But however this may be, all organic change is either a growth or a
dissolution, or a combination of the two. Growth is the coming
together of elements with quasi similar characteristics. I
understand it is believed to be the coming together of matter in
certain states of motion with other matter in states so nearly
similar that the rhythms of the one coalesce with and hence
reinforce the rhythms pre-existing in the other--making, rather than
marring and undoing them. Life and growth are an attuning, death
and decay are an untuning; both involve a succession of greater or
smaller attunings and untunings; organic life is "the diapason
closing full in man"; it is the fulness of a tone that varies in
pitch, quality, and in the harmonics to which it gives rise; it
ranges through every degree of complexity from the endless
combinations of life-and-death within life-and-death which we find
in the mammalia, to the comparative simplicity of the amoeba.
Death, again, like life, ranges through every degree of complexity.
All pleasant changes are recreative; they are pro tanto births; all
unpleasant changes are wearing, and, as such, pro tanto deaths, but
we can no more exhaust either wholly of the other, than we can
exhaust all the air out of a receiver; pleasure and pain lurk within
one another, as life in death, and death in life, or as rest and
unrest in one another.

There is no greater mystery in life than in death. We talk as
though the riddle of life only need engage us; this is not so; death
is just as great a miracle as life; the one is two and two making
five, the other is five splitting into two and two. Solve either,
and we have solved the other; they should be studied not apart, for
they are never parted, but together, and they will tell more tales
of one another than either will tell about itself. If there is one