What, then, is the nature of the process which we call Life? Is it adequately or definitely defined as 'a continuous adjustment of internal to external relations'? Or is it a good deal more than anything the word 'correspondence' implies? According to Hegel it is nothing so simple, but a syllogism with three terms, and a syllogism moreover which permutates its terms and premisses. There is, in the first place, the term, which is also a process, of self-production. The living must articulate itself, create for itself limbs and members, and keep up a perpetual re-creation of morphological and structural system of parts. Secondly, there is the assimilation of what is external to the living individual. If there is to be life, spiritual or bodily, there must be a physiological intus-susception of foreign elements. Without this the first term or process is impossible. Thirdly, there must be a term or process of Reproduction or generation by which the living being passes itself on as a new unit. All life, mental or bodily, involves Reproduction.—These are the three terms of the process of vitality.
But such a life, considered as merely organic, the life studied in Biology, is only a fragment. The truer life is in the genus, not in the individual: the consciousness, the sensation which inwardly unifies the diversity of organic processes. The universal has become the medium in which the Idea exists: it exists no longer in immediacy. The mere natural life gives place to the life of the Spirit. The life of the Spirit has the double form of Cognition and Will:—the theoretical and the practical action of the Idea: or Truth and Goodness. In short, the Idea divides into two halves, which yet remain the same at bottom: Reason and the World: but yet there is reason in the world. The action of the Idea, or its process at this stage, is to bring these two terms into connexion, and show their ideal unity. Beginning with Reason, it goes on to discover reason in the World. Truth consists in the adequacy of object to notion. Such adequacy is the Idea: and an object which thus corresponds with its notion is an ideal object. The ideal man is the True Man. Truth is the revelation of rationality from the objective world: and Cognition is the name for that process. On the other hand, Goodness is the realisation of rationality in the objective world: and the Will is the name for that process. Truth proceeds from the Objectivity: Goodness from the Subjectivity. But truth can only proceed (analytically) from the objective world, in so far as it is produced (synthetically) by the subjectivity. And, on the other hand, when the good is realised in objectivity, it is submitted to the process of Cognition.
With the unity of Life and Consciousness, the Absolute Idea, we reach the supreme effort of Logic. In Bacon's words, 'the truth of being and the truth of knowing is all one' (cf. p. 224). That is the absolute condition of comprehending reality: the principle of Absolute Idealism, so far apart from its psychological wraith, and yet compelled to employ the same language. But after all it is Logic, i. e., only the supreme logical condition of the reality of the physical and psychical world. And it gains reality at the cost of the disruption of its elements: it lets the Is slip from the Is known—the est from the cogitatur—Being from consciousness. Or, in less mysterious language, fundamental philosophy, or Logic, gives place to the concreter system of Philosophy—the Philosophy of the Outward and of the Inward actuality,—of Nature and Mind.
The reader of the Divina Commedia may hardly need to be reminded that, at each of the grander changes of scene and grade in his pilgrimage, Dante suddenly finds himself without obvious means transported into a new region of experience. There are catastrophes in the process of development: not unprepared, but summing up, as in a flash of insight, the gradual and unperceived process of growth. There is birth and death in the spiritual world: and such are moments of sudden lapse, abrupt conversion, when the waters of Lethe close around, and thereafter all things are new. There are such moments of accumulated and abnormal intensity also in the Hegelian philosophy when a new cycle of idea suddenly appears. Such are the epochs of change at the great crises from Being to Essence, and from Essence to Notion. There is a revulsion, a sharp turn of the path which dialectic can enforce but cannot smooth away,—on that path which dialectic indeed, as opposed to the old logic of identity, shows not to be a mere smooth continuity. All development is by breaks, and yet makes for continuity.
This is again exemplified in the passage from Logic to Physics. The reality which presents itself to the philosopher as Nature is a world of reason—but, as it stands, it only lives as some speechless work of art. It is, so to speak, the picture on the wall—the reflection that is cast by the fuller reality of experience. Reason here is in the garb of sense-perception. Nature is the silent image—the tableau vivant—which becomes intelligent, speaking, and real, in the observing and comprehending mind. It is the statue of Condillac, not yet invested with the minimum of sensibility and consciousness. Nature is or shows all that the Idea contained, but contained only in possibility, as a logical condition of reality. It shows it in reality—and that is a reality spread through endless times and spaces. Its unity, its meaning, its continuity are broken up into fragments. Yet as Nature, i. e. in its structural unity, and not in the dispersion of things and elements, it is all a unity of development and has a life-history written in its organism for intelligence to read and to reconstitute, on the assumption that all its accident and irregularity is but the inevitable imperfection of reality as given in parts and successions.