Death and resurrection from the point of view of the cell-theoryBjörklund, Gustaf
Religion
Death and resurrection from the point of view of the cell-theory
Björklund, Gustaf
Biology; Future life
To God he is what the cell is to man, a living part in His organism, and
in this capacity he possesses all the perfect qualities of that organism.
Living his independent life, man is in the same position as the cell
in his own being, when the cell is thought of as living the life it is
confined to by its less perfect organism.
Although limited to that life the cell may literally be said to be man’s
image—but an image of a very singular kind. The cell does not reproduce
man’s traits as does a photograph or a statue, but within its lower realm
it mirrors the fundamental qualities of the original on a very reduced
scale.
These limitations can not be conceived by the cell as such because
they are natural to it and belong to its entity. The cell is and must
feel itself as perfect in its realm as man in his. Only if the cell
could compare its conditions with man’s, these limitations would be
apparent to it, and such a comparison the cell really undertakes within
certain limits. Into each feeling of want enters a comparison between
the possessed and the desired. In the higher wants, then, that drive
the cells to upbuild man’s organism we have a manifestation of such a
comparing power of the cell. Experience shows that the cell may live
in a veritable natural state, but it is also, because of the presence
of the soul in its innermost being, capable of a high culture for the
development of which it receives constant impulses and stimulations from
the soul.
In the same sense man may be said to be the image of God. Living in the
world and the natural state, to which he is confined by his relatively
imperfect organism, man has the qualities of God with corresponding
limitations. But even in this state he feels the spirit of God present
in him because he is an original part of God’s own organism. In his
conscience and in his religious feeling man not only comprehends
distinctly the presence of God in his inner being but constantly
receives also impulses, incitements and inspirations to develop that
perfect life and heavenly kingdom, of which he is called by his high
origin and divine birth to become a citizen.
What the conscience and the religious feelings are to the will, the
logical laws of thinking are to the reason, and in the latter, man finds
God as immediately present as in the former. Indeed, logical laws are the
form in which God himself exists.
Because of God’s presence in the eternal laws of our thinking, man is
able to appraise himself and his condition with an absolute measure, and
can in this way obtain a certain knowledge of God’s world and of his
perfect qualities. He has only to abstract all wants and limitations
from such qualities as have a positive content, because lack of want is
perfectness. We shall now undertake such a valuation with respect to
man’s need of evolution here in time, which quality, as all the others,
can be explained and understood only through its connection with the
corresponding quality in the absolute being.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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