Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/349

body experiences sensation; the soul is in it. Here we have teleological activity in its true form. But the living subject is also something thoroughly finite. The teleological activity presents here the character of something which is formally true, but which is not complete. The living being produces itself; it has the material of production in itself. Each organ excretes animal lymph which is made use of by other organs in order to reproduce themselves. The living being has the material in itself, only this is merely an abstract process. Finitude shows itself in this, that while the organs draw their nourishment from themselves they employ material for this taken from the outside. Everything organic is related to inorganic Nature, which has a definite independent existence. Regarded in one aspect, the organism is infinite since it represents a circle of pure return into self; but it is at the same time in a state of tension relatively to external inorganic Nature, and has its needs. Here the means come from the outside. Man requires air, light, water; he also feeds on other living things, on animals which he in this way reduces to the state of inorganic Nature, to means. It is this relation particularly which leads to the idea of a higher unity representing that harmony in which the means correspond to the end. This harmony is not found in the subject itself, and yet it has in it the harmony which constitutes organic life, as we have seen. The whole construction of the organs, of the nerve and blood system, of the entrails, lungs, liver, stomach, and so on, presents a remarkable agreement. But does not this harmony itself demand something else outside of the subject? We may let this question alone at present; for if we get a grip of the notion of organism such as has been given, then this development of teleological determination is itself a necessary consequence of the living nature of the subject in general. If we do not get a grip of that notion, then the living being will not be the concrete unity referred