Sometimes these principles seem to be strictly hostile to each other and in no respect reciprocal, as where habit in the individual and custom in society oppose themselves bitterly to free will and advancing thought:  yet even here the special warfare is but the material of a broader and more subtile alliance.  An obstinate fixity in one’s bosom often serves as a rock on which to break the shell of some hard inclosed faculty.  Upon stepping-stones of our slain selves we mount to new altitudes.  So do the antagonisms of these principles in the broader field of society equally conceal a fundamental reciprocation.  By the opposition to his thought of inert and defiant custom, the thinker is compelled to interrogate his consciousness more deeply and sacredly; and being cut off from that sympathy which has its foundation in similarity of temperaments and traditions, he must fall back with simpler abandonment upon the pure idea, and must seek responses from that absolute nature of man which the men of his time are not human enough to afford him.  This absolute nature, this divine identity in man, underrunning times, temperaments, individualities, is that which poet and prophet must address:  yet to speak to it, they must speak from it; to be heard by the universal heart, they must use a universal language.  But this marvellous vernacular can be known to him alone whose heart is universal, in whom even self-love is no longer selfish, but is a pure respect to his own being as it is Being.  Well it is, therefore, that here and there one man should be so denied all petty and provincial claim to attention, that only by speaking to Man as Man, and in the sincerest vernacular of the human soul, he can find audience; for thus it shall become his need, for the sake of joy no less than of duty, to know himself purely as man, and to yield himself wholly to his immortal humanity.  Thus does fixed custom force back the most moving souls, until they touch the springs of inspiration, and are indued with power:  then, at once potent and pure, they gush into history, to be influences, to make epochs, and to prevail over that through whose agency they first obtained strength.

Thus, everywhere, through all realms, do the opposite principles of Rest and Motion depend upon and reciprocally empower each other.  In every act, mechanical, mental, social, must both take part and consent together; and upon the perfection of this consent depends the quality of the action.  Every progress is conditioned on a permanence; every permanence lives but in and through progress.  Where all, and with equal and simultaneous impulse, strives to move, nothing can move, but chaos is come; where all refuses to move, and therefore stagnates, decay supervenes, which is motion, though a motion downward.

Having made this general statement, we proceed to say that there are two chief ways in which these universal opposites enter into reciprocation.  The first and more obvious is the method of alternation, or of rest from motion; the other, that of continuous equality, which may be called a rest in motion.  These two methods, however, are not mutually exclusive, but may at once occupy the same ground, and apply to the same objects,—­as oxygen and nitrogen severally fill the same space, to the full capacity of each, as though the other were absent.