Lorenz Oken

“ If, therefore, the irritability of the plant at any time, or but once only, makes its appearance independently, it must be in the sexual organs, and in the moments of impregnation. Impregnation ensues, when the two mundane principles of the plant, light and matter, have attained, as corolla and fruit, to the highest pitch of perfection; then the tension of the spiral vessels ranks so high, that they exercise their function independently of what is terrestrial in the plant, move themselves in the male filaments, touch the female organ, and die in this their highest effort. ”

“ Pneumato-philosophy is the likeness of Physio-philosophy. For spirit is only the tension of nature, and nature only the spirit set in motion.
The philosophy of spirit must develop itself out of the philosophy of nature, as doth the flower out of the stem. For nature is the spirit analyzed and at rest, which we can handle at our pleasure. ”

“ The Singular is not simply therefore a position of one idea, but of all three. All things have issued out of the trinity. The essence of the universe consists in the trinity which is unity, and in the unity which is trinity; for it is a likeness of the primary trinity. Being, generally, is an act, and that, indeed, of a threefold nature. Apart from act or function there is no being. That, which is called nothing, is in itself an act, and there is, therefore, no absolute nothing. The nothing is only something relative to a particular being. Even the mathematical zero is not nothing, but an act. ”

“ It is not, as has been imagined, the hands, as hands, which confer nobility upon our species, for by their means an essential half of the animality, or the power of locomotion, is lost; but it is the preservation of all possible functions in an animal, and in such a manner that each stands upon its highest grade of perfection. The highest perfection cannot, however, be attained where two functions are attached to one organ. Should both hands and feet exercise the sense of touch, the motion is impaired; should both move the body, then the sense suffers. ”

“ Electrism has a basis; it is the air. Magnetism has a basis; it is the metal. Chemism has a basis; it is the salt. So has galvanism a basis; it is the organic mass.
887. Accordingly, what would be organic, must be galvanic; what would be alive, must be galvanic. Life is not different from organism, nor also from galvanism. For life is verily the vital process. But the vital process is an organic, galvanic process. Galvanism lies at the basis of all the processes of the organic world. They are either modifications of it, or only its combinations with other and still higher actions. ”

“ There is no higher, more perfect symbol of divinity than fire. God's whole consciousness, apart from individual thoughts, is fire. The Holy Scriptures therefore usually admit of God appearing under the form of a fire, as a fiery bush, a flame. The world is none other than a rotating globe of fire. ”

“ Light is from eternity, for the tense æther was from eternity. The dark chaos exists only as postulate. Light is time that has become real, the first manifestation of God; is God himself positing, is the dyadic God. The dyas is not merely radiality but light; or both are one, time and light are one, motion and light are one. When God numbers, when he draws lines, he thus creates light. God becoming self-conscious is light. Light is God illuminating. Darkness has accordingly never existed, although the light is derived from the darkness, like numbers and figures are out of nothing. ”

“ Heat is not matter itself any more than light is, but it is only the act of motion in the primary matter. In heat, as well as in light, there certainly resides a material substratum; yet this substratum does not give out heat and light; but the motion only of the substratum gives out heat, and the tension only of the substratum light. There is no body of heat; hydrogen is the body of heat, just as oxygen may be called the body of fire.
389. Heat is real space; into it all forms have been resolved, as all materiality has been resolved into gravity, and all activity, all polarity into light. ”

“ Jena bey Frommann, 1808, 4to, I showed that the Organism is none other than a combination of all the Universe's activities within a single individual body. This doctrine has led me to the conviction that World and Organism are one in kind, and do not stand merely in harmony with each other. From hence was developed my Mineral, Vegetable and Animal system, as also my philosophical Anatomy and Physiology. ”

“ All chemism takes place only in water; not only because the particles can move therein, but because chemism is a process of combustion of the elements themselves. The inferior elements, however, such as water and earth, can only undergo combustion with each other, because the two are moreover related to each other as æther and mass; or as oxygen and base, for the two, so to speak, have become unipolar. Without Fluid and Solid we cannot think of chemism. ”

“ The self-sensation of an individual body is not, however, inclosed within itself, like the primary relation of the universe; because it is not the universe, but only a fraction of it, which has sprouted forth like a bud from the great planetary body. The self-sensation is not therefore a simple feeling of self, but a feeling also of something foreign or extraneous, and thus the animal self-sensation becomes, in reference to Nature, an act of discrimination or discernment. ”

