The World War was not primarily a young men’s war, for most of them

were sent by their elders and met their death that the influence of

the latter might be augmented. Men may be made senile by their years

without growing wise. Thus the world is without true leaders in this

hour of its greatest need till we wonder whether a few score funerals

of those now in power would not be our greatest boon. A psychological

senility that neither learns nor forgets is always a menace and a check

instead of being, as true old age should be, a guide in emergencies.

Thus we have not grown old aright and are paralyzed by a wisdom that

is obsolete or barnacled by prejudice. How often is it said of reforms

great and good that they are earnestly needed and entirely practical

but must wait for their accomplishment until certain venerable but

obstructive personages of a generation that is passing are out of the

way, because they are prone to think the old good and the new bad, and

that every change, therefore, must be for the worse. Thus many live too

long and undo the usefulness of their earlier years.

In fine, not only has the Western world now lost the exhilarating

sense of progress that has for generations sustained and inspired it

but civilization faces to-day dangers of decay such as have never

confronted it since the incursion of the barbarians and of the Moslems

into Europe. Other more disastrous wars are possible. Class hatred

and the antagonisms of capital and labor, national and individual

greed, race jealousies and animosities, the ferment of Bolshevism,

the ascendency of the ideals of _kultur_ over those of culture in our

institutions for higher education in every land, industrial stagnation

and unemployment, the crying lack of leaders and the dominance of

mediocrity everywhere, the decay of faith and the desiccation of

religion, the waning confidence in democracy: these are the prospects

we must face if we are not to flee from reality and be cowards to life

as it confronts us. If men still believed in an omnipotent all-wise

god they would expect him to now intervene by a new, perhaps a third,

dispensation such as Renan believed in. But the good old All-Father

that saved a remnant and drowned the rest in the days of Noah and that

sent His Son later to save the world when it seemed lost is dead and

survives only as a memory, and we realize to-day that man must be his

own savior or perish.

There seem at present three and only three ways of escape, each of them

radical, arduous, slow, and perhaps desperate, and which only those who

have the supreme power of presentification or the genius that sees all

problems in terms of the here and now can clearly discern. The first

of these is (1) eugenics. We must learn to breed a better race of men.

This is, indeed, a religion and already has its apostles and martyrs

and a growing body of disciples who are propagandists of its new

gospel. But the obstacles of ignorance and prejudice are appalling. The

fact remains, however, as poor Nietzsche realized, that if man cannot

surpass his present self he is lost.

(2) Others, like H. G. Wells to-day and like Comenius in his day, see

our chief hope not so much in nature and preformation as in nurture and

epigenesis and would reconstruct, vastly enlarge, and unify our entire

educational system, reversing many a present consensus to the end of

ultimately obliterating all national boundaries and racial prejudices

and organizing a world state, “a parliament of man, a federation of the

world.”

(3) Others, like Metchnikoff and Bernard Shaw, look for salvation

in the prolongation of human life that man may have the longer

apprenticeship he now needs in order to wisely direct the ever more

complex affairs of civilization. Compared with the task it now imposes,

the wisest and ablest are only children and the disasters of our day

are because young Phaethons have thought they could drive the chariot

of the sun when in fact they were “_nicht dazu gewachsen_.” If man

could live and learn, not seventy but two or three times seventy years,

and could begin to be at his best when he now declines and retires, he

might know enough to guide the world in its true course. He must absorb

more knowledge, and of a different kind, and assimilate it better

in order to secrete the wisdom now needed. As the adolescent decade

prepares for maturity, so the senescent decades must prepare for old

age and look forward to it with all the anticipation with which youth

now looks forward to maturity. The limitations of old age must be made

spurs to its greater efficiency just as so many in middle life have

had to do with the chronic handicaps of poor health. Two prevalent

traditions must be ruthlessly broken and destroyed. The first is that

old people’s hold on life is so precarious that medical care is less

likely to be rewarded with success than at earlier stages of life.

