The new idealism thus maintains the organic and even supra-organic nature of thought and being. The world of experience, when taken in its reality and fullness, is an organism which lives and knows and wills, and which is life, action, knowledge; its own means and its own end. The subject acting, living, knowing is action, knowledge, life. In the ordinary organism there is a subject of functions, a being in relation to an inorganic world. In the world-organism (if the inadequate name is still to be retained) there is no outside world, no inorganic or extra-organic thing. In the world-organism the organ and its environment is combined in one, re-united: the plant or animal is not without its place, and its place is not without plant or animal. They are not merely in correlation, but essentially and actually one. _Quid prosunt leges sine moribus?_ asks the moralist: but in the Absolute or the supra-organic Idea, law and morality are not apart: the necessity is also freedom: the law is not severed from its phenomenon. Such an organism which is life, thinking, will, is what Hegel calls the Idea: an organism which is completely organic, with no mere matter: and that Idea is the foundation of his Idealism. Conceived under its conditions, the forces which are sometimes represented as struggling with each other on the field of man's life, are no longer independent; still less completely separable forces. They are the inner division by which the spirit re-establishes and makes secure its unity: their antagonisms are the breath of life. And they have their relations in their common service, building up one life. They form a certain hierarchy of organisation; in which however the higher or more developed does not merely supervene upon the cruder, but in a way supersedes it, and yet contrives to retain its worth and its real truth.
[Footnote 1: Cf. Spinoza's remark on Body, _Eth._ III. pr. 2 Schol.: 'Etenim quod corpus possit, nemo hucusque determinavit; hoc est neminem hucusque experientia docuit quid corpus ex solis legibus naturae quatenus corporea tantum consideratur possit agere,' &c.]
[Footnote 2: See vol. ii, notes and illustrations, p. 392.]
[Footnote 3: Schopenhauers well-known description of this recurrent throwing back of the responsibility of reality on something else is here suggested ('World as Will and Idea,' § 17).]