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substances as the conditions and the activity remain externally in opposition to each other, and lack living,
absolute unity.
§ 285.
In the first place, because the living organism is the general power over the nature external and opposed to it,
assimilation is the immediate fusion of the ingested material with animality, an infection by the latter and
simple transformation (cf. § 278). Secondly, since the power of the living organism is the relation of itself to
itself in mediation, assimilation is digestion. It is the opposition of the subject to its immediate assimilation,
so that the former stimulates itself on the other hand as a negative, and emerges as the process of the
antithesis, the process of animal water (of stomach and pancreatic juices, animal lymph as such) and of
animal fire (of the gall, in which the accomplished return of the organism into itself from its concentration in
the spleen is determined as being for itself as active consumption).
§ 286.
This animal stimulation is turned at first against the external potency, which, however, is placed immediately
on the side of the organism by the infection (§ 277). But this stimulus, as the antithesis and the being for itself
of the process, has at the same time the determination of externality over against the generality and simple
self-relation of the living organism. Both aspects together, initially appearing on the side of the subject as
means, actually constitute therefore the object and the negative side in conflict with the organism, which has
to overcome and to digest.
§ 287.
III. Organic Physics 29
The Philosophy of Nature
This inversion of attitude is the reflection of the organism into itself the negation of its own negativity of
outwardly directed activity. As a natural being it combines the individuality which it reaches in the process
with its generality as disjunctive, in such a way that on the one hand it separates from itself the first negation,
the externality of the object and its own activity, on the other hand, and as immediately identical with this
negation, with this means reproduces itself Thus the outward moving process is transformed and transposed
into the first formal processes of reproduction from its own self.
The primary moment in digestion is the immediate action of life as the power over the inorganic object,
which it sets against itself and presupposes as its stimulating attraction only insofar as it is itself identical
with it. This action is infection and immediate transformation. It has been empirically demonstrated and
shown to accord with the concept, by the experiments of Spallanzani and others and by recent physiology,
that this immediacy, which the living organism has as a generality, continues itself into its food without any
further mediation, by its mere contact with it and simply by taking it up into its own warmth and sphere. This
is a refutation of both the theory of a mechanical, fictitious sorting out and separating of parts already
homogeneous and useful, and the theory of mediation conceived as a chemical process. But the investigations
of the mediating actions have not found more specific moments in this transformation (as appears, for
example, in vegetable substances as a series of fermentations). On the contrary, they have shown for example
that a great deal of food moves straight from the stomach into the mass of gastric juices, without passing
through other mediating stages, that the pancreatic juice is further nothing more than saliva, that the pancreas
could quite as well be dispensed with, and so on.
The last product, the chyle, which the thoracic duct takes up and which is discharged into the blood, is the
same lymph which is secreted by each intestine and organ, effects the skin and lymphatic system in the
immediate process of transformation, and is everywhere found already prepared. The lower organisms of
animal life, which, moreover, are nothing more than lymph coagulated into a membranous point or tube -- a
simple intestinal canal -- do not go beyond this immediate transformation. The mediated digestive process in
the higher organisations of animal life is, in respect of its characteristic product, just such a superfluity as, in
the plant, the generation of seeds mediated by "sexual difference." The faeces often show, especially in
children, in whom after all the increase of material is most apparent, the greatest part of the food unchanged,
mixed mainly with animal substances, bile, phosphorus, and the like, and the primary action of the organism
to be to overcome and to eliminate its own products.
The syllogism of the organism is not, therefore, the syllogism of external purposiveness, for it does not stop
at directing its activity and form against the outer subject but makes this process, which because of its
externality is on the verge of becoming mechanical and chemical, into an object itself And since it is nature,
in the uniting of itself with itself in its outward process, it is no less a disjunctive activity, which rids itself of
this process, abstracts itself away from its anger towards the object, from this one-sided subjectivity, and
thereby becomes for itself what it is in itself: the identity of its concept and its reality. Thus the end and the
product of its activity are found to be that which it already is originally and at the beginning. In this way the
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