(a) In order that the productivity may be at all fixed at a point, limits must be given. Since limits are the condition of the first phenomenon, the cause whereby limits are produced cannot be a phenomenon, it goes back into the interior of nature, or of each respective product.
In organic nature, this limitation of productivity is shown by what we call sensibility, which must be thought as the first condition of the construction of the organic product.
(b) The immediate effect of confined productivity is a change of contraction and expansion in the matter already given, and as we now know, constructed, as it were, for the second time.
(c) Where this change stops, productivity passes over into product, and where it is again restored, product passes over into productivity. For since the product must remain productive ad infinitum, those three stages of productivity must be capable of being DISTINGUISHED in the product; the absolute transition of the latter into product is the cancelling of product itself.
(d) As these three stages are distinguishable in the individual, so they must be distinguishable in organic nature throughout, and the scale of organizations is nothing more than a scale of productivity itself. (Productivity exhausts itself to degree c in the product A, and can begin with the product B only at the point where it left off with A, that is, with degree d, and so on downwards to the vanishing of all productivity. If we knew the absolute degree of productivity of the earth for example—a degree which is determined by the earth’s relation to the sun—the limit of organization upon it might be thereby more accurately determined than by incomplete experience—which must be incomplete for this reason, if for no other, that the catastrophes of nature have, beyond doubt, swallowed the last links of the chain. A true system of Natural History, which has for its object not the products [of nature] but nature itself, follows up the one productivity that battles, so to speak, against freedom, through all its windings and turnings, to the point at which it is at last compelled to perish in the product.)
It is upon this dynamical scale, in the individual, as well as in the whole of organic nature, that the construction of all organic phenomena rests.
B.[[24]]
These principles, stated universally, lead to the following fundamental principles of a universal theory of nature.
(a) Productivity must be primarily limited. Since outside of limited productivity there is [only] pure identity the limitation cannot be established by a difference already existing, and therefore must be so by an opposition arising in productivity itself—an opposition to which we here revert as a first postulate.[[25]]
(b) This difference thought purely is the first condition of all [natural] activity, the productivity is attracted and repelled[[26]] between opposites (the primary limits); in this change of expansion and contraction there arises necessarily a common element, but one which exists only in change. If it is to exist outside of change, then the change itself must become fixed. The active in change is the productivity sundered within itself.