1772. A blossom, which, when separated from the stem, maintains by its own motion the galvanic process or the life within itself, and gets its process of polarization, not from a body lying external to or coherent with it (as is the vegetable stem); but only from itself—such blossom is an Animal. An animal is blossom without stem or a flower, which of itself produces its stem, this being the reverse of what takes place in the plant. The essence of the animal consists in the maintenance through its own motion of the galvanic vital process. It has been already shown above, in speaking "quoad" the distinction of the organic essences, that the exclusive or only valid difference between plant and animal, was motion arising in the latter apart from any external stimulus. We have now been brought by quite another route to the same result.
1773. If the animal is the floral vesicle living from or by itself, it can no longer lie fettered like the plant between two elements; it must be nominally free from the chains of darkness, and thus from the earth. No animal is so joined by growth with the earth, that like as in a plant this should be a co-operating pole in its processes. No animal must co-exist in two elements like the plant, but it has all elements in itself, like the blossom includes all vegetable parts. It may be said that the plant has been immersed in the earth, water, and air; these three elements having, on the contrary, been immersed in the animal. The animal is in respect to them the continent, the planet; they, however, are the continent in respect to the plant. Thus the relations to the world are completely reversed in both.
1774. An animal is a floral vesicle freely separated from the earth, and living alone through its own motion in the water and air. And here it is not locomotion that is treated of, since this by no means belongs to the animal's essence. Yet on this account the poor oyster was formerly adduced as an argument against this animal character, but unjustly; for would a man frozen up in an ice-block lose his character as an animal? The oyster opens its shell and shuts it too, as well as the crocodile opens and shuts its jaws.
ANIMAL SIGNIFICATION.
We will now proceed to knit or associate with this genetic or physiological, the physio-philosophical mode of development.
1775. Every Organic originates from a mucus-point. If this mucus-point occur in the darkness, it thus becomes a terrestrial organism, a plant; if it enter into the light, which is only possible in the water and in air, it thus becomes a solar organism, independent of the planet, self-moving around itself like the sun, an animal.
1776. An animal is a light-mucus-vesicle, a plant, so far as the root is concerned, a darkness-mucus-vesicle; but it works its way unto air and light, and becomes a light-mucus-vesicle in the blossom.
1777. A free blossom is consequently to be philosophically regarded as equivalent to the primary mucus-vesicle, which has at once developed itself in the water. Now, such an aqueo-mucus-vesicle is directly that which the blossom can first become through a series of developments, and by divestures of the Dark.
1778. The plant is an animal retarded by the darkness; the animal is a plant blooming directly through the light, and devoid of root.
1779. The animal has been posited as a light-or æther-Total upon the planet; the vegetable as a planetary Total in light.