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But perhaps the most unphilosophical of any such scientific concoctions of the reflective categories

is the introduction of such formal and material relationships into the theory of stimulation, which has

long been regarded as philosophical. This includes for example the entirely abstract antithesis of

receptivity to active capacity, which supposedly stand to each other as factors in inverse relations

of magnitude. The result of this is to reduce all differences in the organism to the formalism of a

merely quantitative differentiation, involving increase and decrease, strengthening and weakening,

in other words, removing all possible traces of the concept. A theory of medicine built on these

and determinations of the understanding is complete in half a dozen propositions, and it is no

wonder that it spread rapidly and found many adherents.

The cause of this philosophical confusion, which initiated the tendency to befriend nature, lay in the

basic error of initially determining the absolute as the absolute indifference of subject and object,

and then treating all determinations as only quantitative differences. It is the case, rather, that the

absolute form, the concept and the principle of life, has for its soul only the qualitative difference

which consumes itself in itself But because this truly infinite negativity was not recognised, it was

believed that the absolute identity of life, as the attributes and the modes in the external

understanding are for Spinoza, can not be fixed without making the difference into a merely

external difference of the reflection. In this way, however, life is left altogether lacking the salient

point of selfhood, the principle of self-movement, the differentiation of the self and the principle of

individuality in general.

Another crude and utterly unphilosophical procedure is the one which attempted to give the formal

determinations a real meaning by replacing the conceptual determinations with carbon and

nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen, and determined the difference previously characterised as

intensive as now more or less of the one or another substance, whereas the active and positive

relation of the external stimulus would be the addition of a lacking substance. One example is the

assertion that in an asthenia, or a nerve fever, nitrogen has the upper hand in the organism because

the brain and nerves are supposedly in general intensified nitrogen, since chemical analysis has

shown this to be the principal ingredient of these organic structures. The ingestion of carbon is

therefore supposedly indicated in order to restore the balance of these substances, in other words,

in order to restore health. The remedies which have been shown to work empirically against nerve

fever are, for this same reason, regarded as belonging to the side of carbon, and this superficial

compilation and opinion are presented as explanation and proof The crudity of this procedure

consists in taking the external Caput mortuum, the dead substance, a dead life which chemistry

has already destroyed a second time, for the essence of a living organ, and indeed, for its concept.

This last argument gives rise to that highly facile formalism which replaces the determinations of the

concept with sensuous materials like chemical substances, as well as relationships belonging to the

sphere of inorganic nature, like the north and south polarity of magnetism, or the differences

between magnetism and electricity. This is a formalism which conceives the natural universe and

develops its conception in such a way that it attaches a readymade schema of north and south or

east and west polarities externally to the spheres and differences it uses. For this purpose there is a

great variety of forms possible. For it remains a matter of choice whether one employs the

determinations of the totality for the schema, as they appear for example in the chemical sphere,

oxygen, hydrogen, and so on, and transfers them to magnetism, mechanism, electricity, and the

masculine and the feminine, contraction and expansion, and so on, then applies them to the other

spheres.

§ 283.

Need and excitement are connected to the relation between the universal and the particular

mechanism (sleeping and waking), the relation to air (breathing and skin processes), water (thirst),

and the individualised earth, namely, the particular forms of the earth (cf. hunger, § 275). Life, the

subject of these moments of totality, develops inwardly a tension between itself as concept and the

moments of a reality external to itself and is the ongoing conflict in which it overcomes this

externality. Because the animal can only exist as an essentially individual entity, and this only

individually, this objectification is not adequate to its concept and therefore turns back constantly

from its satisfaction to the condition of need.

§ 284.

The mechanical seizure of the external object is only the beginning of the unification of the object

with the living animal. Since the animal is hence a subject, the simple negativity of the punctured

unity, the assimilation can be neither of a mechanical nor a chemical nature, for in these processes

both the material substances as the conditions and the activity remain externally in opposition to

each other, and lack living, absolute unity.

§ 285.

In the first place, because the living organism is the general power over the nature external and

opposed to it, assimilation is the immediate fusion of the ingested material with animality, an

infection by the latter and simple transformation (cf. § 278). Secondly, since the power of the

living organism is the relation of itself to itself in mediation, assimilation is digestion. It is the

opposition of the subject to its immediate assimilation, so that the former stimulates itself on the

other hand as a negative, and emerges as the process of the antithesis, the process of animal water

(of stomach and pancreatic juices, animal lymph as such) and of animal fire (of the gall, in which

the accomplished return of the organism into itself from its concentration in the spleen is

determined as being for itself as active consumption).

§ 286.

This animal stimulation is turned at first against the external potency, which, however, is placed

immediately on the side of the organism by the infection (§ 277). But this stimulus, as the antithesis

and the being for itself of the process, has at the same time the determination of externality over

against the generality and simple self-relation of the living organism. Both aspects together, initially

appearing on the side of the subject as means, actually constitute therefore the object and the

negative side in conflict with the organism, which has to overcome and to digest.

§ 287.

