In this alone they are able to preserve their specific character. This it is which precisely constitutes the difference between the part of a mere conglomerate and the member of an organism. The particular parts of a house, for example, the stones, windows, and so forth, remain just what they are, whether they form part of the structure of a house, or whether they do not. Their relationship to one another is quite indifferent, and the conceptual notion remains in their case a purely external form, which possesses no life in these parts raising them to the ideality of a subjective unity. The members of an organism have, it is true, an external reality, but for all that it is the notion of Life which constitutes the inward, nay, the characteristic being of such reality, a reality which is not expressed through one external form uniting them, but in the ideal coherence of their parts in one living whole. For this reason the limbs have no such reality as belongs to the stones of a building, or the planets, moon, and comets in the solar system. Their reality is one wholly within the content of the organism, and all appearance to the contrary is, as such, ideally imposed on them. Dissever the hand from the body and it loses its independent existence as a member of the organism which made it what it was. Its activity, form, and colour, all that constitutes it, is at once changed; it enters the process of corruption, and ultimately ceases to exist[213]. Consistent character it only possesses as a limb of organic life, reality only in constant reunion with that ideal unity which sustains it. And that is just the superior mode of reality which the living organism possesses in itself. The real or positive is for ever being set up as both the negation of itself and withal the ideal resumption of itself, such ideality constituting, in fact, both the maintenance and specific character of the mode under which each of the separate parts of the bodily presence are associated together. (_γ_) The reality, then, which the Idea wins for itself in the life of Nature is reality as a phenomenal process. Such an _appearance_ stated in its simplest terms is this, that a reality exists, but its potential being[214] is not immediately in its possession, rather it is at the same time negatively affirmed[215] in the particular form that belongs to it. The negation of the immediately external and particular members of a body is not only a negative relative relation as the activity of the inherent idealization[216], but is as such a positive realization[217].