THE FORMULA APPLIED TO THE LOWER ANIMALS. 23 1 



§ 14. But when we go still lower, the lines of 

 demarcation between one individual and another 

 seem to grow faint, and perplexities beset us. Is 

 each segment of a tapeworm an individual, and 

 which is the original individual when a jelly-hsh is 

 cut up into equal pieces, each of which develops 

 into a perfect animal ? Shall we say that each leaf 

 of a tree is an individual, or confine that term to 

 the whole tree ? And if each leaf is a true individ- 

 ual, why not each cell ? And if it is not, what 

 shall we say of cuttings and leaves, each of which 

 is able to develop into a perfect tree ? What, again, 

 of the colonies of zoophytes ? Are they one or 

 many ? Is a coral reef one animal or a multitude ? 

 Shall we regard rather the individual polypes or 

 their common organization ? 



The only answer, perhaps, which it is possible to 

 give is that we have sunk too low to find anything 

 exactly corresponding to our conception of individ- 

 uality. We receive here the first hint that individ- 

 Iuality is an ideal, to which the reality only imper- 

 fectly attains, a category of our thought, to which 

 even the highest developments of reality only ap- 

 Iproximate. But nevertheless we can trace the 

 working of the ideal even in the lowest forms of 

 the real ; with the appropriate modifications the 

 unity of the same design runs through the whole. 



As we trace it downwards, the formula is trans- 

 brmed but not destroyed : it persists in a lower 

 brm. 



The social bond which connected physically dis- 



rete individuals was spiritual, and can no longer be 



raced as such : but it now takes the lower and grosser 



brm of physical connection. A coral reef is a society 



in which the union of the individual members is no 