This inversion of attitude is the reflection of the organism into itself the negation of its own

negativity of outwardly directed activity. As a natural being it combines the individuality which it

reaches in the process with its generality as disjunctive, in such a way that on the one hand it

separates from itself the first negation, the externality of the object and its own activity, on the

other hand, and as immediately identical with this negation, with this means reproduces itself Thus

the outward moving process is transformed and transposed into the first formal processes of

reproduction from its own self.

The primary moment in digestion is the immediate action of life as the power over the inorganic

object, which it sets against itself and presupposes as its stimulating attraction only insofar as it is

itself identical with it. This action is infection and immediate transformation. It has been empirically

demonstrated and shown to accord with the concept, by the experiments of Spallanzani and

others and by recent physiology, that this immediacy, which the living organism has as a generality,

continues itself into its food without any further mediation, by its mere contact with it and simply by

taking it up into its own warmth and sphere. This is a refutation of both the theory of a mechanical,

fictitious sorting out and separating of parts already homogeneous and useful, and the theory of

mediation conceived as a chemical process. But the investigations of the mediating actions have

not found more specific moments in this transformation (as appears, for example, in vegetable

substances as a series of fermentations). On the contrary, they have shown for example that a

great deal of food moves straight from the stomach into the mass of gastric juices, without passing

through other mediating stages, that the pancreatic juice is further nothing more than saliva, that the

pancreas could quite as well be dispensed with, and so on.

The last product, the chyle, which the thoracic duct takes up and which is discharged into the

blood, is the same lymph which is secreted by each intestine and organ, effects the skin and

lymphatic system in the immediate process of transformation, and is everywhere found already

prepared. The lower organisms of animal life, which, moreover, are nothing more than lymph

coagulated into a membranous point or tube — a simple intestinal canal — do not go beyond this

immediate transformation. The mediated digestive process in the higher organisations of animal life

is, in respect of its characteristic product, just such a superfluity as, in the plant, the generation of

seeds mediated by "sexual difference." The faeces often show, especially in children, in whom

after all the increase of material is most apparent, the greatest part of the food unchanged, mixed

mainly with animal substances, bile, phosphorus, and the like, and the primary action of the

organism to be to overcome and to eliminate its own products.

The syllogism of the organism is not, therefore, the syllogism of external purposiveness, for it does

not stop at directing its activity and form against the outer subject but makes this process, which

because of its externality is on the verge of becoming mechanical and chemical, into an object itself

And since it is nature, in the uniting of itself with itself in its outward process, it is no less a

disjunctive activity, which rids itself of this process, abstracts itself away from its anger towards the

object, from this one-sided subjectivity, and thereby becomes for itself what it is in itself: the

identity of its concept and its reality. Thus the end and the product of its activity are found to be

that which it already is originally and at the beginning. In this way the satisfaction accords with

reason: the process outward into external differentiation is converted into the process of the

organism with itself and the result is not the mere production of a means, but of the end.

§ 288.

Through the process with external nature the animal achieves self-certainty and its subjective

concept, truth and objectivity as a single individual. And it is the production of itself just as much

as its self-preservation, or reproduction as production of its first concept. Thus the concept joins

together with itself and is, as concrete generality, genus. The disjunction of the individual finding

itself in the genus is the sexual difference, the relation of the subject to an object which is itself such

a subject.

§ 289.

This relation is the drive: the individual as such is not adequate to its genus, nor does this adequacy

fall into an external reflection. The individual is at the same time, in this limitation of the genus, the

identical relation of the genus to itself in one unity. The individual thus has the feeling of this lack

and exists in the natural difference of the sexes.

§ 290.

(3) The process of genus formation has, as in the inorganic process of chemism, taken the general

concept as the essence of individuals to a general extreme. The tension between the individual and

the inadequacy of its single actuality drives each to have its self-feeling only in the other of its

genus, and to integrate itself through union with the other. Through this mediation the concrete

generality joins together with itself and yields individual reality.

§ 291.

This product is the negative identity of the differentiated individuals and is, as realised genus, an

asexual life. But on the side of nature the product is only implicitly this genus and distinct from the

individuals which have perished in it. It is thus itself an individual which has in itself the

determination of the same difference and transiency. But at the same time, in this new life in which

individuality is suspended, the same subjectivity is retained positively and in this, its return into itself

the genus as such has emerged for itself in reality, and has become a higher being than nature.

§ 292.

Underlying the various orders and structures of the animals lies the general type of the animal

determined by the concept, which nature manifests partly in the different steps of its development

from the simplest organisation to the most complete, in which it is the instrument of the spirit, and

partly in the different circumstances and conditions of elementary nature.

The concept of the animal has the concept itself as its essence, because it is the actuality of the

idea of life. The nature of its generality enables it to have a simpler and more developed existence

which corresponds more or less to it. Thus the concept in its determinacy can not be grasped from

existence itself. The classes, in which it emerges developed and manifested completely in its

moments, appear as a particular existence in contrast to the others, and can also have a bad

existence in them. The concept is already presupposed for the judgment of whether the existence

is bad. If, as usual, existence is presupposed, then it will undoubtedly be used in an empirical way

to reach no fixed determination, and all particular attributes will also seem to be lacking.

Acephalous animals, for example, have been used as proof that people can live without brains.

Zoology, like the natural sciences generally, has concerned itself primarily with discovering more