A living being so constituted that it must and can take up something _into itself_ simply does not exist. Such a living being is only to be found where one is dealing with the concept of identities. But identities are nowhere to be found within the domain of actuality. Here are only processes of combustion. If one sets out with the concept of identities, one creates for oneself a problem whose insolubility proceeds as much from its purely dialectical nature as the problem of telekinesis in physics. If one abides by the _actual_, if one holds strictly to the insight that living beings are individual processes of combustion, then there exist nothing but energies which for a certain period of time put a body of material specifically belonging to themselves in a specific condition of tension, for a time maintain it so, and then after a time again abandon it. Here the cell is not life itself, but simply the most primitive structural expression of the fact that certain materials find themselves in a certain state of tension, in the same way that the ridges and furrows in a Chladni’s sound-figure are a structural expression of the fact that a certain material--some sand on a glass plate--finds itself in a certain state of tension. This whole body of phenomena is by physiology termed the “circulation of matter.” But there is here no “_I_” as an identity that takes up matter into itself, melts it down, and--so to speak--gives it forth again as new coinage. Nowhere in the universe are there any unstamped values, nowhere is there any raw material of substance, but always and everywhere only a recoining: a continuous change in the individual conditions of tension which as little warrants the idea of “resorption”--taken literally--as the flame, or the wind that for a certain space of time whirls up and holds a certain particle of sand in a certain form. An appropriation, a taking up into oneself, can only take place where there is a proprietor able to take something into his house. But actuality does not permit of any such comfortable ideas. Here are nothing but energies that continuously lay hold, pull to themselves, and maintain what has thus been pulled, under the influence of their individual tendency, until such time as other energies make their presence felt in superior force, whereupon the tension is dissolved here, only to assert itself anew elsewhere. Whatever may be manifest as form in the living being, from the gross forms of the limbs down to the cell, to its protoplasm, to its nucleus, to the ever-new marvels of the structure of its body--it is all alike one material, maintained by one individual energy in an individual state of tension. I do not _have_ the marvel of alimentation as my function, but I _am_ all this itself; and beyond this, nothing! That, however, I am this individual, unique being--of this the antecedent conditions lie buried deep in beginninglessness.