Section One: Religious Dualism.

The next opposition that the child has to overcome is found in nourishment. As long as it relies on mother’s milk, motherly love performs the task of mediation that the infant requires; however, with the emergence of teeth, nature gives a hint that the small, developing human is destined to evolve toward independence. After weaning, the child becomes accustomed to taking nourishment directly through its own activity and transforming it into its own flesh and blood—that is, to overcome the opposition of the external world in order to maintain life through its own self-activity self-activity: Selbstthätigkeit – a key 19th-century German philosophical concept suggesting that life is defined by its internal drive for independent action.

Just as the child overcomes matter through chewing, it eventually reaches the point of mastering space through walking and, later, of bringing ideas out of itself through speaking. By doing so, the child liberates its inner self, just as it frees itself from the external world by mastering it through chewing and walking. "All life struggles against the barriers of space and time." 1 Thus, man intervenes in nature by extracting his nourishment from it; while he assimilates it into his own physicality by destroying its original form, nature also exerts an effect upon him. In the further course of development, he intervenes in nature through labor, by cultivating the soil and transforming what is found in nature, through which he himself is, in turn, refined German: gebildet – this word implies both being "formed" and being "educated" or "civilized." Roskoff suggests that by shaping the world, humans shape their own character..

It is a continuous series of interactions interactions: Wechselwirkungen – reciprocal cause-and-effect relationships where both parties influence each other on both a large and small scale, and of each upon the other.

The same occurs within the human biological organism. Blood, which has been called "the mother of all life," is the cause for the formation of gastric juice, and this juice is the cause of blood formation; and just as every organ contains blood, so too is blood the substance of all organs. Blood serves to maintain and animate the organs, and these fulfill their purpose by maintaining blood in its living form. Without the activity of the lungs, the brain cannot function, and without the brain's influence, the movement of the lungs would be impossible.

In the act of living, man overcomes the opposition,

1 Burdach, Man According to the Different Aspects of His Nature original: Der Mensch nach den verschiedenen Seiten seiner Natur, new edition of 1854, p. 631. Karl Friedrich Burdach (1776–1847) was a famous German physiologist whose work bridged the gap between biology and philosophy.