[60]. Nothing shows more clearly the contradictions out of which life arises, and the fact that it is altogether only a heightened condition of ordinary natural forces, than the contradiction of Nature in what she tries, but tries in vain, to reach through the sexes.—Nature hates sex, and where it does arise, it arises against her will. The diremption into sexes is an inevitable fate, with which, after she is once organic, she must put up, and which she can never overcome.—By this very hatred of diremption she finds herself involved in a contradiction, inasmuch as what is odious to her she is compelled to develop in the most careful manner, and to lead to the summit of existence, as if she did it on purpose; whereas she is always striving only for a return into the identity of the genus, which, however, is chained to the (never to be cancelled) duplicity of the sexes, as to an inevitable condition. That she develops the individual only from compulsion, and for the sake of the genus, is manifest from this, that wherever in a genus she seems desirous of maintaining the individual longer (though this is never really the case), she finds the genus becoming more uncertain, because she must hold the sexes farther asunder, and, as it were, make them flee from each other. In this region of Nature, the decay of the individual is not so visibly rapid as it is where the sexes are nearer to each other, as in the case of the rapidly withering flower, in which, from its very birth, they are enclosed in a calix as in a bride-bed, but in which, for that very cause, the genus is better secured.

Nature is the laziest of animals, and curses diremption, because it imposes upon her the necessity of activity; she is active only in order to rid herself of this necessity. The opposites must for ever shun, in order for ever to seek, each other; and for ever seek, in order never to find, each other; it is only in this contradiction that the ground of all the activity of Nature lies. (Remark of the original.)

[61]. Its effect upon the power of reproduction (as well as the reaction of particular conditions of the latter power upon galvanic phenomena) is less studied still than might be needful and useful.—Vide Outlines, p. 177.—(Remark of the original.)

[62]. Compare above Remark, p. 197. (Remark of the original.)

[63]. That it is therefore the same nature, which, by the same forces, produces organic phenomena, and the universal phenomena of Nature, and that these forces are in a heightened conditioned in organic nature.

[64]. The word “Idea” does not have the sense here given it, except in Hegel, and in a very few translations of him. For the most part the word is used, (e. g. in Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature in this number,) as a translation for the German “Begriff,” which we call “comprehension,” adopting the term in this sense from the author of the “Letters on Faust.” It will do no harm to use so expressive a word as comprehension in an objective sense as well as in a subjective one. The thought itself is bizarre, and not merely the word; it is useless to expect to find words that are used commonly in a speculative sense. One must seek a word that has several meanings, and grasp these meanings all together in one, to have the speculative use of a word. Spirit has formed words for speculative ideas by the deepest of instincts, and these words have been unavoidably split up into different meanings by the sensuous thinking, which always loses the connecting links.

[65]. “Essai sur la dialectique dans Platon et dans Hegel,” par Paul Janet, Membre de L’Institut, professeur à la Faculté des lettres de Paris.—Paris, (Ladrange,) 1860.