Primarily, then, the vital force is identical with the will, but so also are all other forces of nature; though this is less apparent. If, therefore, we find the recognition of a desire, _i.e._, of a will, as the basis of _plant life_, expressed at all times, with more or less distinctness of conception, on the other hand, the reference of the forces of _unorganised_ nature to the same foundation is rarer in proportion as their remoteness from our own nature is greater. In fact, the boundary between the organised and the unorganised is the most sharply drawn in the whole of nature, and perhaps the only one that admits of no transgressions; so that _natura non facit saltus_ seems to suffer an exception here. Although certain crystallisations display an external form resembling the vegetable, yet even between the smallest lichen, the lowest fungus, and everything unorganised there remains a fundamental and essential difference. In the _unorganised_ body that which is essential and permanent, thus that upon which its identity and integrity rests, is the material, the _matter_; what is unessential and changing is, on the other hand, the _form_. With the _organised_ body the case is exactly reversed; for its life, _i.e._, its existence as an organised being, simply consists in the constant change of the _material_, while the _form_ remains permanent. Its being and its identity thus lies in the _form_ alone. Therefore the continuance of the _unorganised_ body depends upon _repose_ and exclusion from external influences: thus alone does it retain its existence; and if this condition is perfect, such a body lasts for ever. The continuance of the _organised_ body, on the contrary, just depends upon continual _movement_ and the constant reception of external influences. As soon as these are wanting and the movement in it stops it is dead, and thereby ceases to be organic, although the trace of the organism that has been still remains for a while. Therefore the talk, which is so much affected in our own day, of the life of what is unorganised, indeed of the globe itself, and that it, and also the planetary system, is an organism, is entirely inadmissible. The predicate life belongs only to what is organised. Every organism, however, is throughout organised, is so in all its parts; and nowhere are these, even in their smallest particles, composed by aggregation of what is unorganised. Thus if the earth were an organism, all mountains and rocks, and the whole interior of their mass, would necessarily be organised, and accordingly really nothing unorganised would exist; and therefore the whole conception of it would be wanting.