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theory itself is still maintained. Finally, there is the blindness of the prejudice that the theory rests

on something mathematical, as if the partly false and one-sided measurements, as well as the

quantitative determinations brought into the conclusions, would provide any basis for the theory

and the nature of the thing itself.-A major reason why the clear, thorough, and learned illumination

by Goethe of this darkness concerning light has not had a more effective reception is doubtlessly

because the thoughtlessness and simplemindedness, which one would have to confess for

following Newton for so long, would be entirely too great.

Instead of these nonsensical conceptions disappearing, they have recently been compounded by

the discoveries of Malus, by the idea of a polarisation of light, the notion of the four-sidedness of

sunbeams, and the idea that red beams rotate in a movement to the left, whereas blue beams

rotate in a movement to the right. Such simplistic ideas seem justified by the privilege accorded to

physics to generate "hypotheses." But even as a joke one does not indulge in stupidities; thus so

much the less should stupidities be offered as hypotheses which are not even meant to be jokes.

§ 222.

Light shapes the determinate being or the physical meaning of the body of abstract centrality in the

determination of its identity. Light is the active identity which posits everything as identical. As this

identity, however, is still wholly abstract, things are not yet really identical, but are for an other,

positing their identity with the other in the other.

§ 223.

This abstract identity has its real antithesis outside of itself. As an elementary moment of reflection

it falls apart into itself and is as a duality: (a) of corporeal diversity, of material being for itself of

rigidity; (b) of opposition as such, which, existing independently and uncontrolled by individuality,

has merely sunken within itself and is thus dissolution and neutrality. The former is the lunar, the

latter is the cometary body.

As relative central bodies in the system of gravity these two bodies have their more specific

significance, which is based on the same concept as their physical significance and may be stated

here: they do not rotate on their axes. The body of rigidity has only a formal being for itself which

is independence comprehended in antithesis and therefore not individuality. Hence it is subservient

to another body whose satellite it is, and in which it has its axis. The body of dissolution, on the

other hand, the opposite of the body of rigidity, behaves aberrantly, and exhibits contingency in its

eccentric path as in its physical existence. One can therefore suspect of these bodies that the

proximity of a large planet could change their course. They show themselves to be a superficial

concretion, which may just contingently turn itself again into dust.

The moon has no atmosphere and therefore lacks the meteorological process. It shows only high

mountains and craters, and the combustion of this rigidity in itself It has the shape of a crystal,

which Heim (one of the few ingenious geologists) has described as the original form of the earth as

a merely solid body.

The comet appears as a formal process and unstable mass of vapour; none of them has exhibited

anything of a solid nature, such as a nucleus. In contrast to the image of the ancients, that comets

are merely meteors, more recent astronomers have not been as inflexible and presumptuous. Until

now only the return of some of them has been demonstrated; others were calculated to return, but

did not arrive. Suggestions brought forward by astronomers also indicate that the previously held

formal view of comets, as crisscross manifestations appearing in conflict with the coherence of the

system, should in time be discarded. Then the idea could be accepted that the other bodies of the

system protect themselves against comets, that is, that the other bodies of the system function as

necessary organic moments of protection. This view would afford better grounds for comfort in

regards to the dangers of comets than the reasons which have been adduced so far.

§ 224.

(3) The antithesis that has gone back into itself is the earth or the planet as such. It is the body of

the individual totality, in which rigidity opens up into a separation of real differences, and this

dissolution is held together by self-like points of unity.

One is accustomed to seeing the sun and the stars as more excellent natures than the planets,

because the first elevation of the reflection above sensory perception sets the abstract as the

highest point against that individual element which is not yet conceptualised. The name of a "mad

star" has arisen for individual bodies from the immediate view of their motion. In and for itself

however, this motion of the individual bodies as a turning on an axis around itself and also around

a central body is the most concrete expression of vitality, and therefore more splendid than both

the stillness in the centre of the system, and the subservient and extravagant motion of the lunar

and cometary bodies. The natural light of the central body is equally its abstract identity, with its

truth, like that of thought, in the concrete idea, in individuality.

In regards to the series of planets, astronomy has still not discovered any actual law governing the

determination of their proximity, their distancing, or even anything rational-I no longer find

satisfying what I tried to show in an earlier dissertation about this issue.-Moreover, the attempts by

the philosophy of nature to demonstrate the rationality of the series in its physical constitution,

which have until now been merely preliminary attempts to establish basic perspectives, can also be

viewed as unsatisfactory. What is irrational is to establish the thought of contingency as the basis,

and to see the idea of the organisation of the solar system according to the laws of musical

harmony, as for example in Kepler's thought, as an imaginative confusion, and not to respect the

profound belief that

there is reason in this system. For this belief was the sole basis of Kepler's discoveries. Instead, it

was the wholly awkward and confused use of the numerical relations of tones, applied by Newton

to colours, which acquired fame and remembrance.

(b.) The Elements

§ 225.

The body of individuality contains the determinations of elemental totality, which have an

immediate existence as free, independent bodies, as subordinate moments. As such they constitute

general physical elements.

§ 226.

