All change is pro tanto death or pro tanto birth.  Change is the common substratum which underlies both life and death; life and death are not two distinct things absolutely antagonistic to one another; in the highest life there is still much death, and in the most complete death there is still not a little life.  La vie, says Claud Bernard, {73a} c’est la mort:  he might have added, and perhaps did, et la mort ce n’est que la vie transformee.  Life and death are the extreme modes of something which is partly both and wholly neither; this something is common, ordinary change; solve any change and the mystery of life and death will be revealed; show why and how anything becomes ever anything other in any respect than what it is at any given moment, and there will be little secret left in any other change.  One is not in its ultimate essence more miraculous that another; it may be more striking—­a greater congeries of shocks, it may be more credible or more incredible, but not more miraculous; all change is qua us absolutely incomprehensible and miraculous; the smallest change baffles the greatest intellect if its essence, as apart from its phenomena, be inquired into.

But however this may be, all organic change is either a growth or a dissolution, or a combination of the two.  Growth is the coming together of elements with quasi similar characteristics.  I understand it is believed to be the coming together of matter in certain states of motion with other matter in states so nearly similar that the rhythms of the one coalesce with and hence reinforce the rhythms pre-existing in the other—­making, rather than marring and undoing them.  Life and growth are an attuning, death and decay are an untuning; both involve a succession of greater or smaller attunings and untunings; organic life is “the diapason closing full in man”; it is the fulness of a tone that varies in pitch, quality, and in the harmonics to which it gives rise; it ranges through every degree of complexity from the endless combinations of life-and-death within life-and-death which we find in the mammalia, to the comparative simplicity of the amoeba.  Death, again, like life, ranges through every degree of complexity.  All pleasant changes are recreative; they are pro tanto births; all unpleasant changes are wearing, and, as such, pro tanto deaths, but we can no more exhaust either wholly of the other, than we can exhaust all the air out of a receiver; pleasure and pain lurk within one another, as life in death, and death in life, or as rest and unrest in one another.

There is no greater mystery in life than in death.  We talk as though the riddle of life only need engage us; this is not so; death is just as great a miracle as life; the one is two and two making five, the other is five splitting into two and two.  Solve either, and we have solved the other; they should be studied not apart, for they are never parted, but together, and they will tell more tales of one another than