other
grains of barley and as soon as these are ripe the stalk dies, and
becomes negated in its turn. As the result of this negation of the
negation, we have the original grains of barley again, not singly,
however, but ten, twenty or thirty fold. Forms of grain change very
slowly and so the grain of barley remains practically the same as a
hundred years ago. But let us take a cultivated ornamental plant, like
the dahlia or orchid. Let us consider the seed and the plants
developed from it by the skill of the gardener, and we have in
testimony of this negation of the negation, no longer the same seeds
but qualitatively improved seed which produces more beautiful flowers,
and every repetition of this process, every new negation of the
negation, increases the tendency to perfection. Similarly this process
is gone through by most insects, butterflies, for example. They come
out of the egg by a negation of the egg, they go through certain
transformations till they reach sex maturity, they copulate and are
again negated, since they die as soon as the process of copulation is
completed, and the female has laid her innumerable eggs. That the
matter is not so plainly obvious in the case of other plants and
animals, seeing that they produce seeds, plants, and animals not once
but oftener, does not affect us in this case, we are now only
concerned in showing that the negation of the negation actually does
occur in both kingdoms of the organic world. Besides, all geology is a
series of negated negations, one layer after another following the
destruction of old and the establishment of new rock foundations.
First, the original crust of the earth, through the cooling of the
fluid mass, and through oceanic, meteorological, and chemical
atmospheric action, being broken up into small parts, these broken
masses form layers in the seas. Local elevations of the seas, through
the ebb and flow of the waters, bring portions of these layers afresh
under the influence of rain, the warmth of the seasons, and the oxygen
and carbon in the atmosphere: melted and almost cooled masses of rock
from the interior of the earth underlie these and break through the
layers. Through millions of centuries new layers are continually being
formed, always to a large extent destroyed and serving again as
building materials for new layers. But the result of the process is
always positive, the restoration of a piece of ground made up of
exceedingly diverse chemical