y's definition) a portion of
the shell fish, crabs, and finally a vertebrate animal, the lancelet
(amphioxus) and all plants.

When Herr Duehring therefore undertakes to distinguish life narrowly
and strictly, he gives four mutually contradictory modes of
distinguishing life, one of which condemns not only the whole of plant
life but about half the animal kingdom to eternal death. No one can
accuse him of having deceived us when he promised us peculiar results
based on individual ideas.

In another place he says "There is a simple fundamental type in nature
belonging to all organisms from the lowest to the highest" and this
type is to be met "in the subordinate movements of the most
undeveloped plants." This is again an absolutely false statement. The
simplest type in the whole of organic nature is the cell, and it lies
universally at the foundation of the highest organisms. On the other
hand there is a substance among the lowest organisms lower even than
the cell, the protomoeba, a single piece of undifferentiated
protoplasm, without any differentiation, a complete series of monads
and the entire class of siphoneae. All of these are connected with the
higher organisms only by virtue of the fact that protoplasm is its
substantial foundation, and that they fulfill the functions of
protoplasm, that is they live and die.

Further Herr Duehring tells us "physiologically the concept of
existence consists in this, that it embraces a single nerve apparatus.
Sensation is therefore the characteristic of all animal organisms that
is the capacity of conscious subjective recognition of circumstances.
The sharp line of differentiation between plants and animals consists
in the leap to sensation. This distinguishing line cannot any more be
abolished by known forms of transition than it can be brought into
existence by the logical necessity of externally distinguishable
characteristics." And further "Plants are totally and eternally
without sensation and are devoid of the faculty for it."

In the first place Hegel says that "sensation is the specific
differentiation, the distinguishing mark of the animal." Thus one of
Hegel's erudite statements becomes an indubitable truth of the last
instance merely by being copied into Herr Duehring's book.

In the second place we now arrive for the first time at the forms of
transition between animals and plants. That these intermediate forms
exist, that there are organisms concerning which w