LIFE AFTER DEATH

man, know theyself! ~ 25 ~ Let us take the first proposition. Consider the corpse of a man who has died of heart failure. All its elements are still arranged in the same order as they were a few minutes beforehand, no significant changes having taken place. But those elements are now lifeless. The corpse is still an “orderly elemental manifestation.” but the soul which once inhabited it has now departed. This shows that the organization of elemental matter neither creates nor sustains life. We all know that it is not just those who have been torn limb from limb in accidents who die. People of all ages and in all states of health regularly pass away, and it frequently happens that doctors cannot say—particularly in the case of strokes, heart failure, etc. — why a patient should have died at that particular point in time. It so often happens that a man is perfectly healthy one day and is dead the next. Life, we must concede, is a separate entity from the body. As for the second proposition—the creation of a live human being in a laboratory—scientists are the first to admit that this is a sheer impossibility. They say this, although the body’s chemical formula and atomic structure are well-known. Its carbon is the