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certain and simpler signs for subjective cognition. Only since this goal of an "artificial" system for

classifying animals was given up has the way been opened for a broader view, and among the

empirical sciences there is hardly one which in recent times has expanded as much as zoology,

particularly through its auxiliary science of comparative anatomy. This expansion has not occurred

solely in the sense of more observations, for none of the sciences lacks these, but in the sense of

arranging its material to accord with reason.

Partly it is the habits of individual animals, viewed as a coherent whole determining the

construction of every part, which have become the main point, so that the great founder of

comparative anatomy, Cuvier, could boast that he could recognise the essential nature of the entire

animal from a single bone. Partly it is that the general type of the animal has been traced in the

various, still apparently incomplete and disparate forms, and its importance recognised in the

hardly noticed suggestion, as well as in the mixture of organs and functions, and in this way has

been raised above and beyond its particularity into its generality. A primary feature of this method

is the recognition of how nature shapes and adapts this organism to the particular element in which

it is placed, an environment which can also be one particular species of plant or another of animal.

It is due to the immediacy of the idea of life that the concept, whether or not it is only determined

in and for itself does not exist as such in life. Its existence is therefore subjected to the manifold

conditions and circumstances of external nature, and can appear in the most inadequate forms.

The fecundity of the earth causes life to break out in every way. Even perhaps less than the other

spheres of nature, therefore, can the animal world present in itself an independent, rational system

of organisation, or retain a hold on forms determined by the concept and preserve them against the

imperfection and mixture of conditions, from confusion, degeneration, and transitional forms. This

weakness of the concept, which exists in the animal though not in its fixed, independent freedom,

entirely subjects even the genus to the changes that are shared by the life of the animal. And the

environment of external contingency in which the animal must live exercises perpetual violence

against the individual. Hence the life of the animal seems in general to be sick, and the animal's

feeling seems to be insecure, anxious, and unhappy.

§ 293.

Due to the externality of its existence, the individual organism can not accord with its

determination. It finds itself in a state of disease when one of its systems or organs, stimulated to

conflict with an organic power, establishes itself for itself and persists in its particular activity

against the activity of the whole. For the fluidity and pervasive process of the activity is thus

obstructed.

§ 294.

The characteristic manifestation of disease is, thus, when the identity of the entire organic concept,

as the successive course of life's movement through its different moments, sensibility, irritability,

and reproduction, presents itself as fever. This fever is to the same extent both the isolated activity

in opposition to the course of totality, and the effort towards and beginning of healing.

§ 295.

Medicine provokes the organism to remove the inorganic power with which the activity of the

individual organ or system is entangled and thereby isolated. Essentially, however, the irritation of

the formal activity of the particular organ or system is suspended, and its fluidity is restored within

the whole. The medicine achieves this as an irritant, but one which is even more difficult to

assimilate and to overcome, and against which the organism is compelled to exert its entire

strength. While it acts in this way against an external entity, the organism steps out of the limitation

with which it had become identical and in which it had become involved.

Medication must in general be viewed as an indigestible substance. But indigestibility is only a

relative category, though not in the vague sense in which it is usually taken, as if it really meant

something easily digestible by weaker constitutions. On the contrary, such an easily digestible

substance is indigestible for stronger individuals. The true relativity, that of the concept, which has

its actuality in life, consists, when expressed in the quantitative terms which count as valid here, in

homogeneity being greater, the more the opposed terms are intrinsically self-subsistent. The

highest qualitative form of relativity in the living organism has manifested itself as the sexual relation,

in which independent individualities are identical to each other.

For the lower forms of animal life, which have not achieved a difference within themselves, the

digestible substance is the substance without individuality, such as water for plants. For children,

the digestible substance is partly the completely homogeneous animal lymph, mother's milk, a

substance which is already digested or rather has further differentiated within itself and partly the

least individualised of mixed substances. Substances of this kind, on the other hand, are

indigestible for stronger natures. These natures digest more easily individualised animal substances,

or plant juices which sunlight has matured to a more powerful self and are therefore "spirituous,"

instead of for example, the vegetable products still in their merely neutral colour and closer to the

chemical process proper. Through this more intensive selfhood the former substances form an

even stronger contrast, but for that very reason they are more homogeneous irritants. Taken

together, medications are negative irritants, poisons, a stimulant and at the same time an

indigestible substance, to the extent that the organism alienated from itself in disease must gather

up its strength, turn against the medication as an external, foreign body, and thereby achieve again

the self-feeling of its individuality.

But Brownianism, regarded as a complete system of medicine, is merely an empty formalism,

especially in its determination of diseases and the actions of medications according to sthenic or

asthenic body types, the latter further divided into direct and indirect asthenia. Brown's theory is,

moreover, too often limited by formulations derived from the natural sciences, such as his recourse

to the factors of carbon and nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen as explanations, or magnetic,

electrical, and chemical moments. Nevertheless, his theory did have two important consequences:

through him, the view of merely particular and specific issues, both in diseases and medications,

was expanded to the general in them as essential elements; and through his opposition to the

previously used method, which was even more fixed on asthenic and asthenising questions than the

subsequent phases, he showed that the organism does not react to the most antithetical kind of

treatment in such an opposite way, but that frequently, at least in the final results, it reacts in a

similar and hence general way. Thus the simple identity of the organism with itself as its true

essence is demonstrated in opposition to a particular entanglement of one of its systems with

specific irritants.

§ 296.

The animal individual, in overcoming and moving beyond particular inadequacies in conflict with its

concept, does not suspend the inadequacy in general which it has within it, namely, that its idea is

the immediate idea, or that the animal stands within nature. Its subjectivity is only the concept in

itself but not itself for itself and exists only as an immediate individuality. That inner generality is

thus opposed to its actuality as a negative power, from which the animal suffers violence and

perishes, because its existence does not itself contain this generality within itself.

§ 297.

As abstract, this negative generality is an external actuality which exerts mechanical violence

against the animal and destroys it. As its own concrete generality it is the genus, and the living

organism submerges its different individuality partly in the process of genus formation. Partly,

however, the living organism directly suspends its inadequacy in relation to the genus, which is its

original sickness and the inborn seed of death, since it imagines the individuality of its death. But

because this generality is immediate, the individual achieves only an abstract objectivity, it blunts its

activity, grows ossified, and thus kills itself by itself.

§ 298.

But the subjectivity of the living organism is just as essentially in itself identical to concrete

generality and the genus. Its identity with the genus is thus only the suspension of the formal

antithesis, of immediacy, and of the generality of individuality. Since this subjectivity is, moreover,

the concept in the idea of life, it is in itself the absolute being in itself of reality. Through this

suspension of its immediacy subjectivity coalesces itself absolutely with itself and the last

self-externality of nature is suspended. In this way nature has passed over into its truth, into the

subjectivity of the concept, whose objectivity is itself the suspended immediacy of individuality, the

concrete generality, the concept which has the concept as its existence — into the spirit.

The End

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