Palingenesis

The elegant and fashionable female of London, would start back with horror and consternation—with loathing and disgust—could palingeneses of her ancient ancestors be presented to her.

If in connection with [Friedrich] Schleiermacher we reflect on the method of his speculations and on the contrasts which intersect each other, it can hardly be called a leap if we pass from him to the two men who were designated above […] as those who improved the System of Identity. For one of these, Johann Jakob Wagner, who had been misunderstood and was almost forgotten, a palingenesis had already begun.

Thebes, […] is an originary site, a primal scene of writing; a point of transumption, where the Phoenician alphabet transmutes into the Greek, initiating thereby the variegated career of Greek writing and its palingeneses.

In contrast to this decaying world of darkness, the contemporary clerks, scholars, and gentlemen who named the Renaissance presented it as a resurrection: a revival of texts, art, systems of government, and ways of thinking long dormant; a renovatio, or renewal, of knowledge long lost and now plumbed anew; a palingenesis, or the beginning of a new world cycle after the old had worn itself out.

On this model, codification was not aimed at effecting a palingenesis of civil society or at guaranteeing individual autonomy against public powers.

The first third of [Bertrand] Mathieu's text is given over to the painstaking alignment of [Henry] Miller with the Orphic tradition, not only in Colossus but also the trilogies, his metamorphoses into various figures including Orpheus and Hermes/Elijah and his palingeneses, or rebirths, in his works.

Schelling set himself the fundamental task of establishing a channel of ascensional intelligibility from the origins of creation to man, and even beyond man, in which the doctrines of survival and palingenesis, so dear to the Gnostics, found all their significance. Thus, the evolution of nature was marked by ever-increasing value, and creation would never by completed.

[I]t was averred that all germs, or ova, were originally created—each thing living at this hour, having proceeded from a germ which was included within the germ of its antecedent, back as far as the original creation; […] This evolution doctrine was opposed by the Pythagorean idea of a palingenesis, or metempsychosis, under which notion you are to suppose that the animating principle that has heretofore animated the bodies of the living, seeks a new union with organizable matter, upon the dissolution of its last tabernacle, and carries on the new evolution until again displaced, and set free to make new combinations.

To appear again as identically the same, would require the palingenesis of Plato, that is, the recommencement of all things, so as to have the same series of causes and effects from the very beginning; but this creed implies the finality of God's power in the phenomenal universe, and Plato never thought that.

But by the light of [Xavier] Bichat and Bell's discoveries, we can see one way to a theory of a Palingenesis of man, in which the flesh and blood of St. Paul, the animal life of Bichat, is eliminated, and the pneumatical body or organic life, the senso-motor nervous system, as distinct from the mere ganglionic, is retained.