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 done this we have only got to settle
what a thing is--when a thing is a thing pure and simple, and when
it is only a congeries of things--and we shall doubtless then live
very happily and very philosophically ever afterwards.

But here another difficulty faces us. Common sense does indeed know
what is meant by a "thing" or "an individual," but philosophy cannot
settle either of these two points. Professor Mivart made the
question "What are Living Beings?" the subject of an article in one
of our leading magazines only a very few years ago. He asked, but
he did not answer. And so Professor Moseley was reported (Times,
January 16, 1885) as having said that it was "almost impossible" to
say what an individual was. Surely if it is only "almost"
impossible for philosophy to determine this, Professor Moseley
should have at any rate tried to do it; if, however, he had tried
and failed, which from my own experience I should think most likely,
he might have spared his "almost." "Almost" is a very dangerous
word. I once heard a man say that an escape he had had from
drowning was "almost" providential. The difficulty about defining
an individual arises from the fact that we may look at "almost"
everything from two different points of view. If we are in a