Modern science takes a more objective point of view. It asks by what facts, by what observable events death is indicated. Generally speaking, we may say that these facts interrupt an interior state of things which was life and to which they put an end. Thus death is defined by life. It is the cessation of the events and of the phenomena which characterize life. We must, therefore, know what life is to understand the meaning of death. How wise was Confucius when he said to his disciple, Li-Kou:—“If we do not know life, how can we know death?” According to biology there are two kinds of death because there are two kinds of life; elementary life and death correspond just as general life and death do, and this is where scientific opinion diverges from commonly received opinion. What cares the man who reasons as most human beings do, about this life of the anatomical elements of his body, the existence and the silent activity of which are in no way revealed to him. What does their death matter to him? To him there is but one poignant question, that of being separated or not being separated from the society of his fellows. Death is no longer to feel, no longer to think; it is the assurance that one will never feel, one will never think again. Sleep, dreamless sleep, is already in our eyes a kind of transient death; but, when we fall asleep we are sure of waking again. There is no awaking from the sleep of death. But that is not all. Man knows that death, this dreamless sleep that knows no waking, will be followed by the dissolution of his body. And what a dissolution will there be for the body, the object of his continual care! Remember the description of Cuvier—the flesh that passes from green to blue and from blue to black, the part which flows away in putrid venom, the other part which evaporates in foul emanations, and finally, the few ashes that remain, the tiny pinch of minerals, saline or earthy, which are all that is left of that once animated masterpiece. _The Popular View._—To the man afraid of death it seems, in the presence of so great a catastrophe, that the patient analysis of the physiologist scrupulously noting the succession of phenomena and explaining their sequence is uninteresting. He will only attach the slightest importance to knowing that vestiges of vitality remain in this or that part of his body, if they do not re-establish in every part the _status quo ante_. He cares not to hear that a certain time after the formal declaration of his death his nails and his hair will continue to grow, that his muscles will still have the useless faculty of contraction, that every organ, every tissue, every element, will oppose a more or less prolonged resistance to the invasion of death.