Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/520

HEGEL'S CONCEPTION OF NATURE. 519 are derivable from protoplasm, or it may, like Darwin, simply show how various species are all derived by a process of selection from some few great types of ancestors. There would be something to say from Hegel's point of view to both these theories alike. But in regard to the first he would have a special complaint. To show that protoplasm is the basis of all life is not to show that life begins with formless or inorganic protoplasm. Such a view would con- fuse an element in the notion of life (perhaps he might have called protoplasm the substance or the element of self-identity in organisms) with the beginning of the history of life. To trace all animals from protozoa is intelligible ; but in the protozoon the protoplasm is already an animal, and its nature can be understood or interpreted by the higher form of de- veloped animal life. 1 Some of the difficulties felt nowadays would not trouble Hegel. For instance, the impossibility of distinguishing plants and animals he would with his cool assumption have put down to the weakness of nature. He would rightly maintain that the functions of animal and vegetable life are different, and perhaps we might add for him, that even from the view of evolution the matter was of no great importance, for it is not at the summit of vegetable and the base of animal life that there is this coalescence of forms, but at the bases of both. But taking the case of animals only, he would main- tain that there was only one type of animal, the notion of which philosophy had to explain, and the forms of animal life were but stages in which the type or idea of animal was realised to greater perfection (p. 653). This would be assert- ing that the nature (the logical or metaphysical nature) of animals was different from their history or genesis. And from this point of view he could perhaps enlighten the pro- cess of natural selection and regard it as the struggle of the idea of animal life with the externality or accidentally of its realisation in nature, and this is really his account of the relation between species and genus the fundamental con- ception of zoology : the effort of the species to maintain their type appears in nature as their internecine struggle (p. 649). By such a view, the history of evolution would be maintained but with two advantages. In the first place the variations which in the doctrine of descent are so perplexing, at one time seeming required as the conditions of the selective pro- cess, at another depending for their existence on this process, 1 For the substance of this paragraph I am indebted to Dr. J. H. Stirling's admirable pamphlet As regards Protoplasm.