ELEMENTS OF ORIGINALITY 167 



ter — absolutely forbid any general, loose assumptions 

 that, at death, the Z-system (the intraatomic 

 quantity "life") might be "absorbed" by the matter, 

 or added to the configurations of the atoms, of the 

 Y-system. Death, then, can only mean the loss of 

 a quantity, the dislocation, or severance, of the 

 Z-system (life, the soul) from the Y-system (matter, 

 the body) of the organism. 



That no other definition of death than this is 

 even remotely possible to the theory, is plain. And — 

 of paramount importance — no other conception of 

 death than this answers to all the facts of observa- 

 tion. For, observing that after the death of an 

 organism inevitably the body disintegrates, it ap- 

 pears that the phenomena caused in the body by 

 death are in full harmony with the finding that the 

 living state of the organism is determined by its 

 Z-system, and that death is the separation of that 

 system from the matter, the Y-system. And only 

 on the theory that life is the intraatomic Z-system 

 of the organism, which determines the living state of 

 the organism, and which is separated from the 

 body at death (death being the separation) — sep- 

 arated, in the highest organisms at least, as a unit 

 system — can one understand how it happens that, 

 as Jacques Loeb said, "as soon as respiration has 

 ceased only a few minutes the human body is dead. 



