Commentary on the Philosophy of Nature, Chapter 31
What Organics Has Survived
The borderline cases show in passing something about the durability of the determinations. Physics depended on findings that have since changed; organics depends on distinctions that can be verified on any living being. Anyone who compares a tree and a cat finds the difference at issue without an instrument — and that holds for Gaia and the viruses as well, except that there intuition must first pass through the test.
It is due to intuitability, not to biology: Where a determination can be shown on the object itself, it ages more slowly than one that depends on a theory. Two places test this in what follows — the one on Hegel’s greatest conflict with later science, the other on his own criterion.