Page:Life and death (1911).djvu/321

 CHAPTER I.

VARIOUS WAYS OF REGARDING DEATH.

Different meanings of the word death—Physiological distinction between elementary and general death—Non-scientific opinions—The ordinary point of view—Medical point of view.—The signs of death are prognostic signs.

Different Meanings of the Word Death.—An English philosopher has asserted that the word we translate by "cause" has no less than sixty-four different meanings in Plato and forty-eight in Aristotle. The word "death" has not so many meanings in modern languages, but still it has many. Sometimes it indicates an action which is taking place, the action of dying, and sometimes a state, the state which succeeds the action of dying. The phenomena it connotes are in the eyes of many biologists quite different, according as we watch them in an animal of complex organization, or on the other hand, in monocellular beings, protozoa and protophytes.

''Physiological Distinction between Elementary Death and General Death.''—We distinguish the death of the anatomical elements, elementary death, from the death of the individual regarded as a whole, ''general death''. Hence we recognize an apparent death, which is an incomplete and temporary suspension of the phenomena of vitality, and a real death, which is a final and total arrest of these phenomena. When