getable and animal Life,
which constitute the fourth and last step in these wide and comprehensive
divisions.

In the lowest forms of the vegetable and animal world we perceive totality
dawning into _individuation_, while in man, as the highest of the class,
the individuality is not only perfected in its corporeal sense, but begins
a new series beyond the appropriate limits of physiology. The tendency to
individuation, more or less obscure, more or less obvious, constitutes the
common character of all classes, as far as they maintain for themselves a
distinction from the universal life of the planet; while the degrees, both
of intensity and extension, to which this tendency is realized, form the
species, and their ranks in the great scale of ascent and expansion.

In the treatment of a subject so vast and complex, within the limits
prescribed for an essay like the present, where it is impossible not to
say either too much or too little (and too much because too little), an
author is entitled to make large claims on the candour of his judges. Many
things he must express inaccurately, not from ignorance or oversight, but
because the more precise expression would have involved the necessity of a
further explanation, and this another, even to the first elements of the
science. This is an inconvenience which presses on the analytic method, on
however large a scale it may be conducted, compared with the synthetic;
and it must bear with a tenfold weight in the present instance, where we
are not permitted to avail ourselves of its usual advantages as a
counterbalance to its inherent defects. I shall have done all that I dared
propose to myself, or that can be justly demanded of me by others, if I
have succeeded in conveying a sufficiently clear, though indistinct and
inadequate notion, so as of its many results to render intelligible that
one which I am to apply to my particular subject, not as a truth already
demonstrated, but as an hypothesis, which pretends to no higher merit than
that of explaining the particular class of phenomena to which it is
applied, and asks no other reward than a presumption in favour of the
general system of which it affirms itself to be a dependent though
integral part. By Life I everywhere mean the true Idea of Life, or that
most general form under which Life manifests itself to us, which includes
all its other forms. This I have stated to be the _tendency to
individuation_, and the degrees or int