(_β_) We must add that when we stated the soul is the totality of the notion regarded as the subjective and ideal unity, the body on the other hand, as distinguished by its members, is the same totality but rather in its material aspect as the juxtaposition and sensuous accretion of all the several parts, affirming at the same time that both soul and body are posited as _one_ in the living organism, there is no doubt something contradictory in the statement. For the ideal unity, so far from being this material juxtaposition of parts, in which each particularity possesses its independent consistency and exclusive character, is rather in direct antithesis to such external reality. That what is diametrically opposed should nevertheless be identical is obviously a contradiction in terms. The man, however, who declares the non-existence of anything from the fact that it carries in our notion of it a contradiction which implies the identity of opposed antitheses, simply excludes Life itself from the idea of existence. For the force of Life and still more the power of Spirit (mind) consists in this very movement, namely, to assert the law of contradiction inherent within them, to bear the burden thereof and to overcome it. This affirmation and resolution of the contradiction which obtains between the ideal unity and material juxtaposition of the members, constitutes the appointed _process_ of life itself. And Life is simply _process._ And this process of life includes an activity which has two distinct functions. On the one hand it has continually to affirm the material existence of the physical distinctions[210] among the members of the organism thus determined; on the other, just in proportion as such distinctions grow obdurate in their independent particularity, and tend to remain fixed in absolute separation from each other, it has to make good once more that universal ideality, which is the principle of their life. This is the idealism of Life's process. Philosophy is not the only idealism; far from it. Nature herself in her domain of actuality creates in the life-process just that which the philosophy of idealism completes in the world of contemplative thought. Only where we have these two aspects of one activity, that is, the constant realization of the corporeal definition of the organism no less than the synthetic affirmation of such material presentment in the ideal unity, which it is as one with the notion[211], then and only then we have the completed process of Life, whose more primitive forms[212], however, this is not the place to discuss. Through this unity of Life's energy in both its branches all the members of the organism are up held in their integrity, and continually flushed anew with the ideality of their life. This ideality is furthermore declared by the organic parts in the fundamental law of their being, that this unity of Life is not so much an accidental quality as, on the contrary, the substance of it.