in almost every other word we utter. We cannot serve the God of
philosophy and the Mammon of common sense at one and the same time,
and yet it would almost seem as though the making the best that can
be made of both these worlds were the whole duty of organism.

It is easy to understand how the error of philosophers arose, for,
slaves of habit as we all are, we are more especially 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 accustomed 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