The Way of Escape 149 
arose, for, slaves of habit as we all are, we are more especi- 
ally slaves when the habit is one that has not been found 
troublesome. There is no denying that it saves trouble to 
have things either one thing or the other, and indeed for all 
the common purposes of life if a thing is either alive or dead 
the small supplementary residue of the opposite state 
should be neglected as too small to be observable. If it is 
good to eat we have no difficulty in knowing when it is 
dead enough to be eaten ; if not good to eat, but valuable 
for its skin, we know when it is dead enough to be skinned 
with impunity ;. if it is.a man, we know when he has 
presented enough of the phenomena of death to allow of our 
burying him and administering his estate; in fact, I 
cannot call to mind any case in which the decision of the 
question whether man or beast is alive or dead is frequently 
found to be perplexing ; hence we have become so accus- 
tomed to think there can be no admixture of the two states, 
that we have found it almost impossible to avoid carrying 
_ 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 
