Cosmos, Vol. 4

Structure of the elevated masses (continents and islands); the general, outermost, gaseous envelope (the atmosphere). The second or organic region encompasses not the individual life forms themselves, as in a descriptive study of nature, but rather their spatial relationships to the solid and liquid parts of the Earth's surface—the geography of plants and animals, and the gradations of the specifically unified human race according to races and tribes.

Even this division into two regions belongs, in a sense, to antiquity. Even then, a distinction was made between elementary processes—the change of forms and the transition of substances into one another—and the life of plants and animals. The difference between these two organisms, given the almost¹ total lack of means to enhance eyesight A reference to the lack of microscopes in the ancient world, was based only on suggestive intuition and on the dogma of self-nourishment (Aristotle, On the Soul original: "de Anima" II, 1 Vol. I. p. 412, a 14 Bekker) and the internal impulse for movement. That kind of intellectual perception, which I called intuition, and even more so the sharpness of fruitful association of ideas peculiar to the Stagirite A common nickname for Aristotle, who was born in Stagira, led him even to the apparent transitions from the inanimate to the animate, from the elementary to the plant; indeed, to the view that in the ever-higher forming processes of development, there are gradual intermediate stages from plants to the lower animals (Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals original: "de part. Animal." IV, 5 p. 681, a 12 and History of Animals original: "hist. Animal." VIII, 1 p. 588, a 4 Bekker). The history of organisms (taking the word history in its original sense, thus in relation to earlier epochs of time, to those of ancient flora and fauna) is so intimately connected with geology, with the