are no longer adjusted to his "external
relations," and his life must cease.

In ordinary circumstances, and in health, the human organism is in
thorough correspondence with its surroundings; but when any part of the
organism by disease or accident is thrown out of correspondence, it is
in that relation dead.

This Death, this want of correspondence, may be either partial or
complete. Part of the organism may be dead to a part of the environment,
or the whole to the whole. Thus the victim of famine may have a certain
number of his correspondences arrested by the change in his environment,
but not all. Luxuries which he once enjoyed no longer enter the country,
animals which once furnished his table are driven from it. These still
exist, but they are beyond the limit of his correspondence. In relation
to these things therefore he is dead. In one sense it might be said that
it was the environment which played him false; in another, that it was
his own organization--that he was unable to adjust himself, or did not.
But, however caused, he pays the penalty with partial Death.

Suppose next the case of a man who is thrown out of correspondence with
a part of his environment by some physical infirmity. Let it be that by
disease or accident he has been deprived of the use of his ears. The
deaf man, in virtue of this imperfection, is thrown out of _rapport_
with a large and well-defined part of the environment, namely, its
sounds. With regard to that "external relation," therefore, he is no
longer living. Part of him may truly be held to be insensible or "Dead."
A man who is also blind is thrown out of correspondence with another
large part of his environment. The beauty of sea and sky, the forms of
cloud and mountain, the features and gestures of friends, are to him as
if they were not. They are there, solid and real, but not to him; he is
still further "Dead." Next, let it be conceived, the subtle finger of
cerebral disease lays hold of him. His whole brain is affected, and the
sensory nerves, the medium of communication with the environment, cease
altogether to acquaint him with what is doing in the outside world. The
outside world is still there, but not to him; he is still further
"Dead." And so the death of parts goes on. He becomes less and less
alive. "Were the animal frame not the complicated machine we have seen
it to be, death might come as a simple and gradual dissolution, the
'sans everything' being the last sta