The Way of Escape 151 
living within the body? If we answer “ yes,” then, as we 
have seen, moiety after moiety is filched from us, till we 
find ourselves left face to face with a tenuous quasi im- 
material vital principle or soul as animating an alien body, 
with which it not only has no essential underlying commun- 
ity of substance, but with which it has no conceivable 
point in common to render a union between the two possi- 
ble, or give the one a grip of any kind over the other ; in 
fact, the doctrine of disembodied spirits, so instinctively 
rejected by all who need be listened to, comes back as it 
would seem, with a scientific imprimatur ; if, on the other 
hand, we exclude the non-living from the body, then what 
are we to do with nails that want cutting, dying skin, or 
hair that is ready to fall off? Are they less living than 
brain? Answer “‘ yes,” and degrees are admitted, which 
we have already seen prove fatal; answer “‘no,’’ and we 
must deny that one part of the body is more vital than 
another—and this is refusing to go as far even as common 
sense does ; answer that these things are not very important, 
and we quit the ground of equity and high philosophy on 
which we have given ourselves such airs, and go back to 
common sense as unjust judges that will hear those widows 
only who importune us. 
As with the non-living so also with the living. Are 
we to let it pass beyond the limits of the body, and allow a 
certain temporary overflow of livingness to ordain as it were 
machines in use? Then death will fare, if we once let life 
without the body, as life fares if we once let death within it. 
It becomes swallowed up in life, just as in the other case 
life was swallowed up in death. Are we to confine it to the 
body? If so, to the whole body, or to parts? And if 
to parts, to what parts, and why? The only way out of 
the difficulty is to rehabilitate contradiction in terms, and 
say that everything is both alive and dead at one and the 
same time—some things being much living and little dead, 
and others, again, much dead and little living. Having 