The fact is that normal and healthy age is not only immune to many

diseases common to middle life but often has exceptional recuperative

powers, while even under present conditions the percentage of deaths

is not so very much increased at seventy. Physicians who specialize

in gerontology could do very much here. The other vicious tradition

is that retirement or marked abatement of activity should occur at a

certain age. This ought to be always a personal matter and all who can

really “carry on” should do so with all the powers they possess as long

as they are fully able.

An “Indian summer” should be both expected and utilized to the

uttermost for this is a precious bud of vast potentialities. In it

we already glimpse the superhumanity yet to be. We can already guess

something of the soteriological functions that now lie concealed

and are yet to be revealed in it. It brings a new poise and a new

perspective of values and hence a new orientation and new and deeper

insights into essentials. The very fact that the old who have

approximated ever so remotely this ideal have so far been exceptions

and, in a sense, “sports” should at least open our eyes to the fact

that the great all-mother can still show her original wish and intent.

The old are remarkably and uniquely suggestible in all matters that

pertain to the suppression or augmentation of life. They give up and

die prematurely as victims of a tradition that it is time for them

to do so and they survive no less remarkably not only troubles and

hardships but even surgical operations if they feel that they can do

so. We need not be faith-curers but must be vitalists and believe

in some kind of _élan vital_ or creative evolution, as opposed to

materialistic or mechanistic interpretations of life, to understand the

true psychology of age. It is the nascent period of a new and unselfish

involution of individuation which is impossible under the domination of

egoism. The new self now striving to be born is freer from the dominion

of sense and of the environment and has an autonomy and spontaneity

that is reinforced and recharged with energy from the primal springs of

life, and man may well look to this as one of the great sources of hope

in his present distress.

With the sublimation of sex in the Indian summer of the senium,

thus, comes normally a higher type of individuation than is possible

before. It is freer from passion, sense, selfish interest, clearer

and farther sighted, but sees the identity of the individual and the

race with which it is becoming incorporate. This is the first step

toward the final merging into mother nature. The isolation from the

outer world that comes with dimming senses, the abatement of erotism,

and the reduced vocational activities are compensated for by a new

noetic or meditative urge that comes straight from the primal sources

of all vital energy and gives a new and deeper sense of these and, if

we are philosophical, brings a new sympathy with vitalistic theories

like those of Lotze, Samuel Butler, Fechner, and Bergson, to say

nothing of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bernard Shaw, or the long line of

evolutionists before Darwin, which goes back at least to Heraclitus.

This final rally of powers just when the processes of bodily decay are

accelerated, which in times past sometimes took the form of outbreaks

of prophecy, admonition, or clairvoyance as to the meaning of present

tendencies for the far future of the race and the further development

of which is one of the great present hopes of a world in which the

processes of degeneration are now being greatly accelerated, can be

nothing else than the birth throes of a new and higher stage in the

evolution of man. The task now rests upon us to intensify and prolong

this stage and to assure it to an ever larger number. We already see

that we here escape from many, and must learn to escape from more, of

Metchnikoff’s disharmonies in life. Sometime we shall both breed and

educate for it, make it the ideal and goal for the young, and look

for and heed its deliverances in the favored old. Having attained

it, although death will seem all the darker by contrast with its

regenerative light, man can meet it with less regret because he will

not feel that he must be consoled by the sequel of another life. All

forms of belief in the latter are, in fact, only surrogates expressive

of a deeper faith and these symbols of it have served the precious

purpose of keeping alive in his breast the sense that his life here was

an unfinished fragmentary thing. The true Indian summer of life, when

its possibilities are developed, is all that they mean, for in it all

man’s belated powers will ripen and the final harvest of his life be

garnered.

As to death, normal old age loves it no better than do the young.

