 Second, if spontaneous generation is the very nature of being, then one can legitimately attribute ziran to the ultimate or to things themselves. Chapter 25 of the Laozi says, “Human beings follow earth, earth follows heaven, heaven follows dao, dao follows ziran”, but chapter 64 speaks of “the ziran of the myriad things”, and in chapter 17, the people refer to their own ziran. This immanence contrasts with the common division between God as self-caused and everything else as caused by God, a view which ultimately sees being as divided into two fundamentally different kinds. In employing a univocal conception of being as sheng, Chinese philosophies did not segregate self-generation from the world.