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and a new world, and the further division of the former into continents distinguished from one

another and from the new world by their physical, organic, and anthropological character, to

which an even younger and more immature continent is joined; — mountain ranges, and so on.

§ 264.

The physical organisation of the earth shows a series of stages of granitic activity, involving a core

of mountains in which the trinity of determinations is displayed, and leads through other forms

which are partly transitions and modifications, though its totality remains the existing foundation,

only more unequal and unformed within itself This is partly also an elaboration of its moments into

a more determinate difference and more abstract mineral moments, such as metals and fossil

objects generally, until it loses itself in mechanical stratifications and alluvial terrains lacking any

immanent formative development.

§ 265.

This crystal of life, the inanimate organism of the earth which has its concept in the sidereal

connection but possesses its own process as a presupposed past, is the immediate subject of the

meteorological process, which as an organised whole is in its complete determinateness. In this

objective subject the formerly elementary process is now objective and individual, — the

suspension of immediacy takes place, through which general individuality now emerges for itself

and life becomes vital or real. The first real vitality, which the fructified earth brings forth, is

vegetable nature.

B.

Vegetable Nature

§ 266.

The generality and individuality of life are still immediately identical in immediate vitality.

Consequently the process by which the plant differentiates itself into distinct parts and sustains

itself is one in which it comes out of itself and falls into pieces as several individuals, for which the

whole plant is more the basis than a subjective unity. A further consequence is that the

differentiation of the organic parts is only a superficial metamorphosis, and one part can easily pass

into the function of the other.

§ 267.

The process of shaping and reproduction of the single individual coincides in this way with the

process of genus formation. And because self-like generality, the subjective unit of individuality,

does not separate itself from real particularisation but is only submerged in it, the plant does not

move from its place, nor is it a selfinterrupting individualisation, but a continually flowing

self-nourishment. It does not relate itself to individualised inorganic nature, but to the general

elements. Nor is it capable of feeling and animal warmth.

§ 268.

Insofar, however, as life is essentially the concept which realises itself only through self-division

and reunification, the plant processes also diverge from each other. (1) But their inner process of

formation is to be seen partly as the positive, merely immediate transformation of nourishment

supplies into the specific nature of plants. On the one hand, and for the sake of essential simplicity,

this is the division into abstract generality of an implicitly inseparable individuality, as into the

negative of vitality, becoming wood. But on the other hand, on the side of individuality and vitality,

this is the process specifying itself in an outward direction.

§ 269.

(2) This is the unfolding of the parts as organs of different elementary relations, the division partly

into the relation to earth and into the air and water process which mediates them. Since the plant

does not hold itself back in inner, subjective generality against outer individuality, it is equally torn

out of itself by light, from which it takes the specific confirmation and individualisation of itself

knotted and multiplied into a multiplicity of individuals.

§ 270.

Since, however, the reproduction of the individual vegetable as a singularity is not the subjective

return into itself a feeling of self but inwardly becomes wooden, the production of the self of the

plant consequently moves in an outward direction. The plant brings forth its light as its own self in

the blossom, in which the neutral colour green is determined as a specific coloration, or, too, light

is produced as a white colour, purified from the dark.

§ 271.

Since the plant in this way offers itself as a sacrifice, this exteriorisation is at the same time the

concept realised by the process, the plant, which has produced itself as a whole, but which in the

process has come into opposition with itself. This, the highest point of the process, is therefore the

beginning of the process of sexual differentiation which occurs in the process of genus formation.

§ 272.

(3) The process of genus formation, as distinct from the processes of formation and reproduction

of the individual, is an excess in the actuality of plant nature, because those processes also directly

involve a dissolution into many individuals. But in the concept the process is, like subjectivity which

has converged with itself that generality in which the plant suspends the immediate individuality of

its organic life, and thereby grounds the transition into the higher organism.

C.

The Animal Organism

§ 273.

Organic individuality exists as subjectivity insofar as its individuality is not merely immediate

actuality but also and to the same extent suspended, exists as a concrete moment of generality,

and in its outward process the organism inwardly preserves the unity of the self This is the nature

of the animal which, in the reality and externality of individuality, is equally, by contrast,

immediately and inwardly self-reflected individuality, inwardly existing subjective generality.

§ 274.

The animal has contingent self-movement because its subjectivity is, like light and fire, ideality torn

from gravity, — a free time, which, as removed at the same time from real externality, determines

its place on the basis of inner chance. Bound up with this is the animal's possession of a voice in

which its subjectivity, existing in and for itself dominates the abstract ideality of time and space,

and manifests its self-movement as a free vibration within itself. It has animal warmth, as a

permanent preservation of the shape; interrupted intussusception; but primarily feeling, as the

individuality which in its determinacy is immediately general for itself and really selfdifferentiating

individuality.

§ 275.

The animal organism, as living generality, is the concept which passes through its three

determinations, each of which is in itself the same total identity of substantial unity and, at the same

time and as determined for itself by the form, is the transition into others, so that the totality results

from this process. It is only as this selfreproducing entity, not as an existing one, that the animal

organism is living.

§ 276.

