ABSTRACT
The atom is self-sufficient and would continue to exist if all the world around it were annihilated. By contrast, nonautarky is of the very essence of organism. Its power to use the world, this unique prerogative of life, has its precise reverse in the necessity of having to use it, on pain of ceasing to be. The “not” lies always in wait and must be averted ever anew. Life, in other words, carries death within itself. The fear of death, with which the hazard of separatist existence is charged, is a never-ending comment on the audacity of the original venture upon which substance embarked in turning organic. The dependence in force is the cost incurred by primeval substance in venturing upon the career of organic – that is, self-constituting – identity instead of merely inert persistence.
