¶ Twenty Questions (3)
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Index Entry
animate and inanimate phenomena. The individuals co-working in virology have been too busy and too specialized to philosophize on the significance of the incidentally-discovered fact that no threshold exists separating animate from inanimate. The inanimate crystalline behavior of inanimate atoms crosses right over the threshold. We know that humans, too, physically consist entirely of atoms and that atoms are completely inanimate.
Inanimate.
What is about all biological organisms has become clearer and clearer, and what is physically animate has become not only less clear but is apparently zero or physically nonexistent. There is no experimentally demonstrable physical animism. Cinema cartoons can be ‘animated’ to simulate superficially the presence of animism in exclusively atom-structured organic mechanisms. Apparently the original hypothesis erred in assuming that both animate and inanimate were physical. There have been quite a number of weighings of people as they died. Many cancer-doomed paupers have been willing to have their beds placed on scales. The only difference manifest between weight before and after death is that caused by air exhaled from the lungs or urine that has been passed. What-
