The neo-Platonists and later gnostics held matter to be the incarnate principle of evil, but the view exposes both their subjectivist and essentially spiritualist perspective. When we view the One as a prior condition, whose priority antedates ‘creation’ – that is, when we see the world as essentially spiritual or ‘mind’ – the inertial principle which is both history and physics not only becomes anathema, it becomes the denial side of the equation. Undoubtedly, part of the attraction of the discovery of Aristotle in the thirteenth century pivots around the emergent principle of inertia ; because the neo-Platonic strain, even as modified by Augustine to make matter  ‘positive’, still generates either a dualistic or nihilistic response. If the prior One is essentially spiritual, the material manifestation defies it at a level that, for the skeptical observer, constitutes a radical second. And, on the other side, since the One thus essentially denies causality, requiring all to be present immediately in some form, if only as ‘rational seeds’, what is is entirely here ; and therefore law, whether as abstract or juridical principle, is entirely subjective and hence null.

          Hence we have asserted here that inertia is the corollary of the prophetic. While the records of shamanism suggest that the oldest modes of awakening sometimes involved this deeper level of realization – that is, that the value base is essentially trans-spiritual as well as trans-material – the articulation of this understanding is the relatively recent development of history. In other words, ‘inertia’ involves a profound ‘positive’ principle, since its immanence or ‘manifestation’ in the analytical perceptions of consciousness separates the religious from the spiritual, allowing the discrete definition of ‘value’ as a necessary teleological principle, a principle that does not fall back into the consuming subjectivism of monism, dualism or nihilism. On one side, we have experienced this as the core empirical moment of science, i.e., ‘objectivity’. On the other, it reawakens the culture, now as a pervasive instrument of original gnosticism – what we call ‘the modern’.

          In other words, history itself becomes the prophetic. We can see the principle at work within history. The lineage of prophecy, as such, is apparently not sufficient. That is, the confluence of the Aristotelian is apparently prophetic, since it awakens the latter-day emergence of the ‘inertial’ as a core principle, the pivot, as we say, on which ‘science’ is founded. The historical emergence of ‘science’ is impossible without the infusion of the inertial into the latter-day neo-Platonism of dogma as it stood in the twelfth century.

          But, of course, in the hands of would-be ‘scientific’ philosophers (who still hold the field) inertia becomes the executioner’s ax against religion, a true / false inertia that in their own mind’s eye defines not so much the extent of the world as its core reality. But this core experience of ‘reality’ they do not investigate too carefully, since its legitimate empirical analysis would produce a set of conditioning principles wholly outside anything resembling ‘material inertia’. The validity was always a value. In the case of legitimate science, the value was always inherent in an inferential principle, and not in the perceived phenomena on which the principle is based, and certainly not on anything resembling ‘sensation’. Therefore the core of the experience of ‘inertia’ at the center of ‘scientific objectivity’ has to do with an inertial instance of awareness, and not an ‘inertia’ that can be assigned ‘to the world’.

          In our present response to the world, we do not understand the subsequent interpretive levels of proto-analytical response we have, by the acquisitions of history, ‘stacked up’ on the initial, legitimately ‘immediate’, value response. The fact of ‘object’ as an apparently ‘immediate’ value response testifies to the history of reflective awareness, the beginning of history itself ; the beginning, that is, of the inertial presentation which is the symbolic array (linguistic and otherwise) for the objects and phenomena of the world, the root history of interpretation by which we sustain the reflective view of awareness. While this undoubtedly originally included an element of the inertial, since ‘resistance’ is an aspect of ‘physical’ volition – the expression of volition through the body – the whole conceptual framework, historically, that defines the inertial in this metaphysical as well as empirical way, now becomes a defining refinement in the perception of the object.

          But, of course, since the interpretation is not only a collective agreement, but the collective agreement by which we simultaneously define self and culture, the change has passed with only the most obvious and entirely indirect notices.

          This internal inertia, of course, is the key to reflective awareness : that is, the cycle of this ‘internal’ inertia in the moment of ‘scientific objectivity’.

          In a very real sense, science is the most subjective paradigm for the nature of self-awareness. The release of pure principles, ostensibly entirely external, by a process defined as purely empirical or experiential, at least equally asserts the essential validity of the structures of consciousness and the nature of experience itself, as it does of the external principle and hence of the self-dependent, independent or radical nature of the external world.

          Here, of course, is the actuating principle of Newton’s excursion into philosophy, in which he apparently asserts the absolute priority of inertia, the same Newton who apparently (surprisingly enough) was a serious hermeticist and esotericist. He stands, shall we say, at the epitome moment of realism, the moment when the full cultural establishment of the principle of inertia opens the door to the modern. Whether he himself was actually caught on the ‘external’ side of the inertia, we probably cannot know. Because perception as a function of reflection requires that apparent doubleness of mind which is its function as ‘mirror’, the mind itself is capable of witnessing the whole ‘on one side’ while entirely residing ‘on the other’. Insight itself consists in this kind of ‘split’. But it is precisely the question of the difference of witnessing ‘from one side’ or ‘from both sides’ that defines the difference between ‘spiritual’ and ‘scientific’ insight

          What we are here defining, then, is the dialectic of inertia.

          Dialectic takes its first frame from reflection. But, of course, inertia is thus tacitly not only present from the first, but the actuating principle. The separation in consciousness is simultaneously both teleological and inertial. In terms of the vector of value, this is the first dialectical corollary.

          The structure of self-awareness is constituted by the principles of reflective consciousness, which find correspondences in the principles of what the body ‘reports’. Solipsism shows us that the sensory instrument is the determinant of ‘the world’ as it appears in awareness, so that the evolutionary union of structures apparently requires the corollaries of values – value, of course, being taken as fully a priori. So we are inclined to define self-awareness in terms of these ‘matching’ or ‘mirroring’ structures. But this is precisely the dualism of mind, the nature and limitation of Spirit. For, while it is essentially ‘magical’, it cannot escape the limitations of the One.

          Therefore, ‘vector ’ or ‘actuation’ is the key. Since the separation, while it produces inertia, nevertheless necessarily begins in the spontaneous, the vector begins in the teleological force of the value.

          But inertia thus cannot be separated from its actuating teleological force.

          And the only way these two can be presented as bound together is in the structures of awareness as reflection and the corresponding presentation of the sensory instrument as ‘world’.

          But these ‘bound together’ moments (i.e., simply : ‘moments of experience’) are necessarily purposeful. The whole is ‘the inertial’ as the teleological potency.

          Hence, ‘Spirit’ becomes the reader by which we read the value of the moment. But, as such, Spirit is not simply a valence settling aura, it is also an inherent principle in a dialectical process by which the value as specific, not only extends to the whole as the moment, but also extends to an increasingly larger value or purpose, a necessary sequence in the nature of reflective perception or abstraction.

          The corollary of the moment is history itself, the objective nature of the web of symbolic interpretive structure by which we sustain our present, ‘witnessed’ view of the world. And both science and the prophetic unfolding which produces it certify the ‘externality’ of value, its inherence in the ‘externality’ of the world and the historical process.

          History and nature therefore act their valid part in ‘reality’. But ‘reality’ itself is the dialectical unfolding of the teleology of value.