The votaries of common sense make the same mistake as philosophers do, but they make it in another way.  Philosophers try to make the language of common sense serve for purposes of philosophy, forgetting that they are in another world, in which another tongue is current; common sense people, on the other hand, every now and then attempt to deal with matters alien to the routine of daily life.  The boundaries between the two kingdoms being very badly defined, it is only by giving them a wide berth and being so philosophical as almost to deny that there is any either life or death at all, or else so full of common sense as to refuse to see one part of the body as less living than another, that we can hope to steer clear of doubt, inconsistency, and contradiction in terms in almost every other word we utter.  We cannot serve the God of philosophy and the Mammon of common sense at one and the same time, and yet it would almost seem as though the making the best that can be made of both these worlds were the whole duty of organism.

It is easy to understand how the error of philosophers arose, for, slaves of habit as we all are, we are more especially slaves when the habit is one that has not been found troublesome.  There is no denying that it saves trouble to have things either one thing or the other, and indeed for all the common purposes of life if a thing is either alive or dead the small supplementary residue of the opposite state should be neglected as too small to be observable.  If it is good to eat we have no difficulty in knowing when it is dead enough to be eaten; if not good to eat, but valuable for its skin, we know when it is dead enough to be skinned with impunity; if it is a man, we know when he has presented enough of the phenomena of death to allow of our burying him and administering his estate; in fact, I cannot call to mind any case in which the decision of the question whether man or beast is alive or dead is frequently found to be perplexing; hence we have become so accustomed to think there can be no admixture of the two states, that we have found it almost impossible to avoid carrying this crude view of life and death into domains of thought in which it has no application.  There can be no doubt that when accuracy is required we should see life and death not as fundamentally opposed, but as supplementary to one another, without either’s being ever able to exclude the other altogether; thus we should indeed see some things as more living than others, but we should see nothing as either unalloyedly living or unalloyedly non-living.  If a thing is living, it is so living that it has one foot in the grave already; if dead, it is dead as a thing that has already re-entered into the womb of Nature.  And within the residue of life that is in the dead there is an element of death; and within this there is an element of life, and so ad infinitum—­ again, as reflections in two mirrors that face one another.