L. What is it to be alive?
Dora. There now; you're going to be provoking, I know.
L. I do not see why it should be provoking to be asked what it is to be alive. Do you think you don't know whether you are alive or not?
(Isabel skips to the end of the room and back.)
L. Yes, Isabel, that's all very fine; and you and I may call that being alive: but a modern philosopher calls it being in a 'mode of motion.' It requires a certain quantity of heat to take you to the sideboard; and exactly the same quantity to bring you back again. That's all.
Isabel. No, it isn't. And besides, I'm not hot.
L. I am, sometimes, at the way they talk. However, you know, Isabel, you might have been a particle of a mineral, and yet have been carried round the room, or anywhere else, by chemical forces, in the liveliest way.
Isabel. Yes; but I wasn't carried: I carried myself.
L. The fact is, mousie, the difficulty is not so much to say what makes a thing alive, as what makes it a Self. As soon as you are shut off from the rest of the universe into a Self, you begin to be alive.
Violet (indignant). Oh, surely—surely that cannot be so. Is not all the life of the soul in communion, not separation?