In brief, there is nothing in life of which there are not germs, and, so to speak, harmonics in death, and nothing in death of which germs and harmonics may not be found in life.  Each emphasizes what the other passes over most lightly—­each carries to its extreme conceivable development that which in the other is only sketched in by a faint suggestion—­but neither has any feature rigorously special to itself.  Granted that death is a greater new departure in an organism’s life, than any since that congeries of births and deaths to which the name embryonic stages is commonly given, still it is a new departure of the same essential character as any other—­ that is to say, though there be much new there is much, not to say more, old along with it.  We shrink from it as from any other change to the unknown, and also perhaps from an instinctive sense that the fear of death is a sine qua non for physical and moral progress, but the fear is like all else in life, a substantial thing which, if its foundations be dug about, is found to rest on a superstitious basis.

Where, and on what principle, are the dividing lines between living and non-living to be drawn?  All attempts to draw them hitherto have ended in deadlock and disaster; of this M. Vianna De Lima, in his “Expose Sommaire des Theories transformistes de Lamarck, Darwin, et Haeckel,” {150a} says that all attempts to trace une ligne de demarcation nette et profonde entre la matiere vivante et la matiere inerte have broken down. {150b} Il y a un reste de vie dans le cadavre, says Diderot, {150c} speaking of the more gradual decay of the body after an easy natural death, than after a sudden and violent one; and so Buffon begins his first volume by saying that “we can descend, by almost imperceptible degrees, from the most perfect creature to the most formless matter—­from the most highly organised matter to the most entirely inorganic substance.” {150d}

Is the line to be so drawn as to admit any of the non-living within the body?  If we answer “yes,” then, as we have seen, moiety after moiety is filched from us, till we find ourselves left face to face with a tenuous quasi immaterial vital principle or soul as animating an alien body, with which it not only has no essential underlying community of substance, but with which it has no conceivable point in common to render a union between the two possible, or give the one a grip of any kind over the other; in fact, the doctrine of disembodied spirits, so instinctively rejected by all who need be listened to, comes back as it would seem, with a scientific imprimatur; if, on the other hand, we exclude the non-living from the body, then what are we to do with nails that want cutting, dying skin, or hair that is ready to fall off?  Are they less living than brain?  Answer “yes,” and degrees are admitted, which we have already seen prove fatal; answer “no,” and we must deny that one part of the body is more vital than another—­and this is refusing to go as far even as common sense does; answer that these things are not very important, and we quit the ground of equity and high philosophy on which we have given ourselves such airs, and go back to common sense as unjust judges that will hear those widows only who importune us.