Metchnikoff, who postulated an instinct for death as the reversal of

the love for life and which he thought should supervene at the end,

looked for it in himself when he faced imminent and certain death at

nearly three-score-and-ten; but in vain. The late Secretary Lane,

facing it, was praised for saying, “I accept,” but the psychologist

doubts whether anyone ever did or could welcome death understanding

it to be extinction. The suicide may murder his instinctive will to

live; the martyr may die in the hope of a better world beyond; the

disappointed lover or the coward to life may turn to it as the lesser

of two evils. A man may surrender his life as a sacrifice to a cause he

deems greater than self but it is nevertheless a supreme sacrifice. A

soldier accepts the fatal thrust of the bayonet and a criminal mounts

the scaffold or sits in the death chair because he cannot help it. For

how can life accept its own negation? It can never hope to know more

of it than the sun can know of shadows, which are where it is not.

Thus the old are no wiser and no more willing to die than the young,

if indeed they are as much so, because it means more to the latter who

have more to lose by it. All that philosophy or religion can do is to

direct our minds from its full and stark envisagement.

Growing old hygienically is like walking over a bridge that becomes

ever narrower so that there is progressively less range between the

_licet_ and the _non licet_, excess and defect. The bridge slowly

tapers to a log, then a tight-rope, and finally to a thread. But we

must go on till it breaks or we lose balance. Some keep a level head

and go farther than others but all will go down sooner or later.

Several of my respondents say that they never on any account admit to

themselves that they are old and a few advise us to avoid by every

possible means all thought of death, using every method of diversion

from it. One thinks that to dwell upon this theme is positively

dangerous because the thought tends to bring the reality. I believe, on

the contrary, that such an attitude is not only cowardly but that it

involves self-deception because the _memento mori_ is in fact always

present, if unconsciously, in the old and to face the Great Enemy

squarely really brings easement and safeguards us from a thanatophobia

that may have far more dangerous outcrops. To have once deliberately

oriented ourselves to death before our powers fail gives us a new poise

whatever attitude toward it such contemplation leads us to.

My own conclusion that death is the end of body and soul alike, while

it gives me a profound sense of satisfaction as having reached and

accepted the final goal of all present culture tendencies which all

serious souls feel impelled toward but which many of them still fight

down also brings me, I frankly confess, a new joy in and love of life

which is greatly intensified by contrast with the blankness beyond. As

a dark background brings out a fading picture, so whatever remains of

life is vastly more precious and more delectable day by day and hour

by hour than it could possibly be if at the door of the tomb we only

said _au revoir_. The very minutes seem longer because the departure

into eternity is so near. Although death treats our psyche just as it

does our soma, this is not so bad on our present views of the universe

and insight lifts us above the need of consolation and even gives a

sense of victory though Death do his worst, which those who expect

another personal life never attain. And so I am grateful to senescence

that has brought me at last into the larger light of a new day which

the young can never see and should never be even asked to see. Thus

if any of them should ever read my book thus far I would dismiss them

here and in the following chapter address myself to the aged alone.

That Jesus faced, and consciously, this absolute death at the close of

his career seems to me now to have been made clear by modern critical

and psychological investigation. But it was a sound pedagogic instinct

that led the evangelists to veil this extreme experience of their

Master.[203]

CHAPTER IX

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DEATH

The attitude of infancy and youth toward death as recapitulating

that of the race--Suicide--The death-wish--Necrophilism--The

Black Death--Depopulation by the next war--The evolutionary

nisus and death as its queller--Death symbolism as pervasive as

that of sex--Flirtations of youthful minds with the thought of

death--Schopenhauer’s view of death--The separation of ghosts

from the living among primitive races--The thanatology of the

Egyptians--The journey of the soul--Ancient cults of death and

resurrection in the religions about the eastern Mediterranean,

based on the death of vegetation in the fall and its revival

in the spring, as a background of Pauline Christianity--The

fading belief in immortality and Protestantism which now at

funerals speaks only of peace and rest--Osler’s five hundred

death beds--Influential, plasmal, and personal immortality and

their reciprocal relations--Moral efficacy of the doctrine of

future rewards and punishments--Belief in a future life for the

individual being transformed into a belief in the future of the

race on earth and the advent of the superman--Does man want

personal immortality--Finot’s immortality of the decomposing body

and its resolution into its elements--The Durkheim school and the

Mana doctrine--Schleiermacher--The Schiller-James view of the

brain and consciousness as repressive of the larger life of the

great Autos--The views of Plato and Kant--Have God and nature

cheated and lied to us if the wish to survive is false--Noetic

and mystic immortality by partaking of the deathlessness of

general ideas--Views of Howison, Royce, and others--Is there a

true euthanasia or thanatophilia--Diminution of the desire for

personal immortality with culture and age--Thanatopsis.

