V 



DEATH 



Life and death — Individual death — Immortality of the uni- 

 cellulars — Death of the protists and tissue-organisms — 

 Causes of physiological death — Using up of the plasma — 

 Regeneration — Biotonus — Perigenesis of the plastidules: 

 memory of the biogens — Regeneration of protists and 

 tissue-organisms — Senile debility — Disease — -Necrobiosis — 

 The lot of death — Providence — Chance and fate— Eternal 

 life — Optimism and pessimism — Suicide and self-redemp- 

 tion — Redemption from evil — Medicine and philosophy — 

 Maintenance of life — Spartan selection. 



NOTHING is constant but change ! All existence is a 

 perpetual flux of "being and becoming"! That is 

 the broad lesson of the evolution of the world, taken as a 

 whole or in its various parts. Substance alone is eternal 

 and unchangeable, whether we call this all-embracing 

 world-being Nature, or Cosmos, or God, or World-spirit. 

 The law of substance teaches us that it reveals itself to 

 us in an infinite variety of forms, but that its essential 

 attributes, matter and energy, are constant. All indi- 

 vidual forms of substance are doomed to destruction. 

 That will be the fate of the sun and its encircling planets, 

 and of the organisms that now people the earth — 

 the fate of the bacterium and of man. Just as the 

 existence of every organic individual had a beginning, it 

 will also undeniably have an end. Life and death are 

 irrevocably united. However, philosophers and biolo- 

 gists hold very different views as to the real causes of 

 this destiny^ Most of their opinions are at once out of 

 court, because they have not a clear idea of the nature of 

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