Fusion

“ The tendency to complete fusion is not a rare or exceptional fact. It is exhibited in the most striking manner by double monsters. Nothing can be more extraordinary than the manner, as shown in various published plates, in which the corresponding parts of two embryos become intimately fused together. ”

“ Now, the process of forming the foundation, or great spinal column, for that race which is to usher in the sixth, and which I said is now going on in the Americas, is a slow process for us. Obliged as we are by our inability to judge or to count except by relativity, the gradual coming together of nations and the fusion of their offspring over and over again so as to bring forth something new in the human line, is so gradual as to seem almost without progress. But this change and evolution go on nevertheless, and a very careful observer can see evidences of it. One fact deserves attention. ”

“ So the experience of the world is against the plan of strict fusion, and no arguments have as yet been advanced that are likely to change the world's view. No one has written a book combining algebra and geometry in this fashion that has helped the cause of fusion a particle; on the contrary, every such work that has appeared has damaged that cause by showing how unscientific a result has come from the labor of an enthusiastic supporter of the movement. ”

“ Will this connection extend as far as fusion, as Serres and Maury have admitted? Will all our present races sooner or later be replaced by a single homogeneous race, everywhere endowed with the same aptitudes and governed by a common civilization? ”

“ Let us hold fast to what we have found to be probable, namely, that the fusion of individually different simple organisms must or may bring about a direct advantage—a stimulation of the metabolism, and at the same time an improvement of the constitution in different directions, and let us go on to the consideration of cell-fusion combined with nuclear fusion, or complete amphimixis. ”

“ Independently of fusion from intercrossing, the complete absence, in a well-investigated region, of varieties linking together any two closely-allied forms, is probably the most important of all the criterions of their specific distinctness ”

“ The converse process of freezing or solidification, the change from the liquid to the solid state, is subject to the same laws, and must be considered together with fusion. The solution of a solid in a foreign liquid, and the deposition or crystallization of a solid from a solution, are so closely related to the fusion of a pure substance, that it will also be necessary to consider some of the analogies which they present. ”

“ Where so many different races are all fusing, mingling — one man white like you, or yellow, while another man as black as I am, and all grades between these two extremes, and each race keeping their customs, manners, and everything — in the long run a fusion is taking place, and out of this fusion surely will come a tremendous upheaval ”

“ But by such combinations we define everything except what constitutes the true individuality of A. We define A as a certain combination, or fusion, of universals, which is repugnant to or exclusive of various other combinations of universals. ”

“ In the centrifugal or heterogenizing cycles national souls are evolved; in the centripetal or homogenizing they are given freedom to affect the world. We have seen what such fusion meant for China; perhaps some day we may see what such fusion may mean for the world entire. In Augustus' time, fusion was to do something for the Mediterranean basin. If he had been an Occultist, to know it, his great cards lay in Italy and Spain: the former with her cycle of productiveness due to continue, shall we say until about 40 A.D.?—the latter with hers due soon to begin. ”

“ This is so material a principle in the theory of consolidating the strata of the earth by the fusion of mineral substances, that I beg the particular attention of the reader to that subject. The effect of compression upon compound substances, submitted to increased degrees of heat, is not a matter of supposition, it is an established principle in natural philosophy. ”

“ Like solids in physics, they are slow to form combinations; but when the quality of fluidity has been imparted to them, when their constituent atoms are loosened by fusion, and the particles of each flow freely through and among those of the other, then the affinities are awakened, new combinations are formed, a mutual interchange of qualities takes place, and compounds of value far exceeding those of the original elements are produced. ”

“ Any lapse on our part, however slight, from practically perfect synchronization would have revealed to such a mentality as yours that I, whom you know as Mentor, am not an individual, but four. While we each worked as individuals upon all of the experimental lines, whenever we dealt with any one of the penultimates or ultimates we did so as a fusion. This was necessary, not only for your fullest possible development, but also to be sure that each of us had complete data upon every minute facet of the truth. ”

“ When the family, friends, and working group of such a fusion candidate have forgathered in the morontia temple, they are distributed around the central stage whereon the fusion candidates are resting, meantime freely conversing with their assembled friends. ”

“ The most primitive form of conjugation is undoubtedly the complete fusion of two unicellular organisms of the same species, as we see it to-day in unicellular plants, and also among the lowest unicellular animals, such as the flagellate Infusorians, Gregarines, and Rhizopods. ”

“ The plastic sub-crust is not in a state of dry igneous fusion, but in that condition of aqueo-igneous or hydrothermic fusion which arises from the action of heat on moist substances, and which may either be regarded as a fusion or as a species of solution at a very high temperature. ”

“ If, on the contrary, we look upon these groups as nothing more than races of a single species, all these facts of intercrossing and fusion agree with what may be observed in plants and animals and replace man under the dominion of general laws. ”

“ If the rocks have not been ejected in a state of fusion, it is evidently water, with the different mineral substances it holds in solution, which is the chief actor in the special metamorphism which is produced. ”

“ Such further heat as produces softening and a consequent distortion of the mass, is an agitation so much augmented that the units can no longer completely maintain their relative positions. Fusion is an agitation so extreme, that the relative positions of the units are changeable with ease. ”

“ In conjunction, on the other hand, the individual qualities do not lose, or may even gain, in distinctness and may be easily recognised in the complex, colour contrast being the typical instance. In the section on fusion, the emotions are more fully considered. The author does not regard a satisfactory classification as possible but suggests as a basis the relative shares taken in the fusion by organic sensations and by feeling proper respectively. ”

