erbach, Gedanken uber Tod and Unsterblichkeit, sect. 84.

person with what he was when living, and instinctively personify
the difference as death. Death, strictly analyzed, is only this
abstract conceit or metaphysical nonentity. Death, therefore,
being but a conception in the mind of a living person, when that
person dies death ceases to be at all. And thus the realization of
death is the death of death. He annihilates himself, dying with
the dart he drives. Having in this manner disposed of the
personality or entity of death, it remains as an effect, an event,
a state. Accordingly, the question next arises, What is death when
considered in this its true aspect?

A positive must be understood before its related negative can be
intelligible. Bichat defined life as the sum of functions by which
death is resisted. It is an identical proposition in verbal
disguise, with the fault that it makes negation affirmation,
passiveness action. Death is not a dynamic agency warring against
life, but simply an occurrence. Life is the operation of an
organizing force producing an organic form according to an ideal
type, and persistently preserving that form amidst the incessant
molecular activity and change of its constituent substance. That
operation of the organic force which thus constitutes life is a
continuous process of waste, casting off the old exhausted matter,
and of replacement by assimilation of new material. The close of
this process of organific metamorphosis and desquamation is death,
whose finality is utter decomposition, restoring all the bodily
elements to the original inorganic conditions from which they were
taken. The organic force with which life begins constrains
chemical affinity to work in special modes for the formation of
special products: when it is spent or disappears, chemical
affinity is at liberty to work in its general modes; and that is
death. "Life is the co ordination of actions; the imperfection of
the co ordination is disease, its arrest is death." In other
words, "life is the continuous adjustment of relations in an
organism with relations in its environment." Disturb that
adjustment, and you have malady; destroy it, and you have death.
Life is the performance of functions by an organism; death is the
abandonment of an organism to the forces of the universe. No
function can be performed without a waste of the tissue through
which it is performed: that waste is repaired by the assimilation