Soil is a living substance

Author(s):  
Katsuyuki Minami
Keyword(s):  
2018 ◽  
Vol 94 (94) ◽  
pp. 4-6
Author(s):  
Filippo Menozzi

Rosa Luxemburg will be honoured, remembered, and celebrated as a figure from the past only when, in a future still to-come, the goals of social justice, peace and equality that she fought for are realised. As long as bitter struggles and widespread suffering continue, she is still living, a living substance that is part of the present and can inspire political engagement. The wider meaning of declaring Rosa Luxemburg our contemporary, then, is that the objectives she struggled for are still to-come, and the forms of violence and oppression she struggled against are still part of the material social conditions of today’s world. This coevalness can be pronounced because many issues at the heart of her thought and activism are still with us: from imperialism and the national question to what Nancy Fraser calls the 'back-stories' of capitalism. This special issue of New Formations aims to contribute to the transmission of this vital legacy by suggesting questions about relevance, memory and resonance: how does Luxemburg speak to us, how do her thoughts echo with our own? How can we prevent the legacy of Rosa Luxemburg from becoming heritage, a thing of the past? The essays and interviews included in this special issue grapple in different ways with the central question of how to assess the contemporaneity of Rosa Luxemburg without turning her into an object of commemoration.


1971 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 491-495 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. S. Tritton

This essay takes for granted articles in the Encyclopaedia of Islam and papers by D. B. Macdonald and W. E. Calverley but a brief summary may be allowed. Nafs and rūh were used loosely to mean almost anything connected with life, but acquired new meanings as the years went by. Men differed about the nature and activity of all three constituents of man. ‘Soul’ is almost the equivalent of nafs in its precise sense though it may be hard at times to decide if ‘self’ is not more appropriate. It is easier to admit the existence of soul than to define it for it has neither genus nor proprium; any definition is imperfect and any description inadequate. It is part of the world soul as intellect is part of the world intellect, it is part of the spirit of God, torn off by the instrumentality of intellect, it is simple, incorruptible, and unchangeable. Many were the suggestions; it is a compound of constituents (rukn), union of elements('unsur), a self-moving accident, hot spirit, a nature in perpetual motion. It is a living substance(jawhar) but is not in the body in the same way as rūh is. Another idea is close to a Jewish view that all souls are one and are made different by the influences of the spheres and stars through or by which they pass on their journey to earth. The threefold division of soul into vegetal, animal, and rational was known and may have something to do with the religious division into the soul at rest in faith, the censorious soul, and the lusting soul. Instead of censorious the meaning ‘changeable’ is also given.8 A variant is that a believer has three souls while a hypocrite and an unbeliever have each one.


Protoplasm itself, using the name to express living substance in its simplest, undifferentiated form, is generally recognised as having the properties of a somewhat viscous liquid. This fact was realised as long ago as 1864 by Kühne (1864). As usually seen under the microscope, it contains suspended in it a number of granules of a great variety of dimensions and properties. But in the pseudopodia of an amoeba or of a leucocyte, when examined by the ordinary method of illumination with transmitted light, it appears completely devoid of contents or structure. As Hardy (1899) showed, the various networks and similar arrangements seen in fixed preparations are produced by the action of the reagents used, although they indicate that protoplasm contains matter in the colloidal state. The use of the method of brilliant lateral illumination on a dark ground (so-called “ultra-microscope”) has led to the detection of particles in protoplasm which are too minute to be visible by ordinary illumination. Of course, these particles, being comparable in dimensions with the mean wave-length of light, are not seen in their true dimensions or form, but by their diffraction discs. Remembering that the late Lord Rayleigh showed that the more intense the illumination, the more minute are the particles that it is possible to detect, I tested the result of increasing the intensity of the dark-ground illumination applied to the apparently clear and structureless pseudopodia of large amoebae. The broad flat pseudopodia of a species, which appeared to correspond to Amœba princeps (Leidy), were found to be most appropriate for the purpose. A paraboloid condenser, made by Zeiss, was used in most cases. The source of light was the positive crater of a small arc lamp with carbons at right angles to one another. The rays were made parallel by a condenser, and passed through a cell with parallel sides, about 5 cm. apart, before falling on the mirror of the microscope. The water-cell was found to be necessary on account of the heat otherwise transmitted being sufficient to kill the organisms. In order to obviate the injurious effect of any ultra-violet rays which might be transmitted through the system, quinine sulphate was added to the water. The objective used for the majority of the observations was an excellent ⅙-inch dry lens made by Swift, which was found to admit of magnification by fairly high-power oculars, such as No. 12 compensating of Zeiss. Other methods, such as that of an objective as sub-stage condenser, with a central stop in the observing objective to cut out direct rays, were tried; but the paraboloid was found to be the best on the whole.


