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Updated: May 1, 2025
In the introduction to his treatise Metamorphosis of Plants, when referring to the regressive metamorphosis of stamens into petals as an example of an irregular metamorphosis, he remarks that 'experiences of this kind of metamorphosis will enable us to disclose what is hidden from us in the regular way of development, and to see clearly and visibly what we should otherwise only be able to infer'. In this remark Goethe expresses a truth that is valid in many spheres of life, both human and natural.
Death is popularly considered the maximum of punishment in war, but it is not; reduction to poverty brings prayers for peace more surely and more quickly than does the destruction of human life, as the selfishness of man has demonstrated in more than one great conflict. In the afternoon of the 16th I started back to Winchester, whence I could better supervise our regressive march.
This fact coincides in large part with the previously mentioned tendency toward comfort, which is unwilling to forego childhood and a mother’s careful hands. Introversion is an excellent road to lazy phantasying in the regressive direction. Among psychopathologists Jung especially has of late strongly insisted upon the dangerous rôle of indolence.
What we have here said of the first cosmological idea that of the absolute totality of quantity in phenomena applies also to the others. The series of conditions is discoverable only in the regressive synthesis itself, and not in the phenomenon considered as a thing in itself given prior to all regress.
Our optimism, our faith that right, truth, and order will eventually prevail, can find only a delusive basis in actual experience, and must draw its life from some deeper source. Why then should we so presume that our moral and religious ideas are really progressive and not regressive, as to regard their interpretation as approximating to the truth?
But if this relation is sensuous, and belongs to the possible empirical employment of understanding, the supreme condition or cause must close the regressive series according to the laws of sensibility and consequently, must belong to the series of time. It follows that this necessary existence must be regarded as the highest member of the cosmical series.
As it is, we reach a compromise, such as that of sleep, in which contact with reality is temporarily abandoned. In so far as sleep is psychologically determined, it is a regressive phenomenon. It is interesting that the most frequent euphemism or metaphor for death is sleep. Sleep is a normal regression.
Rebirth fancies unquestionably, then, contain constructive and progressive elements, but, as has been stated above, any thinking which implies a lapse of contact with the environment is, in so far as that lapse is concerned, regressive, and in consequence rebirth fancies, as dramatized by the stupor patients, are regressive, just as are the delusions of death itself.
The frequency with which the delusion of mutual death occurs in stupor is another evidence of its regressive psychology.
But if we dismiss this assumption this transcendental illusion and deny that it is a thing in itself, the contradictory opposition is metamorphosed into a merely dialectical one; and the world, as not existing in itself independently of the regressive series of my representations exists in like manner neither as a whole which is infinite nor as a whole which is finite in itself.
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