The Question at Issue 73 
the instinctive habits and physical development of the 
organism in their collective capacity. Where the change 
is too great, or where an organ has been modified cumula- 
tively in some one direction, until it has reached a develop- 
ment too seriously out of harmony with the habits of the 
organism taken collectively, then the organism holds itself 
excused from further effort, throws up the whole concern, 
and takes refuge in the liquidation and reconstruction 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 themselves. 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 Claud Bernard,* 
c’est la mort: he might have added, and perhaps did, 
et la mort ce n’est que la vie transformée. 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 
* Quoted by M. Vianna De Lima in his “‘ Exposé Sommaire des 
Théories Transformistes de Lamarck, Darwin, et Heckel.” Paris, 
1886, p. 23. 
