sion, etc. In seeing, we have the highest
form of sense-perception as the perception of things in their external
independence--not as being destroyed chemically, like the objects of
taste and smell; not as being attacked and resisting, like the objects
which are known through the ear; not as mere limits to our organism, as
in the sense of touch.

Sense-perception, as the developed realization of the activity of
feeling, belongs to the animal creation, including man as an animal.

We have not yet, therefore, answered the question of capacity for
education, so far as it concerns a discrimination between man and
the brute. We have only arrived at the conclusion that the vegetable
world does not possess the capacity for education, because its
individual specimens are no complete individuals, but only transitory
phases manifesting the species by continual reproduction of
new individuals which are as incomplete as the old ones. Plant life
does not possess that self-activity which returns into itself in the
same individual--if we may so express it; it goes out of one individual
into another perpetually. Its identity is that of the _species_,
but not of the _individual_.

How is it with the animal--with the being which possesses sensibility,
or feeling? This question recurs. In feeling there is a reaction,
just as in the plant. This reaction is, however, in an ideal
form--the reproduction of the external without assimilation of it--and
especially is this the case in the sense of _sight_, though it is true
of all forms of sensation to a less degree.

But all forms of sensibility are limited and special; they refer only
to the _present_, in its forms of _here_ and _now_. The animal cannot feel
what is not here and now. Even seeing is limited to what is present
before it. When we reflect upon the significance of this limitation
of sense-perception, we shall find that we need some higher form of
self-activity still before we can realize the species in the individual,
_i.e._, before we can obtain the true individual--the permanent
individuality.

The defect in plant life was, that there was neither identity of
individuality in space nor identify in time. The growth of the
plant destroyed the individuality of the seed with which we began,
so that it was evanescent in time; it served only as the starting-point
for new individualities, which likewise, in turn, served again the same
purpose; and so its growth in space was a depart