72 LETTERS TO BROTHER JOHN. 



One of the few attributes I shall mention, as 

 peculiar to organized matter, is DEATH. 



Death " the dunnest of all duns," death, 



" Sole creditor, whose process doth involve in 't 

 The luck of finding every body solvent," 



has been so often personified, indeed, as something 

 horrible as some " gaunt gourmand, " who is by 

 every means to be eschewed that we are apt to 

 contemplate it as though it were a real entity a 

 sort of " raw-head-and-bloody-bones," whose chief 

 amusement consists in stopping folks' breath. But 

 I need not tell you, that all this is mere rhetorical 

 delusion one of the poet's " fine phrensies." Death 

 is a sheer abstraction the mere cessation of life. 

 As the cessation of sound is called silence as the 

 cessation of motion is called rest so the cessation of 

 life is called death. Death, therefore, being only 

 the abstraction of life, it is manifest that things 

 which never lived can never die. 



Another condition peculiar and necessary to all 

 matter intended to life is, organism the consum- 

 mated result of organization. Organism, in the 

 common sense, is that state of existence in which 

 the elements composing the germs of matter in- 

 tended to live are held together by a property 

 which may be called " vital affinity," or " the affinity 



