Elements of Physiophilosophy

by Lorenz Oken

1763. All the irritable motion of the vegetable may be confined or reduced to the movements of the stamen-filaments, the other movements being merely precursors of these. What, therefore, the stamina would achieve by their motion, that the irritability does in a general point of view. The motion of the stamina is directed merely upon the stigma, in order to impart the male pollen to the female body; and thus, simply to evoke the spiritual tension, which resides originally in the male semen, as in light-æther from the dead mass, but that originally dwells in the female seed as in the dark mass of earth.

1764. Now, since the stigma bears simply relation to the contents of the ovary, and conveys everything to this, and thus, to a female utricle, which is the middle of the plant, or its body proper; so in the motion of the male organs, the conatus or effort upon their part to introduce an elemental matter, or rather its spirit into this utricle, or this body, is rendered manifest or revealed. The highest Spiritual of the plant is accordingly not a mere motion in the general sense; but one that is definite and wholly special—a motion of Ingestion. The direction or design of the first independent motion is therefore Ingestion; this again not being of a general, but a wholly definite import, namely, an ingestion of the male organ into the female.

1765. The Male is, however, characterized by its self-substantial polarity, and by its self-intrinsic life; the Female by the want of polarity, by a heterodependent life. The act of ingestion thus depends upon polarization, upon evocation and maintenance of an independent life. The fruit is vivified by impregnation, ay, for the first time then obtains life; the female becomes self-active through the vital spirit received from the male; the body is kept alive by, and only by, ingestion. The act of ingestion is the act that tends unto the self-substantial, independent life.

1766. The blossom dies, so soon as, by ingestion, it has attained this independent life. If we assume that it could not die, but retain the life that was momentarily won for several instants; then this would happen only by repetition of the first act, whereby it had obtained in an instant a self-substantial life; and thus by repetition of the ingestion. By ceaseless ingestion only can the blossom gain a lasting, self-substantial life of motion.

1767. But such a blossom, when self-dependently subsisting, could not continue in further union with the vegetable stock or trunk, for this is no longer requisite for its life's support; through the first act of vivification, through the once sprinkled pollen, it virtually becomes detached and falls as fruit to the ground; as a fruit certainly, or as a female body, unto which is wanting the continued excitation produced by the male coition. A fruit thus detached or fallen off, and retaining the male filaments, which ceaselessly exercise the function of ingestion, will be of necessity engaged in constant motion; will be a blossom, that incessantly practises copulation.

1768. As in this blossom the motion of ingestion is that alone which sustains it, and nothing more can flow to it from a stem; so also will this blossom be occupied in constant motion; and it consequently comes to pass that the action, which broke forth at the last and instantaneously in the plant, being thus the highest or most individualized, is here the first, inferior, and most general action, or one that lies at the foundation of all other processes. The free blossom is naught but movement of ingestion.

1769. The blossom, however, concentrates in itself all the lower vegetable processes, is itself naught but the aggregate of such processes repeated in the body of the light; thus the blossom, having been set free, is a vesicle of ingestion endowed with all terrestrial functions.

ANIMAL FORMATION.

1770. The vegetable blossom loses its definition as plant, so soon as it has acquired self-substantial life; it loses its definition, because as blossom, it simply lives in light, while the plant must half dwell in darkness; it loses it, because the copulating motion can be frequently self-repeated.

1771. The self-moveable or automatic blossom has consequently passed over into a new kingdom, or into one whose very definition is the self-substantial motion.