From infancy to old age the conceptions of death undergo characteristic

changes in the individual not unlike those through which the race has

passed. The death fear or thanatophobia is, thus, a striking case of

recapitulation. The infant, like the animal, neither knows nor dreads

death. The death-feigning instinct in animals is only cataplexy and the

horror of blood that some herbivora feel is not related to death. From

Scott’s 226 cases[204] and my own 299 returns to questionnaires[205]

it appears that the first impression of death often comes from a

sensation of coldness in touching the corpse of a relative and the

reaction is a nervous start at the contrast with the warmth that

the contact of cuddling and hugging was wont to bring. The child’s

exquisite temperature sense feels a chill where it formerly felt heat.

Then comes the immobility of face and body where it used to find prompt

movements of response. There is no answering kiss, pat, or smile. In

this respect sleep seems strange but its brother, death, only a little

more so. Often the half-opened eyes are noticed with awe. The silence

and tearfulness of friends are also impressive to the infant, who often

weeps reflexly or sympathetically. Children of from two to five are

very prone to fixate certain accessories of death, often remembering

the corpse but nothing else of a dead member of the family. But

funerals and burials are far more often and more vividly remembered.

Such scenes are sometimes the earliest recollections of adults. Scrappy

memory pictures of these happenings may be preserved when their meaning

and their mood have entirely vanished and but for the testimony of

others they would remain unable to tell what it was all about.

Little children often focus on some minute detail (thanatic fetishism)

and ever after remember, for example, the bright pretty handles or the

silver nails of the coffin, the plate, the cloth binding, their own or

others’ articles of apparel, the shroud, flowers, and wreaths on or

near the coffin or thrown into the grave, countless stray phrases of

the preacher, the music, the incidents of the ride to the graveyard,

the fear lest the bottom of the coffin should drop out or the straps

with which it is lowered into the ground should slip or break, a

stone in the first handful or shovelful of earth thrown upon the

coffin, etc. The hearse is almost always prominent in such memories

and children often want to ride in one. This, of course, conforms to

the well-known laws of erotic fetishism by which the single item in a

constellation of them that alone can find room in the narrow field of

consciousness is over-determined and exaggerated in importance because

the affectivity that belongs to items that are repressed and cannot get

into consciousness is transferred to those that can do so.

Children often play they are dead, even when alone. They stretch out in

bed, fold their hands, and hold their breath as long as they can to see

how it feels to be dead. A few in fancy feel ill, imagine doctor and

nurse, go through the last agony, imagine others standing about weeping

and praising them, or perhaps picture themselves as the bystanders and

see the imaginary death of a friend and try to weep. Real grief is hard

for them and late to understand and they often think tears a pretense.

They sometimes pick out pretty coffins for themselves or their chums

and imagine becoming burial frocks. The odor of varnish from a coffin

sometimes has an incredible persistence and power to call up feelings

and emotions. Many children fear the corpse will wake and sit up--“he

is not dead but sleepeth,” etc. Many are the records of how by calling,

touching, pounding, or otherwise doing either forbidden or commendable

things children strive to provoke or coax their dead relatives to awake.

Death has many degrees to children. The buried body is deadest. It

is more so in the coffin than before being placed there. A very sick

person who may die begins to be invested with the same awe. Lying in

bed by day, the doctor, the silent nurse, the smell of medicines,

often suggest that death has begun. Toward very old people children

feel something of the same awe because they must soon die. According

to some of our data some young children are incipient necrophiles,

persistently trying to stroke, handle, or even kiss and hug the corpse.

