24 FUNDAMENTAL PROPERTIES 



interrupt the working of the entire mechanism, just as the 

 functional workings in the body of a highly organised vertebrate 

 animal may be as suddenly arrested by a puncture in a particular 

 part of its nervous system. In both instances the first result is 

 a simple cessation in the action of a complex machine ; and, in the 

 case of the animal — seeing that its body has been gradually built 

 up in a given manner under the influence of certain definite actions 

 or ' functions/ the continuance of which is absolutely necessary — it 

 follows that when such actions are arrested irretrievably, the 

 organism as an individual whole must die, although its separate 

 parts and anatomical elements may and do perish much more 

 slowly, after different intervals. 



If the medulla oblongata has been punctured and the heart 

 has ceased to beat, there is a permanent stoppage of this function, 

 without which ' life,' in such a being as a mammalian vertebrate, 

 is impossible. It consequently dies. If the blood no longer 

 circulates, the anatomical elements, which are absolutely depen- 

 dent upon this fluid for their pabulum, must also, after a time, 

 necessarily die. The individual muscular and nervous elements 

 may and do still live for a time — the nerve will conduct a stimulus 

 under which the muscle will contract ; and so it is, even more 

 markedly, with the epithelial cells — those possessing cilia display 

 their characteristic vital actions long after the organism considered 

 as a complex whole has ceased to live. 



Now the lower we descend in the scale of living things, the less 

 marked does the life of the organism as a whole become, in con- 

 tradistinction to the life of its several parts. Schelling's ' tendency 

 to individuation ' becomes less and less manifest in proportion as 

 the structural differentiation diminishes. The more the several 

 parts of an organism resemble one another, the less difference is 

 there between the functions discharged by these several parts, and 

 therefore the importance is proportionately less to the whole 

 organism when one of these functions is interfered with. Look 

 at the writhing segment of the worm whose body has been cut 

 by the gardener's spade, or at the green Nereis of the rock-pool 

 whose body has been accidentally torn, and let us think of the 

 powers of repair possessed by each. Look again at the little 

 polyp of our lakes and ponds — the Hydra, whose individual life 

 is so dwarfed in comparison with the life of its several parts that 

 you may cut it or injure it to almost any extent, and yet the 

 separate parts will still live. It can, in fact, scarcely be said to 



