ITS MEANING AND DIVISIONS. 



similation, the Form's real identification of 

 the world with itself, which only death inter- 

 rupts in the living thing. The process of 

 Assimilation is, therefore, the perennial bat- 

 tle between Life and Unlife, through which 

 battle every living individual passes with vic- 

 tory and defeat. 



Still this living individual reproduces it- 

 self not only in its own body, but in another 

 body ; it begets its like as we say. This is the 

 generative Process of Life, its highest mani- 

 festation, the supreme act of Nature. We 

 see that the living organism has to reproduce 

 not merely its own tissues, but must rise to 

 reproducing a different organism; Life the 

 very lowest has thus a side of altruism, which 

 starts far down in Nature. The microbe's 

 trend, in its simple fissiparism, is to live not 

 merely in itself, but in and for another. More- 

 over, the generative Process returns to the 

 starting-point and recreates the Form which 

 thus begins anew the round of Life. 



Manifestly in all the kinds of Life vege- 

 tal, animal, terrestrial there is the threefold 

 movement above indicated, whose stages are 

 Formation, Assimilation, Generation. Here 

 again we may discern that inner all-ordering 

 process so often noted as psychical, which 

 never fails at the nodal point to direct Na- 

 ture. Moreover, we shall find that each of 



