Is the line to be so drawn as to admit any of the non-living within the body? If we answer “yes,” then, as we have seen, moiety after moiety is filched from us, till we find ourselves left face to face with a tenuous quasi immaterial vital principle or soul as animating an alien body, with which it not only has no essential underlying community of substance, but with which it has no conceivable point in common to render a union between the two possible, or give the one a grip of any kind over the other; in fact, the doctrine of disembodied spirits, so instinctively rejected by all who need be listened to, comes back as it would seem, with a scientific _imprimatur_; if, on the other hand, we exclude the non-living from the body, then what are we to do with nails that want cutting, dying skin, or hair that is ready to fall off? Are they less living than brain? Answer “yes,” and degrees are admitted, which we have already seen prove fatal; answer “no,” and we must deny that one part of the body is more vital than another—and this is refusing to go as far even as common sense does; answer that these things are not very important, and we quit the ground of equity and high philosophy on which we have given ourselves such airs, and go back to common sense as unjust judges that will hear those widows only who importune us. As with the non-living so also with the living. Are we to let it pass beyond the limits of the body, and allow a certain temporary 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.