death ensues; as long as effort endures, organisms go on from change
to change, altering and being altered--that is to say, either
killing themselves piecemeal in deference to the surroundings or
killing the surroundings piecemeal to suit themselves. There is a
ceaseless higgling and haggling, or rather a life-and-death struggle
between these two things as long as life lasts, and one or other or
both have in no small part to re-enter into the womb from whence
they came and be born again in some form which shall give greater
satisfaction.

All change is pro tanto death or pro tanto birth. Change is the
common substratum which underlies both life and death; life and
death are not two distinct things absolutely antagonistic to one
another; in the highest life there is still much death, and in the
most complete death there is still not a little life. La vie, says
Claud Bernard, {73a} c'est la mort: he might have added, and
perhaps did, et la mort ce n'est que la vie transformee. Life and
death are the extreme modes of something which is partly both and
wholly neither; this something is common, ordinary change; solve any
change and the mystery of life and death will be revealed; show why
and how anything becomes ever anything other in any respect than
what it is at any given moment, and there will be little secret left
in any other change. One is not in its ultimate essence more
miraculous that another; it may be more striking--a greater
congeries of shocks, it may be more credible or more incredible, but
not more miraculous; all change is qua us absolutely
incomprehensible and miraculous; the smallest change baffles the
greatest intellect if its essence, as apart from its phenomena, be
inquired into.