Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 3.djvu/52

36 of a desire, i.e., of a will, as the basis of plant life, expressed at all times, with more or less distinctness of conception, on the other hand, the reference of the forces of unorganised nature to the same foundation is rarer in proportion as their remoteness from our own nature is greater. In fact, the boundary between the organised and the unorganised is the most sharply drawn in the whole of nature, and perhaps the only one that admits of no transgressions; so that natura non facit saltus seems to suffer an exception here. Although certain crystallisations display an external form resembling the vegetable, yet even between the smallest lichen, the lowest fungus, and everything unorganised there remains a fundamental and essential difference. In the unorganised body that which is essential and permanent, thus that upon which its identity and integrity rests, is the material, the matter; what is unessential and changing is, on the other hand, the form. With the organised body the case is exactly reversed; for its life, i.e., its existence as an organised being, simply consists in the constant change of the material, while the form remains permanent. Its being and its identity thus lies in the form alone. Therefore the continuance of the unorganised body depends upon repose and exclusion from external influences: thus alone does it retain its existence; and if this condition is perfect, such a body lasts for ever. The continuance of the organised body, on the contrary, just depends upon continual movement and the constant reception of external influences. As soon as these are wanting and the movement in it stops it is dead, and thereby ceases to be organic, although the trace of the organism that has been still remains for a while. Therefore the talk, which is so much affected in our own day, of the life of what is unorganised, indeed of the globe itself, and that it, and also the planetary system, is an organism, is entirely inadmissible. The predicate life belongs only to what is organised. Every organism,