Buddhist Romanticism

Organic
From their study of biology and paleontology, the Romantics
extrapolated three connected principles of organic growth and causality
that they applied to the activity of human organisms within the larger
organism of the universe as a whole.
1) The first principle is what defines an organism: An organism is
composed of parts that work together toward a common purpose, which is
the survival of the organism and the production of further life. Organic
causality is thus not blind and mechanical. Instead, it is teleological—i.e., it
strives toward a particular purpose. This purpose is what gives the
organism its unity, and also what turns the fact of life into the imperative of
life: Every part of the organism has the duty to further the purpose of the
organism. Any action furthering that purpose is good; any interfering with
that purpose is bad.
Because one of the purposes of each organism is to create more
organisms, it is connected to the larger process of continuing life. Its
purpose thus goes beyond its own survival. However, this fact alone does
not connect the organism with life—or the universe—as a whole. It
connects the organism only with its own descendants. The larger
connection, the interconnectiveness of all life, will come from the third
principle, below.
2) The second principle is that organisms achieve their purpose by
evolving. This principle applies most obviously on the individual level, in
the development of an organism from an embryo to its adult form. But it
also applies on the larger scale, to the history of life. As life evolves, the
laws of organic growth and the nature of organic activity evolve as well.
Thus early forms of life strived simply to survive, but as life has advanced it
has grown more and more conscious: more aware of itself and its
surroundings. From consciousness, it has developed—especially, in human
beings, the highest form of life—the drive to express the forces within it
through language and other acts of creation. Thus the peculiarly human
contribution to the evolution of life, the contribution that puts humanity on
the cutting edge of evolution, is the ever-advancing freedom and ability of
human beings to express outwardly to one another the life force that they
share within them.
3) The third principle is that organisms evolve through the principle of
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