Page:Phillpotts - The Grey Room (Macmillan, 1921).djvu/42

Rh organic. Nobody has ever found anything that isn't. Existence depends on matter, and when the chemical process breaks down, the organism perishes and leaves nothing. When a man can't go on breathing, he's dead, and there's an end of him."

But Henry had read modern science also.

"What about the vital spark, then? Biologists don't turn down the theory of vitalism, do they?"

"Most of them do, who count, my dear chap. The presence of a vital spark—a spark that cannot be put out—is merely a theory with nothing to prove it. When he dies, the animating principle doesn't leave a man, and go off on its own. It dies too. It was part of the man—as much as his heart or brain."

"That's only an opinion. Nobody can be positive. We don't know anything about what life really means, and we haven't got the machinery to find out."

"By analogy we can," argued Tom. "Where are you going to draw the line? Life is life, and a sponge is just as much alive as a herring; a nettle is just as much alive as an oak-tree; and an oak-tree is just as much alive as you are. What becomes of its vital spark when you eat an oyster?"

"You wouldn't believe in a life after death at all, then?"

"It's a pure assumption, Henry. I'd like to believe in it—who wouldn't? Because, if you honestly did, it would transform this life into something infinitely different from what it is."

"It ought to—yet it doesn't seem to."