The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. I, Nos. 1-4, 1867Various
Philosophy
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. I, Nos. 1-4, 1867
Various
Philosophy -- Periodicals
64. Thus each organic living body is a species of divine machine, or a
natural automaton, infinitely surpassing all artificial automata. A
machine made by human art is not a machine in all its parts. For
example, the tooth of a brass wheel has parts or fragments which are not
artificial to us; they have nothing which marks the machine in their
relation to the use for which the wheel is designed; but natural
machines—that is, living bodies—are still machines in their minutest
parts, _ad infinitum_. This makes the difference between nature and art,
that is to say, between the Divine art and ours.
65. And the author of nature was able to exercise this divine and
infinitely wonderful art, inasmuch as every portion of nature is not
only infinitely divisible, as the ancients knew, but is actually
subdivided without end—each part into parts, of which each has its own
movement. Otherwise, it would be impossible that each portion of matter
should express the universe.
66. Whence it appears that there is a world of creatures, of living
(things), of animals, of Entelechies, of souls, in the minutest portion
of matter.
67. Every particle of matter may be conceived as a garden of plants, or
as a pond full of fishes. But each branch of each plant, each member of
each animal, each drop of their humors, is in turn another such garden
or pond.
68. And although the earth and the air embraced between the plants in
the garden, or the water between the fishes of the pond, are not
themselves plant or fish, they nevertheless contain such, but mostly too
minute for our perception.
69. So there is no uncultured spot, no barrenness, no death in the
universe—no chaos, no confusion, except in appearance, as it might seem
in a pond at a distance, in which one should see a confused motion and
swarming, so to speak, of the fishes of the pond, without distinguishing
the fishes themselves.
70. We see, then, that each living body has a governing Entelechy, which
in animals is the soul of the animal. But the members of this living
body are full of other living bodies—plants, animals—each of which has
its Entelechy, or regent soul.
71. We must not, however, suppose—as some who misapprehended my thought
have done—that each soul has a mass or portion of matter proper to
itself, or forever united to it, and that it consequently possesses
other inferior living existences, destined forever to its service. For
all bodies are in a perpetual flux, like rivers. Their particles are
continually coming and going.
72. Thus the soul does not change its body except by degrees. It is
never deprived at once of all its organs. There are often metamorphoses
in animals, but never Metempsychosis—no transmigration of souls. Neither
are there souls entirely separated (from bodies), nor genii without
bodies. God alone is wholly without body.
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