“ The light tends from the sun to the earth, not merely because the polarization in accordance with its nature streams forth from the centre to the periphery, because the light is radiality; but because the earth is the basic pole of the sun. It is thus polarity, and not simply the straight line, which light obeys. Light tends to the centre of the earth, because between this and the sun the tension oscillates. ”

“ This substantial production of alternating poles upon the planet takes place through the diversity of its surface as water and land, through the oblique position of its axis, whereby summer and winter are produced, through the processes, or through the life that is upon it, through the processes of decomposition and combination effected by water, through the revival and death of vegetation, and even the white colour of snow. The planet discharges its pole in the neighbourhood of the sun, like a cork pellet, and reloads of itself at a distance from the sun ”

“ The matter, which is the direct position of God, which fills the whole universe, which is the time in a state of tension and motion, the formed space, the heavy primary essence, I call the Primary matter, the matter of the world, cosmic matter, Æther. The æther is the first realization of God, the eternal position of the same. It is the first matter of creation. ”

“ The male imparts nothing in impregnation but the solar ray, or fluid nervous mass, in its semen, which awakes, animates, and inspirits the quiescent female. The female supplies or furnishes all the Material or, as in the plant, the fruit. In other respects it is not to be understood, as if no material whatever had been imparted by the male, but only that it is not the matter as such, which the male gives the female, that becomes fruit; but that the tension which resides in male semen, evokes at the same time, as by a process of contagion or fermentation, a similar tension in the female. ”

“ Life is moreover only a mathematical problem, which, the higher it ascends, approaches so much the nearer to absolute zero in its attainment of the infinity of numbers, becomes so much the more endowed with life.
105. Arithmetic is the science of the second idea, or that of time and motion, or of life; it is, therefore, the first science; mathematics not only begins with it, but creation also, with the becoming of time and of life. ”

“ As all finite things are positions of the primary act in the sphere out of the centre, so are all of them heavy. Gravity is the force that strives unto the centre, and which is there impeded by other forces already present therein. A finite thing, that is not heavy, is a contradiction. The gravity of the single thing is weight. The world itself has no weight, or else it must be heavy in relation to something else without it. The ideas of gravity and weight, as we speak of them in reference to individual things, are not applicable to the world, still less to God. ”

“ As the fundamental earths lose themselves in pure carbon, in resin, and so in the vegetable world, so the series of corrosive earths resolves itself likewise in remnants of an organic, and that indeed the animal, kingdom. As the pit-coals and resins are associated with the metals and Inflammables, so are the fossil animal remains with the calcareous earth; and thus the voice of the organic world speaks already with force and clearness to those that hearken, from out the stones. ”

“ The unclosed vascular system is not yet self-substantial, because it is a cæcal eversion of the intestine or inversion of the skin, being itself only a ramified intestine and skin. Every system, however, attains its perfection, by being rendered independent of its origin. Thus the leaf is the spiral vessel that has become free, the root the cellular tissue in a like condition, the blossom the liberated vegetable trunk. The vascular system will therefore aspire also to the achievement of its blossom. ”

“ Matter has been imparted with space and time. All space is material; ay, matter is itself the space and the time, the form and the motion; for space is nothing special, but only extended or formed force. It is here also shown that the nothing does not exist. There is as little nothing in the universe as there is an 0 in mathematics. ”

“ Exemption from time is only in the Eternal.
75. Time, not being itself the Finite, but creating it, is not itself a Real, but still an Ideal, a form only of the primary act, an idea, with which finite things have been directly posited. Time is the act of numbering; numbering is thinking; thinking is time. Our thinking is our time. In sleep there is no time for us. God's thought is God's time; God's time, however, is all time, consequently time of the world. Time is not of earthly but heavenly descent or origin. ”

“ Geometry is a science of equal value with arithmetic; it is even as certain, because it has no other propositions; it is equally eternal, is the same realization of the primary act, the Deus geometrizans of the Pythagoreans. Everything to be certain must therefore resemble geometry, must be itself a position of geometry, only under other relations. ”

“ Electricity is a merely peripheric antagonism, without centre, thus without union; an eternally Dissevered without rest. Electricity is thus also a special form, under which polarity makes its appearance, and is likewise rooted in the primary creation. There is, consequently, no thing which were not magnetic and electric.
135. The idea of a surface is constantly that of surrounding. It is not generated by a section of a globe, but by the completion, the circumferential limitation of the sphere. The essence of the sphere is boundary. Every surface is finite, is convex. ”