“ Time, however, will open the eyes of men; science will some day find admittance into the cabinet of the curious. I will therefore now give another proof,—not of the consolidation of mineral bodies by means of fusion, for there is no mineral body in which that proof is not found,—but of the inconsistency of aqueous infiltration with the appearances of bodies, where not only fusion had been employed for the consolidation, but where the application of heat is necessary, and along with it the circumstances proper for distillation. ”

“ In the second place, still deeper will be this impression, when we recollect that similar transmutations have already been experienced by the earth with an improvement of its condition. There is no evidence that the entire surface of the earth has ever undergone a complete fusion since organic life first appeared upon it. ”

“ But according to the Stoics even, the body being produced by the mixture of the four elementary substances, when this body has been dissolved into the four elements, these remaining indestructible, it is possible that they receive a second time the same fusion and composition, from God pervading them, and so re-make the body which they formerly made. ”

“ The claims of cold fusion, however, are unusual in that even the strongest proponents of cold fusion assert that the experiments, for unknown reasons, are not consistent and reproducible at the present time. ”

“ When the mass is seen to be in a state of incipient fusion, the workman takes the oar and turns it over breadth by breadth in regular layers, till he has reversed the position of the whole mass, placing on the surface the particles which were formerly in contact with the hearth. ”

“ Lumby, Swainson and others have ably maintained this, but the difficulties of their hypothesis that the fusion took place as late as about 800 a.d. are very great, and I incline to think will eventually prove fatal to it. ”

“ All of which tends to show that there is more of both parents in each person than is commonly supposed; and that the reason why opinions differ so, is because the fusion is chemical rather than mechanical, which makes it difficult to put the finger on distinct points of resemblance. ”

“ The latter occurs in slabs of four inches in thickness, divided by a line of saffron–coloured sand, and seems to have been subjected to fusion, as if the particles or grains had been cemented together by fusion. ”

“ More explicitly—are we to consider no two atoms as, at their diffusion, of the same nature, or of the same form, or of the same size?—and, after fulfilment of their diffusion into Space, is absolute inequidistance, each from each, to be understood of all of them? ”

“ GNOSTICS, n. A sect of philosophers who tried to engineer a fusion between the early Christians and the Platonists. The former would not go into the caucus and the combination failed, greatly to the chagrin of the fusion managers. ”

“ If by this superhuman concentration one succeeded in converting or resolving the two cosmoses with all their complexities into sheer ideas, he would then reach the causal world and stand on the borderline of fusion between mind and matter. There one perceives all created things- solids, liquids, gases, electricity, energy, all beings, gods, men, animals, plants, bacteria-as forms of consciousness, just as a man can close his eyes and realize that he exists, even though his body is invisible to his physical eyes and is present only as an idea. ”

“ It 446was there alleged that throughout Evolution, integration of matter is accompanied by integration of such motion as the matter previously had; and that thus there is a transformation of diffused motion into aggregated motion, parallel to the transformation of diffused matter into aggregated matter. Here however, it is asserted that every aggregate motion is constantly undergoing diffusion—every integrated motion undergoing perpetual disintegration. ”

“ We shall infer that the particular structures which have been formed by the activities carried on will not grow more heterogeneous and more definite; and that if other orders of activities, implying other sets of forces, commence, answering structures of another kind will begin to make their appearance, to grow more heterogeneous and definite, and to replace the first. And it will be manifest that while the transition is going on—while the first structures are dissolving and the second evolving—there must be a mixture of structures causing apparent confusion of traits. ”

“ In treating of this question, I shall begin with the doctrine of progression, a concise statement of which, so far as it relates to the animal kingdom, was thus given twelve years ago by Professor Sedgwick, in the preface to his Discourse on the Studies of the University of Cambridge.
'There are traces,' he says, 'among the old deposits of the earth of an organic progression among the successive forms of life. They are to be seen in the absence of mammalia in the older, and their very rare appearance in the newer secondary groups; in the diffusion of warm-blooded quadrupeds ”

“ In short, the only cosmic genesis, the only genesis that brings forth alike from cosmic vapour to star, from star to planetary system, from mineral to plant, from plant to animal, from the physiological to the psychic, is the genesis that constitutes the life of logic — the genesis of one conception from another conception by virtue of the membership of both in a system of conceptions organised by an all-embracing Idea. ”

“ This redistribution constitutes evolution where there is a {141} predominant integration of matter and dissipation of motion, and constitutes dissolution where there is a predominant absorption of motion and disintegration of matter.
“3. Evolution is simple when the process of integration, or the formation of a coherent aggregate, proceeds uncomplicated by other processes.
“4. Evolution is compound when, along with this primary change from an incoherent to a coherent state, there go on secondary changes due to differences in the circumstances of the different parts of the aggregate. ”

“ It does not advance us much to be furnished with a set of formulas which profess equally to explain the rotation of the earth and the French Revolution, the pressure of the atmosphere and the growth of the moral sense, the Precession of the Equinoxes and the social improvement of women, the indivisibility of molecules and the rise and growth of the Catholic Church. And this law is the perpetual 'transformation from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, through successive differentiation and integration!' That may all be quite true. ”

“ But as the growth of organization is essentially a particular kind of redistribution of matter and motion, and as redistribution of matter and motion is going on universally in the inorganic world, it is interesting to inquire whether, in such simple approaches toward organization as we find, there is any approach toward the characteristics of organic evolution as above described. It was easy for Mr. Spencer to show that the change from a nebula into a planetary system conforms to the definition of evolution in a way [Pg 46] that is most striking and suggestive. ”