masculine and the feminine, contraction and expansion, and so on, then applies them to the other

Need and excitement are connected to the relation between the universal and the particular

mechanism (sleeping and waking), the relation to air (breathing and skin processes), water (thirst),

and the individualised earth, namely, the particular forms of the earth (cf. hunger, § 275). Life, the

subject of these moments of totality, develops inwardly a tension between itself as concept and the

moments of a reality external to itself and is the ongoing conflict in which it overcomes this

externality. Because the animal can only exist as an essentially individual entity, and this only

individually, this objectification is not adequate to its concept and therefore turns back constantly