The chapter ends with a run of verbs and then names what they add up to. The way gives them life and rears them, brings them up and nurses them, settles and steadies them, feeds and shelters them; and it gives life without possessing, acts without depending, rears without ruling. This, the chapter says, is called the dark power.
Two things are being defined at once. The first is a relation of complete provision with no ownership attached, which chapters two, ten and thirty-four state in almost identical words and which is the book's most repeated formula. The second is the term itself.
The word rendered dark is the same one that closes chapter one, where it is applied to the gateway of everything subtle, and it carries the sense of a deep obscure colour rather than of evil or of secrecy. Dark power is therefore not power exercised in the dark. It is efficacy of a kind that cannot be inspected, which is the same quality chapter twenty-one attributes to the way when it says the essence in it is genuine and can be relied on.
The term recurs in chapter sixty-five, where it is applied to a ruler who governs without knowledge and is said to be deep and far reaching and to turn back with all things, and in chapter ten, in the same formulaic company as here.
The accumulation of verbs before the definition is doing rhetorical work. Eight acts of care are listed, and only then are the three refusals attached, so the reader has the full weight of what is given before being told that nothing is claimed for it.