“ Life is nothing new, that came first into the world, after it was created, but an Original, an idea, a moved thought of God, the primary act itself with all its consequences.
89. There is in the universe no vital force of its own; the individual things lie not there some time and await the polarizing breath, but they first become through the breath of God. The Causa existentiæ is life. ”

“ As every globule of sap or mucus is indifferent, it has thus naturally an affinity for air. The air itself is comprehended, like the water and the earth, in the organism. And thus it may with full force be said; that the organism is elevated by respiration to the element air, by digestion to the element water, by nutrition to the element earth. So that respiratory process = air-process, digestive process = water-process, and nutritive process = earth-process. ”

“ The reason why one has hitherto rambled about in Pneumato-philosophy without ballast and without compass, depends solely upon the disregard which has been paid to the science or knowledge of Nature. It is in fact not difficult to understand how impossible it must be, from observations made upon the rapidly evanescent phenomena of the spirit, to thence abstract a system of the laws in conformity wherewith this spirit manifests itself or acts. Spirit is nothing different from Nature, but simply her purest outbirth or offspring, and therefore her symbol, her language. ”

“ Mathematics itself were nothing if it had none other than its highest principle zero. In order, therefore, that mathematics may become a real science, it must, in addition to its highest principle, subdivide into a number of details, namely, first of all into numbers, and, finally, into propositions. What is tenable in regard to mathematics must be equally so of all the sciences; they must all resemble mathematics.
34. The first act towards realization or the becoming something, is an origination of Many. All reality can, accordingly, manifest itself only in multiplicity. ”

“ The eye, in order to experience the sensation of light, is placed in a similar tension to the air, water, or crystal. This tension between it and the brain is perceived by the latter as illumination. The eye is a prism, in which the brain sees the world, in which the brain observes its own tension, or the production of colour. Sight is a deoxydation of the eye. ”

“ The moon can never have existed as an orbitar ring around the earth in time, or else it had been solid. Being once solid, it can no more coagulate into a globe. Still less, however, have the planets originated from conjoined moons. From whence then have the moons come? The solar system has not arisen mechanically, but dynamically; it has not become what it is by being projected or hurled from the hand of God, nor by impulses and aberrations; but by polarization according to eternal laws, according to the laws of light. ”

“ The Highest to which the vegetable kingdom could attain was the blossom; and of this the sexual parts are the completion. At the instant when the sex originated, the vegetable functions became of a nobler character; for the sexual organs are only the inferior organs refined or purified by light. The electrical and chemical process of the vegetable body are again represented, but in a spiritual manner, in the blossom. The functions of the fruit were none other than those of the elevated chemism; they were only the nobler processes of digestion and nutrition. ”

“ A blossom, which, when separated from the stem, maintains by its own motion the galvanic process or the life within itself, and gets its process of polarization, not from a body lying external to or coherent with it (as is the vegetable stem) ; but only from itself—such blossom is an Animal. An animal is blossom without stem or a flower, which of itself produces its stem, this being the reverse of what takes place in the plant. The essence of the animal consists in the maintenance through its own motion of the galvanic vital process. ”

“ The Oozoa or Cystic animals, when compared with the plants, are the first flower that has been set free, or in other words, a flower which no longer stands polarwise upon a stem, because it is not developed in the differencing air, but in the indifferent water. It may be said that nature, having brought matters as far as the development of the sexual parts, then quits or passes out of the vegetable world; while these parts, or even the entire plant, requiring now no longer the stem and root, become a root themselves, and in behalf of this enter the water. ”

“ All things are created in time; for time is the totality of Singulars. Time is no stationary quantity, which is always changing itself into something new during its progressive flux. It is not a continuous stream, but a repetition of one and the same act, namely, the primary act, like as it were to a rolling ball, which constantly returns upon itself. There is no endless, still less an eternal thing; for things are only positions of time. Time itself is, however, only repetition, and thus also a suppression of these positions. ”

“ Sight is thus a tension between optic and central brain; as illumination is tension between planetary and solar æther.
2908. Illumination and vision are of one kind, only occurring in two different sorts of worlds. The planet sees by means of the illumination, the animal illuminates or gives out light by means of seeing. Sight is a light-sense.
2909. Now, the illumination is a fixation of æther, a coloration, and thus a descent of the æther into what is terrestrial. In seeing we perceive the æther, as to how it becomes world; in hearing we perceived the world, as to how it became æther. ”