A ceaseless, limitless activity, therefore, as the basis or groundwork of all, for ever crossing, arresting, and limiting itself: an eternal war, which, however, is always being led back to peace,--a process of differentiation which rests upon, is the product of, and is for ever forced back to integration, is the perpetual rhythm of the natural universe. It is a process in which can be traced three grades, stages, or 'powers' (first, second, and third, &c.). By its more generally descriptive name it is called Organisation. 'Organism,' says Schelling, 'is the principle of things. It is not a property of single natural objects; but, on the contrary, single natural objects are so many limitations, or single modes of apprehending the universal organism[3].' 'The world is an organisation; and a universal organism itself is the condition (and to that extent the positive) of mechanism[4].' 'Mechanism is to be explained from organism: not organism from mechanism.' 'The _essential_ of all things is _life_: the _accidental_ is only the _kind_ of their life: and even the dead in Nature is not utterly dead,--it is only extinct life.'
But if the conception of an organism be thus the adequate or complete idea of Nature as a whole, that idea is only realised as a third 'power' supervening on, and by means of two subordinate or inferior ranges or 'powers.' The first stage is that occupied by the mathematical and mechanical conception of the world,--the bare skeleton or framework which has to be clothed upon and informed with life and growth. This first 'power' in the world-process of antithetical forces, under the control of, and on the basis supplied by, the original thetic unity which synthetises them, is Matter. In Matter we have the equilibrium and statical indifference of two opposing forces--one centrifugal, accelerating, repulsive, the other contripetal, retarding, attractive--which, working under the synthetising unity supplied by the force of universal gravitation, build up in their momentary arrests or epochs the various material forms. In this first 'power' we have as it were the scheme or machinery through which organisation will work: the outward and 'abstract, organism. And the essential feature of this 'construction' or 'deduction' of matter is that it does not take material atoms and build them into a world, but 'deduces' the properties of matter as issuing from the play of opposing forces, and as due to the temporary syntheses resulting from the presence of unity making itself felt in the opposites.