945. Generation is a successive formation, both in relation to the quantity as well as the quality, and the specific organs. It having been preposited, that an organism has several organic systems, so must these range according to their importance, and like the systems of nature, behind each other, and be also developed in this order. As the whole of nature has been a successive fixation of æther, so is the organic world a successive fixation of infusorial mucus-vesicles. The mucus is the æther, the chaos for the organic world. The semen of all animals consists also of infusoria; the same may be said of the vitellus. The pollen of flowers consists in like manner of microscopic vesicles with globules, which have a life of their own and move themselves in water. Many confervæ indeed divide evidently into a multitude of living, self-moving globules, which, after they have swam about for some time, again unite to form a stem of conferva.
946. Every generation consequently commences à priori or from the beginning. The organic substance must again be dissolved into the original chaos, if any thing new should reoriginate.
947. Out of an organic menstruum only can a new organism proceed, but not one organism out of the other. A finished or perfect organism cannot gradually transform itself into another.
948. The generative juices, or semen and vitellus, are none other than the total organism reduced to the primary menstruum.
949. Physically regarded also every individual originates only from the Absolute, but no one out of the other. The history of generation is a retrogression into the Absolute of the Organic, or the organic chaos—mucus, and a new evocation from the same.
950. This development from mucus is only applicable however to the generation of the perfect organisms, but not to the origin of the organic body, or the infusorial mass. The former originate only from an organic mass that has been already formed; but the infusorial mass, as constituting the organic primary bodies, cannot have originated in the same way. It does and must originate directly from the Inorganic. For whence can the organic matter have otherwise proceeded?
951. The infusorial mucus-mass originated, as has been already remarked, at the moment when the earth's metamorphosis was at an end; at the moment, when the planet succeeded in so bringing together and identifying all the elementary processes, that they were all together or at one and the same time in every point.
952. Hence the organic primary body originated also by synthesis, not by analysis, if regard be paid to its factors. But do we consider this substance as first emerging into view, when the coarse, abundant, isolated materials, such as earth, metals, Inflammables, and salts had separated themselves from it; that this organic primary body then remained behind as it were for the first time: it has then originated through analysis, or was preformed; but so preformed as are also the metals, and as is everything. It need scarcely be observed, that this last separation from out the Earthy is the carbon, the dissolution of the earths into atoms, and thus again into points or globules susceptible of form.
953. Everything is preformed in æther, like as every Mathematic is preformed in zero, every Active in God; yet for that very reason nothing individual is preformed therein; but it originates first through fixation of poles on the substance. This is the true meaning of the original generation of the Organic.
954. This origin of the organic primary bodies I designate Generatio originaria, Creation.