2020 ◽  
pp. 189-204
Author(s):  
Armando López de Castro

Teresa de Jesús escribió poesía porque tenía un alma musical y sabía dar ritmo a sus poemas. Es una música que surge de la oscuridad y habla de lo profundo, destinada a elevarse desde la fuerza de su dolorosa espera, de ahí que invite a la plegaria con el estremecimiento de ser sustancia viva. Vueltos hacia su propio interior, sus poemas potencian su energía sonora desde la desnudez de su fingida retórica y nos hacen volar el oído hacia lo sobrenatural, buscando la recuperación del orden perdido. Teresa de Jesús wroter poetry because she had a musical soul and knew how to give rhythm to her poems. It is a music that emerges from the darkness and speaks from the deep, destined to rise from the force of its painful waiting, hence the invitation to prayer with the shudder of being living substance. Turned towards his own interior, his poems enhance his sound energy from the nakedness of his feigned rhetoric and make us blow our ears towards the supernatural, seeking the recovery of the lost order.


2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 120-123
Author(s):  
V. P. Pishak

150-years have passed since the birth of famous Ukrainian and Russian scientist, academician V. I. Vernadsky (1863–1945) – the founder and the first president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (UAS), as well as the first scientific library in Ukraine. The genius of scientific predictions of V. I. Vernadsky is undeniable: he is the founder of geochemistry, biochemistry and genetic mineralogy; the doctrine about living substance and its role in the evolution of the biosphere and the noosphere theory; the reasoning of the concept of the biosphere – the sphere of living organisms, their place and role in placental scope; the development of biogeochemistry. "There is no more stable "acting" chemical force on the Earth than all the living organisms" – V. I. Vernadsky pointed (Vernadsky, 1965). The scientist pointed that even in the early stages of life nascence the populations and communities always have been evolved. Thus, there is a set of organisms that are closely interacted with each other and with inanimate nature has arisen. According to Vernadsky, from the very beginning of the emergence of the biosphere, the living components (biomonomers and biopolymers) were differed by a great variety. Without such an initial heterogeneity of living systems on Earth, the conversion of solid, liquid and gaseous substances could not be carried out. Thus, the heterogeneity of the biosphere correlated with a variety of physical and chemical organization of different parts of the earth's surface. The chemical elemental composition of the earth's surface as well as elemental composition of living organisms, which are directly involved in chemical transformations on Earth, have never been significantly changed during whole geological history. "The variety of living substance, and life have always performed various biogeochemical functions at the same time" – V. Vernadsky pointed. The chemical transformations, the circulation of substance are evolving in the same time, they are interconnected with the circulation of chemicals, which in turn depend on rain, seasonal and other cyclic changes of light, temperature, pressure – meaning the chronoperiodic changes – V. I. Vernadsky followed the idea of continuity of living substance in outer space. Both – tasks and methodological bases of geochemistry and biogeochemistry were based in the theoretical ecology – environmental aspects of evolution, the principles of systemic analysis, biocenology problems, mathematical modeling, chronoperiodic reaction etc. Theoretical principles of ecology, developed by V. I. Vernadsky, their practical solution in some sections of biology led to the formation of different ecological areas: animal’s, plant’s and microorganism’s ecology, engineering ecology and others. Scientist drew the great attention to human ecology. With the changing of socio-economic formations, a role of a human in biosphere life has increased, especially in an era of scientific and technological revolution. The human activities as a source of energy, the active economic activity of Homo sapiens, the appearance of chemicals of anthropogenic origin, – these and many other directions of human activity allowed V. I. Vernadsky substantiate the place and role of new environmental factor – the noosphere, and hence a new research area – noospherology. Theoretical bases of ecology, developed by V. I. Vernadsky, find their practical implementation in medicine: the development of molecular genetics, genomic medicine, and detection of genetic predisposition to many diseases, so-called multifactorial diseases, environmental protection, the formation of new medicine areas – predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory one. Nowadays, the biomedical community, motivated by works of V. I. Vernadsky, feces the new horizons of therapy, diagnostics and prevention of diseases, based on the environmental factors.


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