of the essence of the organism-a problem which can only assume its full significance today once the metaphysical dimension in which it oscillates is properly opened up and penetrated. This is a task that we are only now just beginning to comprehend. That is why we shall not for a moment exaggerate the significance of the interpretation of the essence of the organism provided here with respect to the captivation of the animal, above all because it is still incomplete. This interpretation is not incomplete in some external respect, but rather from a perspective which brings us once again before the decisive problem in determining the essence of life. For the sake of providing a complete orientation to the problem I shall briefly indicate the issue. All life is not simply organism but is just as essentially process, thus formally speaking motion. But in what sense? As a sequence of unfolding events? Not at all, although it is always possible to treat the processes of life in this way. Even in our everyday experience we are familiar with the birth, growth, maturing, aging, and death of animals. But all this reveals to us a motility of a peculiar kind, for here the organism as we now understand it does not simply happen to get caught up as it were in this motility. Rather, this motility determines the being of the animal as such. And that means that the drivenness of the instinctual drives, the driving of instinctual drives in the totality of captivation, the animal's struggle with its encirclement-that all this motility belongs to captivation. Captivation is not a static condition, not a structure in the sense of a rigid framework inserted within the animal, but rather an intrinsically determinate motility which continually unfolds or atrophies as the case may be. Captivation is at the same time motility, and this belongs to the essence of the organism.
Apart from the phenomena like birth, growth, and aging already mentioned, we have only to consider the fundamental fact of genetic inheritance in order to have some intimation of the rich abundance of problems that now begin to impose themselves around the question concerning the essence of the organism. Birth, maturing, aging, and death all too obviously remind us of the being of man, which we recognize as being historical. In view of these phenomena of the life process we have mentioned, some have even attempted to talk about organisms as historical beings (Boveri).5 What kind of history do we find in the life process of the particular individual animal? What kind of history does the animal kind, the species, possess? The species is by no means simply a logical schema under which the actual and possible particular individuals are subsumed. The species-character is rather an essential character of the being of living things, and one that precisely finds expression in what we have come to know as the fundamental structure of animality: captivation, the animal's
5. T. Boveri, Die Organismen als historische Wesen (Würzburg, 1906).