(1) The element of undifferentiated simplicity is no longer the positive identity with itself the

self-manifestation which is light as such, which constitutes the proper, inner self of the individual

body; on the contrary, it is only a negative generality as the selfless moment of an other. This

identity is therefore the seemingly harmless but insidious and consuming power of the individual

and organic process. This element, air, behaves as a transparent but just as elastic fluid, which

absorbs and penetrates everything.

§ 227.

(2) The elements of the antithesis are (a) being for itself not the indifferent being of rigidity, but

rather being for itself posited in individuality as a moment, and therefore material selfhood, light

identical to heat: fire. This element is materialised time, absolutely restless and consuming, and

causes the self-consumption of the subsisting body as it conversely destroys the body through its

external approach. In consuming another, fire consumes itself.

§ 228.

(b) The other element is the neutral element, the antithesis which coalesces into itself. Without

individuality, however, and thus without rigidity and determination in itself it is a thoroughgoing

equilibrium that dissolves all determinacy mechanically posited in it. It receives its limitation of

shape only from outside, and without the unrest of the process in itself but at the most the

possibility of process, namely, solubility. This element, water, can assume a gaseous and a solid

form as a state apart from its characteristic state, that of internal indeterminacy.

§ 229.

(3) Earth, however, the element of the developed difference and its individual determination, is in

the first place still indeterminate: earthiness, as such.

(c) The Elementary Process

§ 230.

The individual identity, by which the different elements in terms of both their difference from each

other and their unity with each other are bound, is a dialectic which constitutes the physical life of

the earth, the meteorological process. It is in this process alone that the elements, as dependent

moments, have their existence, being generated in it and posited as existent.

just as the determinations of ordinary mechanics and the dependent bodies are applied to absolute

mechanics and the free central bodies, so too, the finite physics of the single individual bodies is

taken to be the same as the free, independent physics of the process of the earth. It is seen as a

triumph of science that the same determinations are recognised and demonstrated in the general

process of the earth as are found in the external and dependent processes of isolated physical

corporeality. The demonstration of this likeness is effected by changing the determinations, through

abstraction, from their characteristic differences and conditions into superficial generalities like

attraction. Thus forces and laws are imaginatively drawn in which the particular, the concrete

concept, and the conditions are lacking and are then fantasised as an addition, partly as an external

substance and partly by analogy.

A primary difference marks the fixed idea 'of the substantial, immutable diversity of the elements,

which is posited once and for all by the understanding on the basis of the processes of the isolated

materials. Where higher transitions occur in these finite processes, where, for example, water is

solidified into a crystal, where light and heat vanish, and so on, the obstinacy of formal thought has

recourse to the nebulous and to some extent meaningless conceptions of 44 solution," "becoming

bound or latent," and so on. Here, too, essentially belongs the transformation of all relationships in

physical phenomena into "substances" and "materials," partly imponderable, so that each physical

existence becomes the chaos previously mentioned of materials passing in and out of each other's

pores. Such views conflict not only with every concept, but also with reasonable thinking.

§ 231.

The process of the earth is continuously ignited by its general self the activity of light, its primordial

relationship to the sun. One moment of this process is the diremption of substantial identity, the

development of moments of the independent antithesis into a tension between rigidity and selfless

neutrality. Through this tension the earth tends towards resolution into, on the one hand, a crystal,

a moon, or on the other hand into a fluid body, a comet, and the moments seek to realise their

connection with their independent roots.

§ 232.

The other moment of the process is that being for itself towards which both sides of the antithesis

strive, suspends itself as negativity pushed to its extreme;-it becomes the self-igniting destruction of

the different existence sought by the moments. Through this process the substantial identity of the

moments is produced, and the earth transforms itself into fertile individuality.

The thunderstorm is the complete manifestation of this process, whereas the other meteorological

phenomena are beginnings or moments and undeveloped elaborations of it. Concerning

thunderstorms, however, physics has so far been unable to propose a satisfactory

explanation-since it limits its perspective to the conditions of the external process-, neither of rain

formation (in spite of de Luc's observations and the conclusions drawn from them, and, among the

Germans, the arguments made by the clever Lichtenberg against the theory of dissolution, whose

conclusions have at least been retained to some extent) nor of lightning and thunder. It has had just

as little success with other meteorological phenomena, in particular with meteorites, in which the

process progresses as far as the beginning of an earthly core.

§ 233.

The concept of matter, gravity, sets out its moments in elemental nature, initially in the form of

independent realities. The earth is initially the abstract ground of individuality, and posits itself in its

process as the negative unity of the abstract, mutually separating elements, and consequently as the

real ground and actuality of individualisation. Now, in this actuality, the elements present

themselves as being unified together in concrete points of unity.

C.

The Physics of Individuality

§ 234.

The individual body is matter, brought together by the particularity of the elements out of the

generality of gravity and into individuality. Thus it is determined in and for itself and has by virtue of

its individuality a characteristic form which constitutes the unity of the differentiation of a body. —

This individuality is (a) immediate or at rest, a shape; (b) its separation into the diversity of

features and the tension of differences; (c) process, in which the shape dissolves just as much as,

in its determinateness in and for itself emerges.

(a) Shape

§ 235.

The individuality of matter in its immediate existence is the immanent form, which gives its own

determinate difference to that material of the body which itself has in the first place only a

superficial unit, and then one particular determinacy as its essence.