6. The organic life may exist after the animal life has perished. The animal life is extinguished when sensation is abolished, and voluntary motion can be performed no more. But disease may abolish sensation and destroy the power of voluntary motion, while circulation, respiration, secretion, excretion, in a word, the entire circle of the organic functions continues to be performed. In a single instant apoplexy may reduce to drivelling fatuity the most exalted intellect, and render powerless and motionless muscles of gigantic strength; while the action of the heart and the involuntary contractions of the muscles may not only not be weakened, but may act with preternatural energy. In a single instant, apoplexy may even completely extinguish the animal life, and yet the organic may go on for hours, days, and even weeks; while catalepsy, perhaps the most singular disease to which the human frame is subject, may wholly abolish sensation and volition, while it may impart to the voluntary muscles the power of contracting with such unnatural energy and continuity, that the head, the trunk, the limbs may become immoveably fixed in whatever attitude they happen to be at the moment the paroxysm comes on. In this extraordinary condition of the nervous system, however long the paroxysm last, and however complete the abolition of consciousness, the heart continues to beat, and the pulse to throb, and the lungs to respire, and all the organic organs to perform their ordinary functions. Dr. Jebb gives the following description of the condition of a young lady who was the subject of this curious malady.
"My patient was seized with an attack just as I was announced. At that moment she was employed in netting; she was in the act of passing the needle through the mesh; in that position she became immoveably rigid, exhibiting, in a pleasing form, a figure of death-like sleep, beyond the power of art to imitate, or the imagination to conceive. Her forehead was serene, her features perfectly composed. The paleness of her colour, and her breathing, which at a distance was scarcely perceptible, operated in rendering the similitude to marble more exact and striking. The position of her fingers, hands, and arms was altered with difficulty, but preserved every form of flexure they acquired: nor were the muscles of the neck exempted from this law, her head maintaining every situation in which the hand could place it, as firmly as her limbs."
In this condition of the system the senses were in a state of profound sleep; the voluntary muscles, on the contrary, were in a state of violent action; but this action not being excited by volition, nor under its control, the patient remained as motionless as she was insensible. The brain was in a state of temporary death; the muscle in a state of intense life. And the converse may happen: the muscle may die, while the brain lives; contractility may be destroyed, while sensibility is perfect; the power of motion may be lost, while that of sensation may remain unaffected. A case is on record, which affords an illustration of this condition of the system. A woman had been for some time confined to her bed, labouring under severe indisposition. On a sudden she was deprived of the power of moving a single muscle of the body; she attempted to speak, but she had no power to articulate; she endeavoured to stretch out her hand, but her muscles refused to obey the commands of her will, yet her consciousness was perfect, and she retained the complete possession of her intellectual faculties. She perceived that her attendants thought her dead, and was conscious of the performance upon her own person of the services usually paid to the dead; she was laid out, her toes were bound together, her chin was tied up; she heard the arrangements for her funeral discussed, and yet she was unable to make the slightest sign that she was still in the possession of sense, feeling, and life.
In one form of disease, then, the animal life, both the sensitive and the motive portions of it, may perish; and in another form of disease, either the one or the other part of it may be suspended, while the organic life continues in full operation: it follows that the two lives, blended as they are, are distinct, since the one is capable of perishing without immediately and inevitably involving the destruction of the other.
7. And, finally, as the organic life is the first born, so it is the last to die; while the animal life, as it is the latest born, and the last to attain its full development, so it is the earliest to decline and the first to perish. In the process of natural death, the extinction of the animal is always anterior to that of the organic life. Real death is a later, and sometimes a much later event than apparent death. An animal appears to be dead when, together with the abolition of sensation and the loss of voluntary motion, respiration, circulation, and the rest of the organic functions can no longer be distinguished; but these functions go on some time after they have ceased to afford external indications of their action. In man, and the warmblooded animals in general, suspension or submersion extinguishes the animal life, at the latest, within the space of four minutes from the time that the atmospheric air is completely excluded from the lung; but did the organic functions also cease at the same period, it would be impossible to restore an animal to life after apparent death from drowning and the like. But however complete and protracted the abolition of the animal functions, re-animation is always possible as long as the organic organs are capable of being restored to their usual vigour. The cessation of the animal life is but the first stage of death, from which recovery is possible; death is complete only when the organic together with the animal functions have wholly ceased, and are incapable of being re-established.
In man, the process of death is seldom altogether natural. It is generally rendered premature by the operation of circumstances which destroy life otherwise than by that progressive and slow decay which is the inevitable result of the action of organized structure. Death, when natural, is the last event of an extended series, of which the first that is appreciable is a change in the animal life and in the noblest portion of that life. The higher faculties fail in the reverse order of their development; the retrogression is the inverse of the progression, and the noblest creature, in returning to the state of non-existence, retraces step by step each successive stage by which it reached the summit of life.
In the advancing series, the animal is superadded to the organic life; sensation, the lowest faculty of the animal life, precedes ratiocination, the highest. The senses called into play at the moment of birth soon acquire the utmost perfection of which they are capable; but the intellectual faculties, later developed, are still later perfected, and the highest the latest.
In the descending series, the animal life fails before the organic, and its nobler powers decay sooner and more rapidly than the subordinate. First of all, the impressions which the organs of sense convey to the brain become less numerous and distinct, and consequently the material on which the mind operates is less abundant and perfect; but at the same time, the power of working vigorously with the material it possesses more than proportionally diminishes. Memory fails; analogous phenomena are less readily and less completely recalled by the presence of those which should suggest the entire train; the connecting links are dimly seen or wholly lost; the train itself is less vivid and less coherent; train succeeds train with preternatural slowness, and the consequence of these growing imperfections is that, at last, induction becomes unsound just as it was in early youth; and for the same reason, namely, because there is not in the mental view an adequate range of individual phenomena; the only difference being that the range comprehended in the view of the old man is too narrow, because that which he had learnt he has forgotten; while in the youth it is too narrow, because that which it is necessary to learn has not been acquired.
And with the diminution of intellectual power the senses continue progressively to fail: the eye grows more dim, the ear more dull, the sense of smell less delicate, the sense of touch less acute, while the sense of taste immediately subservient to the organic function of nutrition is the last to diminish in intensity and correctness, and wholly fails but with the extinction of the life it serves.
But the senses are not the only servants of the brain; the voluntary muscles are so equally; but these ministers to the master-power, no longer kept in active service, the former no longer employed to convey new, varied, and vivid impressions, the latter no longer employed to execute the commands of new, varied, and intense desires, become successively feebler, slower, and more uncertain in their action. The hand trembles, the step totters, and every movement is tardy and unsteady. And thus, by the loss of one intellectual faculty after another, by the obliteration of sense after sense, by the progressive failure of the power of voluntary motion; in a word, by the declining energy and the ultimate extinction of the animal life, man, from the state of maturity, passes a second time through the stage of childhood back to that of infancy; lapses even into the condition of the embryo: what the fœtus was, the man of extreme old age is: when he began to exist, he possessed only organic life; and before he is ripe for the tomb, he returns to the condition of the plant.