Elements of Physiophilosophy

by Lorenz Oken

2317. Already, in the course of the heavenly bodies, has the highest act of the animal, that of copulation, been preindicated or portrayed. The creation of the universe or world is itself nothing but an act of impregnation. The sex is prognosticated from the beginning, and pursues its course like a holy and conservative bond throughout the whole of nature. He therefore who so much as questions the sex in the organic world, comprehends not the riddle or problem of the universe.

2318. If the female parts have effected a complete transition into the male, so are the sexes necessarily separate and distinct.

2319. Since the male parts are the female that have been more highly developed, so there resides in the latter the constant conatus or effort to convert themselves into the male.

2320. This metamorphosis, or conversion, is, however, no longer possible in the female parts, when already finished or fully formed, but is only attainable in a new attempt being made upon their part, to transform the fluid mass into ova.

2321. Gestation or pregnancy is none other than the propensity of the Female to convert itself into the Male.

2322. The fœtus is the male in a female, or the fœtus is the male sexual parts in the female.

2323. In idea, every fœtus should be male. But, if mascularity be attained with the first production, then the second necessarily subsides into the female. In this manner there of necessity originates an equiponderance in the number of both sexes.

2324. Moreover, if the sexual parts be regarded according to their proper signification in the animal, they are the upper intestinal system, as it has been developed in the mouth, and that indeed in such a manner, that the female parts are the vegetative form or the oral cavity, the male, the animal form, or the tongue with the salivary glands; the former represent the process of deglutition, the latter that of taste.

2325. Into the uterus or into the prostate gland the excretory ducts of the sexual glands, or the spermatic canals and oviducts, pursue a convergent course, like the salivary ducts do into the oral cavity.

2326. The testes, as also the ovaria, are forebodent of the salivary glands. The semen and oviducts are salivary ducts; they open by twos and symmetrically. Semen and ova are secreted like saliva. Semen and ova have also a salivary function, though of this the former is endowed with more than the latter.