MORE ABOUT SUSPENDED ANIMATION 185 



living activities when carefully thawed, has not "died." 

 The mere fact that it can be resuscitated justifies the 

 application to it, according to correct English usage, of 

 the word " alive" — it is still " alive." It is not possible to 

 alter the significance of the words " life," " living " and 

 " alive," so as to retain the definitions of Herbert Spencer 

 and Burdon Sanderson as correct. They are incorrect. 

 Life is not continuous or ceaseless change. It is a property 

 of the more active substance of plants and animals which 

 has special structure and definite chemical constituents. 

 The property is, no doubt, usually manifested under 

 normal conditions of temperature, light, moisture, pres- 

 sure, chemical and electrical surroundings in a continuous 

 series of changes, both chemical and physical. But at 

 exceptionally low temperature, and in other arresting 

 circumstances these changes can, in a few exceptional 

 organisms, be absolutely stopped, though the organism 

 in which the changes cease is uninjured as a mechanism. 

 It still possesses " the property of life " — is still " alive " 

 although motionless and unchanging. Its life is in 

 suspense, as is that of a clock with arrested pendulum. 



The unjustified conception of " life," or " living," or 

 being "alive," and not dead, as necessarily a state of 

 incessant chemical and other change, is bound up with the 

 old fancy that life is not to be considered as a state or 

 motion of a special and complex structure called proto- 

 plasm, but is a thing, a spirit or an essence, which takes 

 possession of organic bodies and makes them "live." 

 According to Sir Oliver Lodge, if chemists could build up 

 the chemical materials which constitute protoplasm, the 

 protoplasm so made by them would not live. It would 

 (he stated at the meeting of the British Association in 

 Birmingham in 191 2) have to receive a charge or infusion, 

 as it were, of this thing suggested by the word "life." It 

 cannot live itself (according to the suppositions of Sir 



