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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
III. Organic Physics 26
The Philosophy of Nature
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.
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