The animal organism is therefore: (a) a simple, general being in itself in its externality, whereby real

determinacy is immediately taken up as particularity into the general, and is thereby the

unseparated identity of the subject with itself; — sensibility; — (b) particularity, as excitability from

the outside and, on the other hand, the counter-effect coming from the outward movement of the

subject; — irritability; — (c) the unity of these moments, the negative return to itself through the

relation of externality, and thereby the generation and positing of itself as an individual; —

reproduction. Inwardly, this is the reality and foundation of the first moments, and outwardly, this

is the articulation of the organism and its armament.

§ 277.

These three moments of the concept have their reality in three systems, namely, the nervous

system, the circulatory system, and the digestive system. The first is in the systems of the bones

and sensory apparatus, whereas the second turns outwardly on two sides in the lungs and the

muscles. The digestive system is, however, as a system of glands with skin and cellular tissue,

immediate, vegetative, reproductive, but as part of the actual system of the intestines it is the

mediating reproduction. The animal thus divides itself in the center (insectum) into three systems,

the head, thorax, and the abdomen, though, on the other hand, the extremities used for mechanical

movement and grasping constitute the moment of the individuality outwardly positing and

differentiating itself.

§ 278.

The idea of the living organism is the manifested unity of the concept with its reality; as the

antithesis of that subjectivity and objectivity, however, this unity exists essentially only as process.

It exists at the same time as the movement of the abstract relation of the living entity to itself which

dissolves itself into particularity, and, as the return into itself it is the negative unity of subjectivity

and totality. Each of these moments is itself a process, however as a concrete moment of the

living, and the whole is the unity of the three processes.

§ 279.

(1) The abstract process of living individuality is the process of inner formation in which the

organism converts its own members into a inorganic nature, into means, and feeds on itself Thus it

produces precisely this totality of its self-organisation, so that each member is reciprocally the end

and the means, and maintains itself through the others and in opposition to them. It is the process

which has the simple feeling of self as a result.

§ 280.

(2) The self-feeling of individuality is, in its negative return into itself immediately exclusive and in a

state of tension with inorganic nature as with real and external nature. (3) Since animal

organisation is immediately reflected into itself in this external relation, this ideal relationship is the

theoretical process and, indeed, the determinate feeling, which differentiates itself into the multiple

sensory qualities of inorganic nature.

§ 281.

The senses and the theoretical processes are therefore: (1) the sense of the mechanical sphere of

gravity, of cohesion and its variation, of heat, and feeling as such; (2) the senses of antithesis, of

the particularised principle of air, and of equally realised neutrality, of water, and of the antitheses

of its dissolution; — smell and taste; (3) the sense of the pure, essential, but exterior identity, of the

side belonging to the materials of gravity: fire, light, and colour; and (4) the sense for the depiction

of subjective reality, or of the independent inner ideality of the body standing in opposition, the

sense of hearing.

The threefold moments of the concept therefore convert here into a fivefold number, because the

moment of particularity or of the antithesis in its totality is itself threefold. Another reason for the

transition is that the animal organism is the reduction of inorganic nature split apart from itself but at

the same time it is its developed totality. Because it is still natural subjectivity, the moments of

nature's developed totality exist separately, but as an infinite unity. The determinations of this

subjectivity, therefore, have the sense of touch as their particular sense, the most fundamental,

general sense, which thus could also better be called feeling. Particularity is the antithesis, and this

is the identity and the antithesis itself Thus the sense of light belongs to this particularity, an identity

which constitutes one side of the antithesis, as abstract, but precisely therefore determines itself.

Also belonging here are the two senses of the antithesis itself as such, air and water, both like the

others in their embodied specification and individualisation. To the sense of individuality belongs

that subjectivity which, as purely self-demonstrating subjectivity, is tone.

§ 282.

The real process of inorganic nature begins equally with feeling, namely, the feeling of real

externality, and with this feeling the negation of the subject, which is at the same time the positive

relation to itself and its certainty in contrast to its negation. It begins with the feeling of a lack, and

the drive to suspend the lack, which is the condition of being stimulated externally.

Only what is living feels a lack, for it alone in nature is the concept, the unity of itself and of its

specific opposite; in this relation it is a subject. Where there is a limitation, it is a negation only for

a third, an external reflection. It is lack, however, insofar as in one sense the overcoming of the

lack is also at hand, and the contradiction is posited as such. A being which is capable of having

and enduring the contradiction of itself in itself is the subject; this constitutes its finitude. — Reason

proves its infinitude precisely at that point when reference is made to finite reason, since it

determines itself as finite. For negation is finitude and a lack only for that which is the suspended

being of itself the infinite relation to itself. Thoughtlessness, however, stops short at the abstraction

of the limitation, and in life, too, where the concept itself enters into existence, it fails to grasp the

concept, but remains fixed on the determinations of representation: drives, instincts, and needs.

An important step towards a true representation of the organism is the substitution of the category

of stimulation by external forces for the category of the intervention of external causes. This latter

contains the beginning of idealism, the assertion that nothing at all can have a positive relation to

the living if the living being is not in and for itself the possibility of the relation itself that is, not

determined by the concept, and thus in general not immanent to the subject.