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.

Once scientific observation and thought are freed from the limitations
of the onlooker-consciousness, both gravity and electricity appear in a
new perspective, though the change is different for each of them.
Gravity, while it becomes one pole of a polarity, with levity as the
opposite pole, still retains its character as a fundamental force of
the physical universe, the gravity-levity polarity being one of the
first order. Not so electricity. For, as the following discussion will
show, the electrical polarity is one of the second order; moreover,
instead of constituting matter as is usually believed, electricity
turns out to be in reality a product of matter.

*

We follow Goethe's line when, in order to answer the question, 'What is
electricity?' we first ask, 'How does electricity arise?' Instead of
starting with phenomena produced by electricity when it is already in
action, and deriving from them a hypothetical picture, we begin by
observing the processes to which electricity owes its appearance. Since
there is significance in the historical order in which facts of nature
have come to man's knowledge in the past, we choose as our
starting-point, among the various modes of generating electricity, the
one through which the existence of an electric force first became
known. This is the rousing of the electric state in a body by rubbing
it with another body of different material composition. Originally,
amber was rubbed with wool or fur.