The philosophy of Jacobi is essentially unsystematic. A certain fundamental view which underlies all his thinking is brought to bear in succession upon those systematic doctrines which appear to stand most sharply in contradiction to it, and any positive philosophic results are given only occasionally.
But, in attempting to make this conception quite clear and thinkable, we are forced to represent the connexion of things as a universal substance, the essence of which we conceive as a system of laws which underlies everything and in its own self connects everything, but imperceptible, and known to us merely through the impressions it produces on us, which we call things.
The law of reciprocal proportion, of which some examples have been already given, is part of a larger law of equivalence that underlies most of our chemical methods and calculations.
A salt basin underlies the city, and, next to the lumber industry, the salt industry was the first to be developed, but its importance has dwindled; the product value in 1905 being $20,098 out of $5,620,866 for all factory products.
On the other hand, serious difficulties arise if we assume that every animal sacrificed represents a deity; and even assuming that such a belief underlies the rite of animal sacrifice, a modification of the belief must have been introduced when such sacrifices became a common rite resorted to on every occasion when a deity was to be approached.
