III. 

 Death. 



THIS makes no pretension of being an elaborately thought-out 

 essay on " Death." It is the result of an attempt to clear up my 

 own ideas on a subject which, when vitalistic conceptions are 

 spreading so rapidly among biologists, seems to be a last outpost of 

 the other school, and yet an outpost which may be the centre of its 

 victory. 



I propose to offer no historical introduction ; for just as nothing 

 so entirely unfits one to understand current political problems 

 as what is called the study of history, so, however interesting to the 

 curious, the past history of any scientific controversy is the most 

 misleading of all guides to its subsequent development. 



In biology, as in morals, simplicity of term invariably covers 

 confusion of idea. The apparent opposites life and death, like the 

 apparent opposites right and wrong, extend as a vast tangle of 

 intermeshing ideas. As out of a naive acceptance of right and 

 wrong as simple ideas come the cruel follies of the conscientious, 

 so out of a naive acceptance ^of the simple words life and death 

 as corresponding to simple facts comes the grotesque abstraction — 

 vitalism. 



There are three ways in which an organism may come to an end. 

 By some gross accident of life, as when one cleans an amoeba off a 

 slide with a duster, or oneself trifles with nitro-glycerine, an organism 

 may be swept out of existence. Or, and specially in the case of the 

 higher organisms, some alteration in the machinery, some slight 

 defect in the mechanism, may interfere fatally with the whole. Or, 

 lastly, the wrought iron itself may slowly oxidise, or by constant 

 vibration become crystalline, the cells and protoplasm of the living 

 organism may decay. Of course, the divisions of this classification, 

 like those of all classifications that do not deal with beans or 

 buttons, or the subject matter of metaphysics, are not mutually 

 exclusive. They represent only the point of view for the moment 

 convenient to the classifier. 



With the first mode of death, though it probably enormously 

 preponderates in the animal world — so enormously as to make it 

 doubtful whether natural selection can have anything to do with 

 fixing the term of natural life — we have at present little to do. 



