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Professor Henry Drummond was telling how he had never thought it possible to give a definition of life, till he found one in the works of Herbert Spencer, who said that life is correspondence with environment. A child is born with five senses and various bodily organs, and each corresponds with something in his environment; the eye sees sights, the ear hears sounds, the lungs breathe air, and so on. "While I can correspond with my environment, I have life," said Spencer; "but if something happened to me which prevented me from corresponding with my environment then I should be dead; death is a failure of correspondence.
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Norman P. Grubb (Rees Howells: Intercessor)