ge of the successive loss of
fundamental powers."[57] But finally some important part of the mere
animal framework that remains breaks down. The correlation with the
other parts is very intimate, and the stoppage of correspondence with
one means an interference with the work of the rest. Something central
has snapped, and all are thrown out of work. The lungs refuse to
correspond with the air, the heart with the blood. There is now no
correspondence whatever with environment--the thing, for it is now a
thing, is Dead.

This then is Death; "part of the framework breaks down," "something has
snapped"--these phrases by which we describe the phases of death yield
their full meaning. They are different ways of saying that
"correspondence" has ceased. And the scientific meaning of Death now
becomes clearly intelligible. Dying is that breakdown in an organism
which throws it out of correspondence with some necessary part of the
environment. Death is the result produced, the want of correspondence.
We do not say that this is all that is involved. But this is the root
idea of Death--Failure to adjust internal relations to external
relations, failure to repair the broken inward connection sufficiently
to enable it to correspond again with the old surroundings. These
preliminary statements may be fitly closed with the words of Mr. Herbert
Spencer: "Death by natural decay occurs because in old age the
relations between assimilation, oxidation, and genesis of force going
on in the organism gradually fall out of correspondence with the
relations between oxygen and food and absorption of heat by the
environment. Death from disease arises either when the organism is
congenitally defective in its power to balance the ordinary external
actions by the ordinary internal actions, or when there has taken place
some unusual external action to which there was no answering internal
action. Death by accident implies some neighboring mechanical changes of
which the causes are either unnoticed from inattention, or are so
intricate that their results cannot be foreseen, and consequently
certain relations in the organism are not adjusted to the relations in
the environment."[58]

With the help of these plain biological terms we may now proceed to
examine the parallel phenomenon of Death in the spiritual world. The
factors with which we have to deal are two in number as before--Organism
and Environment. The relation between them may once more be de