things. To stream and insect and bird it is insensible,
torpid, dead. For this is Death, this irresponsiveness.

The bird, again, which is higher in the scale of life, corresponds with
a wider environment. The stream is real to it, and the insect. It knows
what lies behind the hill; it listens to the love-song of its mate. And
to much besides beyond the simple world of the tree this higher
organism is alive. The bird we should say is more living than the tree;
it has a correspondence with a larger area of environment. But this
bird-life is not yet the highest life. Even within the immediate
bird-environment there is much to which the bird must still be held to
be dead. Introduce a higher organism, place man himself within this same
environment, and see how much more living he is. A hundred things which
the bird never saw in insect, stream, and tree appeal to him. Each
single sense has something to correspond with. Each faculty finds an
appropriate exercise. Man is a mass of correspondences, and because of
these, because he is alive to countless objects and influences to which
lower organisms are dead, he is the most living of all creatures.

The relativity of Death will now have become sufficiently obvious. Man
being left out of account, all organisms are seen as it were to be
partly living and partly dead. The tree, in correspondence with a narrow
area of environment, is to that extent alive; to all beyond, to the all
but infinite area beyond, it is dead. A still wider portion of this vast
area is the possession of the insect and the bird. Their's also,
nevertheless, is but a little world, and to an immense further area
insect and bird are dead. All organisms likewise are living and
dead--living to all within the circumference of their correspondences,
dead to all beyond. As we rise in the scale of life, however, it will be
observed that the sway of Death is gradually weakened. More and more of
the environment becomes accessible as we ascend, and the domain of life
in this way slowly extends in ever-widening circles. But until man
appears there is no organism to correspond with the whole environment.
Till then the outermost circles have no correspondents. To the
inhabitants of the innermost spheres they are as if they were not.

Now follows a momentous question. Is man in correspondence with the
whole environment? When we reach the highest living organism, is the
final blow dealt to the kingdom of Death? Has the last