What is Life?

Abstract

Life presents us with many problems; but is ‘What is Life?’ one of them ? Don’t we all know what life is ? Or do we ? Surgeons have recently learnt how, in certain cases, to start a man’s heart working after it has stopped; this has long been possible with the breathing, which was once thought to be a criterion of life — ‘If that her breath will mist or stain the stone, why then she lives’, says King Lear. What then is the state of the man who has stopped breathing, and whose heart has stopped beating, but who is subsequently resuscitated ? Is he alive or dead ? If we say he is alive, why do we not apply the same term to another man, in a precisely similar condition, who does not happen to be lucky enough to have his seizure when there is a surgeon at hand, and who is therefore not resuscitated ? How would we date the death of the second man ? If we say that his life ended when he had the seizure, we ought in consistency to say that the first man, too, died when he had the seizure, and was subsequently brought back to life. But then is death not ‘the undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveller returns’ ? We feel an aversion to saying that a man has been dead, if he subsequently ‘comes to life again’.