74 Luck, or Cunning? 
other change. One is not in its ultimate essence more 
miraculous that another; it may be more striking—a 
greater congeries of shocks, it may be more credible or more 
incredible, but not more miraculous ; all change is gud us 
absolutely incomprehensible and miraculous ; the smallest 
change baffles the greatest intellect if its essence, as apart 
from its phenomena, be inquired into. 
But however this may be, all organic change is either a 
growth or a dissolution, or a combination of the two. 
Growth is the coming together of elements with quasi 
similar characteristics. I understand it is believed to be 
the coming together of matter in certain states of motion 
with other matter in states so nearly similar that the 
rhythms of the one coalesce with and hence reinforce the 
rhythms pre-existing in the other—making, rather than 
marring and undoing them. Life and growth are an 
attuning, death and decay are an untuning ; both involve 
a succession of greater or smaller attunings and untunings ; 
organic life is “‘ the diapason closing full in man”; it is 
the fulness of a tone that varies in pitch, quality, and in the 
harmonics to which it gives rise ; it ranges through every 
degree of complexity from the endless combinations of life- 
and-death within life-and-death which we find in the 
mammalia, to the comparative simplicity of the ameba. 
Death, again, like life, ranges through every degree of 
complexity. All pleasant changes are recreative; they 
are pro tanto births ; all unpleasant changes are wearing, 
and, as such, fro tanto deaths, but we can no more exhaust 
either wholly of the other, than we can exhaust all the air 
out of a receiver ; pleasure and pain lurk within one another, 
as life in death, and death in life, or as rest and unrest in 
one another. 
There is no greater mystery in life than in death. We 
talk as though the riddle of life only need engage us ; this 
is not so ; death is just as great a miracle as life ; the one is 
two and two making five, the other is five splitting into two 
