Commentary on the Philosophy of Nature, Chapter 33
What Remains of Organics
Not the systematics of the animal classes, and not the order of the shapes. What remains is a criterion, and Hegel first turned it against himself: he tests his own stages by it and finds that the three life-processes are not equally developed in them — in the plant they coincide, in the animal they come apart (Chapter 28). That is no deficiency of the theory but its application.
The division has thereby left behind more than the two preceding it. Mechanics gave the order by increasing relatedness, physics the question how far the relation reaches into the object. Organics gives the question that makes both answerable: are the moments present, and are they distinguished from one another? On this question hangs what Chapter 29 exhibited in the borderline cases, and on it hangs too what the following part has to examine.