 Thinking about nature as Spirit, different from the human merely in degree, already presupposes a holistic conception of nature, where the whole is prior to the parts. For, if all individuals are, in Spinoza’s words “modes” of nature, namely, merely different manifestations of the one and same whole, then these parts are necessarily dependent on the whole. But insofar as nature is also an (all encompassing) organism, then just as its parts are dependent on it (for their existence and intelligibility), so it depends on its parts for its existence as the organism that it is: independently of its parts, an organism could not sustain its particular organization, i.e., its life form. In an organism, the parts are the reciprocal cause and effect of one another and of the organism as a whole.