As with the non-living so also with the living.  Are we to let it pass beyond the limits of the body, and allow a certain temporary overflow of livingness to ordain as it were machines in use?  Then death will fare, if we once let life without the body, as life fares if we once let death within it.  It becomes swallowed up in life, just as in the other case life was swallowed up in death.  Are we to confine it to the body?  If so, to the whole body, or to parts?  And if to parts, to what parts, and why?  The only way out of the difficulty is to rehabilitate contradiction in terms, and say that everything is both alive and dead at one and the same time—­some things being much living and little dead, and others, again, much dead and little living.  Having done this we have only got to settle what a thing is—­when a thing is a thing pure and simple, and when it is only a congeries of things—­and we shall doubtless then live very happily and very philosophically ever afterwards.

But here another difficulty faces us.  Common sense does indeed know what is meant by a “thing” or “an individual,” but philosophy cannot settle either of these two points.  Professor Mivart made the question “What are Living Beings?” the subject of an article in one of our leading magazines only a very few years ago.  He asked, but he did not answer.  And so Professor Moseley was reported (Times, January 16, 1885) as having said that it was “almost impossible” to say what an individual was.  Surely if it is only “almost” impossible for philosophy to determine this, Professor Moseley should have at any rate tried to do it; if, however, he had tried and failed, which from my own experience I should think most likely, he might have spared his “almost.”  “Almost” is a very dangerous word.  I once heard a man say that an escape he had had from drowning was “almost” providential.  The difficulty about defining an individual arises from the fact that we may look at “almost” everything from two different points of view.  If we are in a common-sense humour for simplifying things, treating them broadly, and emphasizing resemblances rather than differences, we can find excellent reasons for ignoring recognised lines of demarcation, calling everything by a new name, and unifying up till we have united the two most distant stars in heaven as meeting and being linked together in the eyes and souls of men; if we are in this humour individuality after individuality disappears, and ere long, if we are consistent, nothing will remain but one universal whole, one true and only atom from which alone nothing can be cut off and thrown away on to something else; if, on the other hand, we are in a subtle philosophically accurate humour for straining at gnats and emphasizing differences rather than resemblances, we can draw distinctions, and give reasons for subdividing and subdividing, till, unless we violate what we choose to call our consistency somewhere, we shall find ourselves