This is not the place to go more closely into the details which physiology and embryology have brought to the light of day in the course of their increasingly accurate demonstration of the germination process. It must suffice to point out that all these results without exception have to do with reactions, and say nothing--absolutely nothing--about the _essential nature_ of what takes place--a fact which sufficiently indicates the extent of their value. The question as to how it is possible that a man, a living being, can be developed out of a cell, is one that is never even broached upon this line of inquiry. The question as to _actual energies_ is here set aside unintentionally, as in the mechanical world-theory of the physicist it is excluded deliberately. The reading which the Buddha-thought supplies on this question already, in what has gone before,[17] has been sufficiently worked out, and so need only be briefly summarized here. It runs as follows:-- The whole insoluble problem of heredity only arises, as with the problem of the effecting of contact and the problem of nutrition, through working with fixed quantities, with identities. As in physics one asks, “How can two bodies come into contact?” thus putting a question the answering of which is already estopped with the simple putting of the question, since in the physical sense there are no such things as “bodies”; and as in physiology one does the like when one asks, “How can the living being assimilate nutriment into itself?” where there is not anything at all present of such sort that it can assimilate something _to itself_; so in the matter of procreation the question is asked, “How is it possible that out of two biological identities a new identity can arise?” But it is not an identity at all that rises new in procreation; that truly would mean carrying out the arithmetical sum _one plus one equals one_ into actual practice. Nothing happens save that material of a peculiar character, for a longer or shorter period, is subjected to a new state of strain of a peculiar character--has a fresh tendency imparted to it. And this new tendency, this impulsion it is, which, as Kamma coming from a previous existence, now takes hold. It takes hold where it does take hold, just because it _must_ take hold there; because this location answers to it, the individual, the unique, as the only one in the universe; and all it does here is merely to stimulate, to develop that which already lies prefigured in the material, extending even to what is most singular, most individual. Were the material nothing individual, certainly no individual energy could take hold of it. But just because there is an _individual_ material, therefore does it call for _individual_ energy. Because the energy is _individual_, therefore does it call for _individual_ material, and nowhere else can it take hold save just there where it does.