The Book of Love

The Book of Love

Many years ago I wrote that to live means nutrition and generation, and the deeper I cast the sounding-line into the dark abysses of life, the more I am convinced that this definition faithfully depicts the most striking characteristics of all creatures which, from bacteria to man, come to life, grow and die on the face of our planet. If, however, I wished still further to simplify my idea, reducing life to its simplest and most essential form, I would say without fear of betraying the truth, that to live means to generate. Every living body is perishable, but before dying it has the power of reproducing the form that has made it capable of living; and that whirlwind which absorbs and rejects, which assimilates new atoms and repels old ones, and which so clearly represents the eternal picture of life in all its manifestations, is also the most faithful representation of every form of generation. Nutrition is a real genesis, and in the great chemical laboratory of living beings we have at all times before our eyes the reproduction of histological elements of organs and individuals. We lose hair, epithelia, white corpuscles every day; and yet every day we generate hair, epithelia and leucocytes: this is an every-day generation in the body of man. A nail falls off, a new one takes its place: this is the reproduction of an organ. We generate children similar to ourselves: this is the reproduction of an entire organism, the true generation. But in one of our offspring we see re-repeated a mole which is on our nose: this is the reproduction of an organ within an organism. On the other hand, one[Pg 14] race generates another race, one species another species; and here we see a broader genesis by which from the reproduction of a cell through another cell we gradually pass to the generating of an organ, of an individual, of a race, of a species. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 57423
Author: Mantegazza, Paolo
Release Date: Jun 30, 2018
Format: eBook
Language: English