Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/506

 HEGEL'S CONCEPTION OF NATURE. 505 up all its parts or differences under its own control. In the organism we have no longer a mere relation between bodies, rising at times to a furtively ideal character, but a negative unity which maintains itself by existing in different parts. Such a unity is Life. But as vegetable life (p. 470) it is still simple and immediate, not yet fully expressed, and it there- fore returns to its old form of self-externality : its members are a repetition of itself, it is composed of buds and branches, each of which is the whole plant ; it is rather the soil in which many individuals grow than a single organised subject. Its parts are not really different, but, according to Goethe's famous theory of metamorphosis, they pass into one another. It never gathers itself together for the collective act of feeling. But, in the animal, life exists not merely potentially as subjective, but really ; the external form is so idealised as to become limbs or members of a whole, and the organism in its process towards without retains its own individual unity (p. 549) : it lives by reaction and by assimilation. Its voice, its motion, its warmth are evidences of the freedom of total life to which all its members contribute. And in its feeling it reaches the highest expression of self-contained unity which Nature can hope to attain. In a philosophy of organic life you would expect to begin with life ; and though this part of Hegel's Philosophy of Nature is perhaps the most valuable, yet it is one of the most puzzling things in the whole work to find him speaking of the Earth geologically considered as the first form of life, in which subjectivity is identical with the outward organism. The Earth is a system of geological members, the corpse of the life-process by which they were engendered ; but though itself the source of all life, its own life is extinguished and is a thing of the past (p. 430). Before we proceed to some minuter examples of Hegel's method let us note that these divisions of the philosophy of nature correspond to the divisions of Logic and Psychology. The three parts of Logic are the Idea as immediate or Being, the Idea as in relation or Essence, the Idea as returned into itself or Notion. Correspondingly, Mechanics is Nature as it exists immediately, then and there, in Being ; Physics is Nature in relation, separate bodies or characters in con- nexion ; Organics is Nature in notional unity. In like manner the science of Spirit treats first of man as natural (Anthropology and Psychology) ; secondly, of man under relations of law and necessity, which for him are the expres- sion of a world of freedom (Objective Spirit or Morality) ; 34