278 THE BIOCOSMOS PARTICULARIZED. 



as distinct from Unlife. Still we have to 

 think what Life with its various shapes is as 

 a stage of total Nature, and formulate it just 

 in its evolutionary aspect, which indeed man- 

 ifests the lurking Psyche in the Physis, 

 whereof much has been already said. 



At present, however, we are to set forth 

 the basic process of Animal-life, which pro- 

 cess will also be seen to be psychical in its 

 primordial source. This process will have 

 the three stages which we have already no- 

 ticed as forming the round of every living in- 

 dividual Formation, Assimilation, Genera- 

 tion. Life has inherently this triple move- 

 ment, be it vegetal, animal or telluric. As a 

 living thing the individual has Form, and 

 keeps forming itself after one and the same 

 general pattern; but in order to form itself 

 and thus retain its Form, it must also have 

 Assimilation, which appropriates and makes 

 like to itself the external and unlike. But 

 this external world with which it grapples 

 in Assimilation, is far vaster and stronger 

 than it is, and will in time assimilate it the 

 other way to Unlife unless it can reproduce 

 itself in a wholly new individual, yet of its 

 own kind its offspring. Generation thus 

 rises to reproducing not merely the sin- 

 gle individual within its own organism, but 

 a line of successive individuals through time, 



