STATEMENT OF THE QUESTION AT ISSUE. 75' 



concern, and takes refuge in the liquidation and recon- 

 struction of death. It is only on the relinquishing of 

 further effort that this death ensues ; as long as effort 

 endures, organisms go on from change to change, 

 altering and being altered — that is to say, either killing 

 themselves piecemeal in deference to the surroundings 

 or killing the surroundings piecemeal to suit them- 

 selves. There is a ceaseless higgling and haggling, or 

 rather a life-and-death struggle between these two 

 things as long as life lasts, and one or other or both 

 have in no small part to re-enter into the womb from 

 whence they came and be born again in some form 

 which shall give greater satisfaction. 



All change is pro tanto death or pro tanto birth. 

 Change is the common substratum which underlies 

 both life and death; life and death are not two 

 distinct things absolutely antagonistic to one another ; 

 in the highest life there is still much death, and in 

 the most complete death there is still not a little life. 

 " La vie," says Claude Bernard,* " e'est la mart ; " he 

 might have added, and perhaps did, " et la mart ce 

 n'est que la vie traTisform^e." Life and death are the 

 extreme modes of something which is partly both and 

 wholly neither ; this something is common, ordinary 

 change ; solve any change and the mystery of life and 

 death will be revealed ; show why and how anything 

 becomes ever anything other in any respect than what 

 it is at any given moment, and there will be little 

 secret left in any other change. One is not in its 



* Quoted by M. Viatma De Lima in his Exposi Sommaire des Theories 

 Transfonnisies' de Lamarck, Darwin, et Hcechet, Paris, 1886, p. 23. 