Scott’s curves indicate that up to and at the age of five death is

more likely to be interesting if not attractive, while at about nine

its real horror first begins to be felt. Some, at a very tender age,

acquire associations that persist for years, perhaps through life,

and which are liable to be evoked by specific instances. This is, for

example, the case with the sight and smell of tuberoses, a black box or

boat, a crepe veil or bow on a door, hat, or garment, tolling of bells

or even the ringing of them, etc. Certain phrases in Scripture and in

some morbid cases all allusions to death are liable to cause hysterical

outbreaks. Some thanatophobes in whom these infantile fetishistic fears

persist cannot go past an undertaker’s show window but go far around to

avoid it. One such young man felt a sudden and strong aversion toward

a young lady to whom he was attached as soon as he learned that she

was employed in an undertaker’s establishment. These aversions often

spring up suddenly, perhaps in the form of a convulsive sob, tears, or

inexplicable depression, although they are usually of infantile origin.

Children’s funerals and interments of pets are now represented by a

small literature.

For young children the dead are simply absent and curious questions are

asked as to where they have gone, when they will return, why the child

cannot go with them. The infantile mind often makes strange mixtures of

its own naïve constructions with adult insight. The distinction between

psyche and soma, of which death is the chief teacher, is hard for the

realistic minds of children. Told that Papa or Mama rest or sleep in

the ground, they ask why they are there, where it is so cold and dark,

why they do not wake, what they eat, who feeds them, impulsions in

the race that primitive burial customs often elaborately answered by

preparing bodies for reanimation, leaving food and utensils with the

corpse, etc. When told of heaven above, children have strange, crass

fancies, such as that the body is shot up to heaven, the grave dug

open by angels, the body passed down through the earth and then around

up, etc. It generally gets out of the grave and goes to its abode by

night.

As ideas of the soul begin to be grasped it is conceived as a tenuous

replica of the body hovering about somewhere, sometimes seen though

rarely felt. It may even be talked to or fancied as present, though

unseen. Children’s dreams of the dead are often vivid and rarely

dreadful. In general the child thinks little or nothing but good of

the dead and the processes of idealization, aided by adults, often

almost reach the pitch of canonization so that later the memory of

a dead parent may become a power in the entire subsequent life of

sentiment as if all the instincts of ancestor worship were focalized on

the individual parent. Indeed, we find some adults who maintain quiet

sacred hours for thought of or ideal communion with their departed

dear ones and such yearnings, of course, make a favorable soil for the

ghost cult of spiritism. This component of our very complex attitude

toward dead friends is also the stratum that crops out in the holy

communion sacrament of the ghost dances of our American Indians, in

which the souls of all the great dead of their tribe are supposed to

come back and commune with their living descendants. Just in proportion

as the dead are loved does death work its charm of sublimation and

idealization, and just as a child of either sex has loved the parent of

the other will he or she idealize a chosen mate snatched away by death.

Thus, too, one factor in the belief in immortality is love that must

conserve its object though deceased, this factor being quite distinct

from the transcendental selfishness that would conserve our own ego.

Young children often seem rather to rejoice in than to fear death.

The excitement of all its ceremonies is new and impressive. Some even

express a wish, after a funeral is over, that someone else would die.

In their funeral games they quarrel as to who shall assume the central

rôle of the corpse, which they feign well. One abnormal four-year-old

tried to kill a younger mate and I find records of a number of

pathological children who have actually done so, largely in order to

enjoy the excitement of death, funeral, and burial. A sweet young girl

was found dancing on the fresh grave of her younger sister, chanting,

“I am so glad she is dead and I am alive,” suggesting not the ancient

days of famine when every death left more food for the survivors so

much as jealousy at the diversion of parental attention and care to the

younger child.

