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 lightly--each carries to its extreme
conceivable development that which in the other is only sketched in
by a faint suggestion--but neither has any feature rigorously
special to itself. Granted that death is a greater new departure in
an organism's life, than any since that congeries of births and
deaths to which the name embryonic stages is commonly given, still
it is a new departure of the same essential character as any other--
that is to say, though there be much new there is much, not to say
more, old along with it. We shrink from it as from any other change
to the unknown, and also perhaps from an instinctive sense that the
fear of death is a sine qua non for physical and moral progress, but
the fear is like all else in life, a substantial thing which, if its
foundations be dug about, is found to rest on a superstitious basis.

Where, and on what principle, are the dividing lines between living
and non-living to be drawn? All attempts to draw them hitherto have
ended in deadlock and disaster; of this M. Vianna De Lima, in his
"Expose Sommaire des Theories transformistes de Lamarck, Darwin, et
Haeckel," {150a} says that all attempts to trace une ligne de
demarcation nette et profonde entre la matiere vivante et la matiere
inerte have broken down. {150b} Il y a un reste de vie dans le
cadavre, says Diderot, {150c} speaking of the more gradual decay of