Chapter 26

“Facts, my boy, can be less basic than they seem. I’m dead, according to your basic facts, when my heart stops beating. I’ve gone to another world when the blood stops coursing through my veins, and once I’ve ceased to breathe, I’m no longer alive. That’s your claim. Perhaps! And only perhaps. But I and other men of science have seen a heart stop beating, stop dead, and yet be started again, by outside hands, and the machinery of life go on as before. Respiration can stop, as it must stop when a swimmer goes down a…