Neurotic children often play with unusual abandon, as if to compensate

for the depression, when they have just left a room where brothers or

sisters have breathed their last. A small boy who lost his father said,

“Now I will milk, cut wood, bring up coal,” etc., attempting thus to

assume the father’s rôle, perhaps even putting on some of his attire;

while girls whose mothers die become more tender to their fathers

or the other children, feeling themselves to be in some degree the

surrogate of the mother. Just as children of tender age far more often

fear the death of others than they do their own, so they vastly more

often wish the death of those they hate than they feel any suicidal

impulse. Children’s propensity to play with death-shudders in their

talk and thought was well illustrated in the case of two girls of

perhaps seven whom I overheard while they were watching a man on a very

high roof. One said, “Oh, I wish he would fall right down backwards and

kill himself.” “And they pick him up all bloody,” giggled the other.

“His bones all broke,” said the first. “And put him in a black box in

the grave,” said the second. “And all his children cry,” said number

one. “And starve to death,” added the other. They were getting more

excited and spoke lower as they passed out of my hearing. The horror

and also the fascination of rooms in which people have died often shows

a conflict that is psychologically the same.

If death is thus distorted by misconceptions in infancy it looms up

as a great and baffling mystery to fledgling _youth_. So little is it

really understood by them that it is hard to utilize the fear of it

even for motivating hygienic regimen. To tell a boy or girl in the

teens that it has been proven that by conforming to certain established

laws of health life may be prolonged on an average of fifteen years

seems to them a far cry and it has little power as an incentive

because they are so absorbed in living out all the possibilities of

the present. There are certain perils, too, in using the death fear

as a euthenic motive for the young. Yet during adolescence the death

problem often becomes a veritable muse inspiring endless dreads,

reveries, perhaps obsessions and complexes of the most manifold kind,

especially in neurotics, in whom infantile impulses and adult insights

are strangely mingled, producing weird perversions in later life. All

these mazes we can never thread without a knowledge of the impression

death has made upon the impressionable soul of man at every stage of

life and perhaps most of all in the adolescent period, when youth first

comes into close contact with the death thought.

When the young are achieving adulthood at the most rapid rate they

are often overwhelmed with a sense of insufficiency, inferiority, or

incompleteness against which they have to react as best they can.

Tolstoi gave us a good illustration of this from his own boyhood. His

tutor flogged him and he reacted as the only way in which he could “get

even” by not merely the thought of suicide but the vivid imagination,

well set in scene, of himself as dead and his father dragging the

horrified tutor before his beautiful corpse and accusing him of

having murdered his son, while the friends around bemoaned him as so

brilliant and so tragically slain. It seems strange that at that period

of life when both vitality and viability are greatest and the will to

live seems to have its maximal momentum the death thought is so prone

to be obsessive. But death is very hard to conceive and interpretations

of what it really means differ with every age, race, individual, and

perhaps almost every moment of life. It is so negative, privative, and

human nature, like physical nature, abhors a vacuum so much that the

soul balks not only at the idea of annihilation but at every thought

of the arrest of life. Recent studies of children’s suicides show that

although they begin at the early dawn of school age they are augmented

by all repressions of their natural interests and instincts. Only at

puberty or after, when the life of the race begins to dominate that

of the individual, do children begin to comprehend what death really

means; and even then, as the 58 suicides of German school children

per year from 1883 to 1905 show, many, if not most, are sudden and

impulsive and probably the majority, at least those of pubescent girls,

are largely for the sake of the effect their death will have upon those

nearest them. What child has not seriously considered suicide, at least

in reverie? Several partial censuses have been unable to find one.[206]

As to the death wish, this may be often felt and even expressed

impulsively on some special provocation and then the realization of

it may bring not only horror but in neuropathic children may set up

a prolonged and morbid corrective process to strangle it. We have

many cases in which overtenderness to parents or relatives, which had

become so insistent as to be troublesome, was motivated by the impulse

to atone for a vivid death wish that took form in a moment of anger.

