THE WAY OF ESCAPE. 169 



beast is alive or dead is frequently found to be per- 

 plexing; hence we have become so accustomed to 

 think there can be no admixture of the two states, 

 that we have found it almost impossible to avoid carry- 

 ing this crude view of life and death into domains of 

 thought in which it has no application. There can be 

 no doubt that when accuracy is required we should 

 see life and death not as fundamentally opposed, but 

 as supplementary to one another, without either's 

 being ever able to exclude the other altogether ; thus 

 we should indeed see some things as more living than 

 others, but we should see nothing as either unalloyedly 

 living or unalloyedly non-living. If a thing is living, 

 it is so living that it has one foot in the grave already ; 

 if dead, it is dead as a thing that has already re-entered 

 into the womb of Nature. And within the residue of 

 life that is in the dead there is an element of death; 

 and within this there is an element of life, and so ad 

 infinitum — again, as reflections in two mirrors that 

 face one another. 



In brief, there is nothing in life of which there 

 are not germs, and, so to speak, harmonics in death, 

 and nothing in death of which germs and harmonics 

 may not be found in life. Each emphasizes what 

 the other passes over most lightly — each carries to 

 its extreme conceivable development that which in 

 the other is only sketched in by a faint suggestion — 

 but neither has any feature rigorously special to itself. 

 Granted that death is a greater new departure in. an 

 organism's Hfe, than any since that congeries of births 

 and deaths to which the name embryonic stages is 



