gives it the lie. Every ingenuous and aspiring soul leaves
the doctrine behind him in his own experience, and all men
feel sometimes the falsehood which they cannot demonstrate.
For men are wiser than they know. That which they hear in
schools and pulpits without afterthought, if said in
conversation would probably be questioned in silence. If a
man dogmatize in a mixed company on Providence and the
divine laws, he is answered by a silence which conveys well
enough to an observer the dissatisfaction of the hearer, but
his incapacity to make his own statement.

I shall attempt in this and the following chapter to record
some facts that indicate the path of the law of Compensation;
happy beyond my expectation if I shall truly draw the
smallest arc of this circle.

POLARITY, or action and reaction, we meet in every part
of nature; in darkness and light; in heat and cold; in
the ebb and flow of waters; in male and female; in the
inspiration and expiration of plants and animals; in the
equation of quantity and quality in the fluids of the
animal body; in the systole and diastole of the heart;
in the undulations of fluids, and of sound; in the
centrifugal and centripetal gravity; in electricity,
galvanism, and chemical affinity. Superinduce magnetism
at one end of a needle, the opposite magnetism takes
place at the other end. If the south attracts, the north
repels. To empty here, you must condense there. An
inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that each thing
is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole;