palingenesis

noun

1. (also, figuratively, uncountable)Rebirth; regeneration; (countable) an instance of this.

   “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.”

2. (also, countable, figuratively, uncountable)Rebirth; regeneration; (countable) an instance of this.

   “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.”

3. (also, countable, figuratively, historical, uncountable)Rebirth; regeneration; (countable) an instance of this.

   “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.”

4. (historical, obsolete, uncountable)The apparent repetition, during the development of a single embryo, of changes that occurred previously in the evolution of its species.

   “[P]alingenesis is to be seen in the Ectoprocta, cœnogenesis in the Entoprocta.”

   “Now that all mammals are led back to a distant diphyodont stem, it is also true that the further we go back both in palingenesis and embryogenesis, the more widespread heterodontism is—all modern homodontism proving to be secondary.”

   “Fortunately enough we find that recently zoologists have become more and more convinced that it is necessary to relinquish the erroneous "fundamental biogenetic law" which sees whole phylogenies repeated in the ontogenies, with a very small number of deviations ("Fälschungen") which cover 10–0 per cent only of the total number; all the rest are, according to this interpretation, palingeneses, i.e. recapitulations.”

   “It is not, as [Michel] Foucault asserts, that [Charles] Bonnet's palingenesis is absolutely opposed to evolutionism; it is that his model of is internalist rather than externalist: […] Bonnet's palingenesis, while not development according to the externalist, scientific model of evolution founded by [Charles] Darwin, ranks as a "classical internalist theory" of development: a program placed in the germs at the Creation unfolds in its divinely preordained pattern.”

5. (uncountable)The regeneration of magma by the melting of metamorphic rocks.

   “This process of regeneration of magma has been called palingenesis by [Jakob] Sederholm, who ascribes to it many of the Archæan granite and granodiorite masses of Fennoscandia.”

   “Sedimentary rocks may weather to produce more sedimentary rocks; they may be metamorphosed to produce metamorphic rocks; or they may be transformed to magma by palingenesis.”

   “In ultrametamorphism, useful components and volatiles, particularly water, are mobilized before partial anatexis or palingenesis of rocks takes place.”