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PHYSICAL ASTRONOMY. 309
The attempt lias repeatedly been made, since the beginning
of this century, to ascribe vitality to the inorganic world.
Quite wrongly: for living and inorganic are convertible
conceptions, and with death the organic ceases to be
organic. But no limit in the whole of Nature is so sharply
drawn as the line which separates the organic from the in
organic : that is to say, the line between the region
in which
Form is the essential and permanent, Matter the accidental
and changing, and the region in which this relation is
entirely reversed. This is no vacillating boundary like
that perhaps between animals and plants, between solid
and liquid, between gas and steam : to endeavour to
destroy it therefore, is intentionally to bring confusion into
our ideas. On the other hand, I am the first who has
asserted that a will must be attributed to all that is lifeless
and inorganic. For, with me, the will is not, as has
hitherto been assumed, an accident of cognition and there
fore of life ; but life itself is manifestation of will.
Knowledge, on the contrary, is really an accident of life,
and life of Matter. But Matter itself is only the percepti
bility of the phenomena of the will. Therefore we are
compelled to recognise volition in every effort or tendency
which proceeds from the nature of a material body, and
properly speaking constitutes that nature, or manifests
itself as phenomenon by means of that nature ; and there
can consequently be no Matter without manifestation of
will. The lowest and on that account most universal
manifestation of will is gravity, wherefore it has been
called a primary and essential property of Matter.
The usual view of Nature assumes two fundamentally
different principles of motion, therefore it supposes that
the movement of a body may have two different origins :
i.e., that it proceeds either from the inside, in which
case it is attributed to the will; or from the outside,
and then it is occasioned by causes. This principle is gene-