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There are cases which seem to elude this law, and investigation has shown that other characteristics of the rubbed bodies, such as surface quality, can have a modifying influence. For lack of a guiding idea they are treated in the textbooks as ‘irregularities’. Observation led by a true polarity concept shows that in these cases also the rule is not violated. In this respect, interesting information can be gained from the observations of J. W. Ritter (1776-1810), an ingenious Naturphilosoph from the circle round Goethe, but to whom, also, physical science is indebted for his discovery of the ultra-violet part of the spectrum and of galvanic polarization. Among his writings there is a treatise on electricity, giving many generally unknown instances of frictional electricity which are in good accord with our picture and well worth investigating. According to Ritter, even two crystalline substances of different hardness, such as Calcite and quartz, become electric when rubbed together, the softer playing the part of ‘resin’ and the harder that of ‘glass’.

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Our observations have shown that the emergence of the electric state, whether it be caused by friction or galvanically, depends on matter entering into a condition in which its cohesion is loosened – or, as we also put it, on its being turned into ‘dust’ – and this in such a way that the escaping levity remains dust-bound. This picture of electricity now enables us to give a realistic interpretation of certain phenomena which, in the interpretation which the physicist of the past was bound to give them, have contributed much to the tightening of the net of scientific illusion.

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Read thus, the phenomenon tells us that a part of space occupied by a magnetic field has qualities which are otherwise found only where a coherent solid mass is present. A magnetic piece of solid iron, therefore, differs from a non-magnetic piece by giving rise in its surroundings to dynamic conditions which would otherwise exist only in its interior. This picture of the relatedness of magnetism to solidity is confirmed by the fact that both are cancelled by heat, and increased by cold.2

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If we remember that the nervous system represents the salt-pole, and the metabolic system the sulphur-pole, of the human organism, and if we take into account the relationship between levity and gravity at the two poles, we can see from the distribution of the two electricities that the coupling of levity and gravity at the negative pole of the electrical polarity is such that levity descends into gravity, while at the positive pole gravity rises into levity. Negative electricity therefore must have somehow a ‘spherical’ character, and positive electricity a ‘radial’.

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When man in the state of world-onlooker undertook to form a dynamic picture of the nature of matter, it was inevitable that of all the qualities which belong to its existence he should be able to envisage only those pertaining to gravity and electricity. Because his consciousness, at this stage of its evolution, was closely bound up with the force of gravity inherent in the human body, he was unable to form any conception of levity as a force opposite to gravity. Yet, nature is built bipolarically, and polarity-concepts are therefore indispensable for developing a true understanding of her actions. This accounts for the fact that the unipolar concept of gravity had eventually to be supplemented by some kind of bipolar concept.

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These few facts connected with the generation of frictional electricity are enough to allow us to form a picture of the nature of the polarity represented by the two kinds of electricity.

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Some sixty years after Dalton had established, purely hypothetically, the theory of the atomistic structure of matter, scientific research was led to the observation of actual atomistic phenomena. Crookes found electricity appearing in his tubes in the form of discrete particles, with properties hitherto known only as appertaining to mass. What could be more natural than to take this as evidence that the method of thought developed during the past era of science was on the right course?

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By its magnetic properties iron thus reveals itself as a substance capable of assuming the condition of solid matter to a degree surpassing ordinary solidity. As an exceptional kind of metal it forms the counter-pole to mercury, in which the solid-fluid condition characteristic of all metallic matter is as much shifted towards the fluid as in iron it is to the solid. (Note in this respect the peculiar resistance of iron to the liquefying effect which mercury has on the other metals.)

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This finding is fully confirmed by electrical phenomena in the realm of nature most remote from man (though it was an effort to solve the enigma of man which led to the discovery of this realm). Since Crookes’s observations of the behaviour of electricity in a vacuum it is common knowledge that only the negative kind of electricity occurs as a freely radiating force (though it retains some properties of inertia), whereas positive electricity seems to be much more closely bound to minute particles of ponderable matter. Here again we find gravity-laden levity on the negative side, levity-raised gravity on the positive.

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Now, the only sphere of nature-phenomena with a bipolar character accessible to the onlooker-consciousness ‘was that of electricity. It was thus that man in this state of consciousness was compelled to picture the foundation of the physical universe as being made up of gravity and electricity, as we meet them in the modern picture of the atom, with its heavy electro-positive nucleus and the virtually weightless electro-negative electrons moving round it.