Appendix - 7. (473).
The ancients, who attributed the generation of beings to love, acknowledged indirectly that the moulding force or the 'plastidinamia', as J. F. Lobstein called it (De l'organisation de la matière dans l'espèce humaine, in Millin's Magasin encyclopédique, 1804), must be found in feeling alone, because love is feeling. The Epicureans, who attributed this formative, organising virtue to matter without the intervention of the Creator, basically did no more than associate a feeling with matter. A clear demonstration of this is their claim that all worldly events are explained by the principle of love and by the sympathy and antipathy of things. Their imagination certainly confused the extrasubjective facts of attraction and repulsion with the real subjective cause (feeling), and interchanged these as they pleased. This prevented them from making a constant distinction between the concept of what is subjective and what is extrasubjective. But clearly, their use of the word 'love' is sufficient of itself to show that their thought started from the subjective principle. Indeed, some thinkers today have turned precisely to feeling and love to explain generation and, by extending their explanation to plants, have imitated the language of Epicureans. Virey, for example, has no hesitation in writing:
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Animals and plants have life because they have received existence and organisation from the love of their parents. We all begin in the maternal womb; our life is simply an emanation of that of our parents, the fruit of their love; our existence has its source entirely in them, and the more ardent their love, the more energetic our life. Love is the force by which individuals produce descendants who are stronger and more active than those of very old or very young parents. As the sole source of life, love is the period of strength, energy, activity and reproduction. - In its widest sense, love is the principle of life of all organised bodies and alone presides over the generations. It is the generative Venus, celebrated in earlier time by philosophers and poets: |
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Through you, every kind of living thing is
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Love therefore is the judge of the organic world. It orders the chaos of matter which it impregnates with life; it opens and closes at will the door of existence to all the beings it calls out of nothing and returns to nothing. Attraction in brute matter is a kind of love or friendship analogous to the love that reproduces organised being. The generative faculty is therefore a general phenomenon in the universe, manifested in brute substances by planetary and chemical attraction, and in organised bodies by love or life. Article Générations in Nouveau Dictionnaire d'Histoire naturelle. |
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