In general we have only a life wish for our friends and reserve the

death wish for enemies. Even in the most highly evolved emotional lives

this is perhaps only a question of predominance, for psychoanalysts

tell us that never was there a death, even of a lover, that did not

bring some small modicum of joy to the survivor, swallowed up and

overwhelmed as this component might be in grief. Were this not so,

comforters and consolers would have no resources. We strive to think

that our dear ones are happier, comforting ourselves with memories,

and ascribe to the dead superior powers of transcendental enjoyment;

while, conversely, no savage ever killed the bitterest foe of his tribe

without elements of pity or perhaps phrases to atone for the soul of

the victim or to his friends by saying propitiatory words or performing

placatory rites. Even hell and devils never kill the soul and there are

spots and spells of remission of torment so that surcease and nepenthe

are not unknown, even in the inferno.

The death thought in some of our data seems to be spontaneous, that

is, it may break out obsessively, not only on the slightest occasion

but without any ascertainable cause. Some young people have spells

of crying with wild abandon at the thought that they must die, which

sometimes seems to sound out to them as if from the welkin. It is worst

nights. It seems so unspeakably dreadful that they cannot steady their

voice. The thought in the infant prayer, “If I should die before I

wake,” etc., made one child more or less neurotic for years with horror

of hell and judgment and she was wont to fancy herself found dead in

the morning and used to pose for it to look her best. This, too, plays

its rôle in revival hysteria. Some who have been very near death by

drowning or other accident magnify this experience in memory until it

may come to haunt them. Indeed, it seems characteristic of adolescence

that although it may occur at later stages of life, in some quiet hour,

perhaps when alone on the shore or in the forest or in a wakeful moment

at night, the thought, “I must die,” seems to spring and fasten upon

the soul like a beast of prey. It flashes out with great and absorbing

vividness. Occasionally a voice seems to pronounce the sentence. In a

few cases it is so intense that a child fancies itself in the act of

dying and springs up in terror. Probably all morbid fears of death are

regressive or reversionary and have childish features. One clergyman

was so haunted by it that he could not conduct funerals and only after

years was he able to find self-control in the conviction that he might

live on till Christ’s second coming.[207]

In my teens in the country I often, and with a willingness that was

hard for myself or my parents to understand, took my turn in watching

with the sick and dying neighbors or “setting up” with corpses. On two

occasions, once entirely alone, I performed as best I could the office

of “laying out” the body of an old neighbor who died in the middle of

the night. Other young people of my acquaintance were generally very

ready to perform such offices although they involved great nervous

tension, and in general a companion watcher was sought or provided.

Another personal experience illustrates the persistence of juvenile

attitudes toward death in mature life. As a boy in the country I had

to pass, in going to and coming from the village, a lonely country

church yard, by which I used to run and in which many of my relatives

for generations were buried. Only a few years ago I yielded, during a

sojourn at the village inn, to the whim of revisiting this graveyard

by moonlight one midnight. I forced myself to climb over the high

black entrance gate, for all was surrounded by a wall of dark-colored

stone and by a row of pine trees. I walked deliberately through the

graveyard and back, striking a match on my grandfather’s tomb to light

a cigar as a culmination of a kind of bravado that left nothing that

an observer could detect as indicating anything but perfect poise and

control. I did not even quite shudder when, as I stood amidst the grave

stones, a dark cloud obscured the moon, and after walking back and

forth there for a time I leisurely clambered out and went back. But the

strange thing about it all was a nervous tension, the flitting fears

and fancies that had to be kept under and that constantly impelled me

to turn and run. On returning I found myself in a state of high nervous

excitement and realized that almost any sudden unexpected shock would

have caused me, as the sudden obscurity of the moon nearly did, to

yield to precipitate flight.

Thus, we see in the young buds of about all of the many and diverse

attitudes the race has assumed toward death. Most of them are

polymorphic and perverse, some merely organic residua of long phyletic

influences. Thus, as in sex, the components of the death attitudes

are early present but are not organized into unity until puberty,

when the racial experiences in both fields come to be more or less

unified. It would seem that death has no business with young people or

they with it and that it is as absurd for them to occupy themselves

with it at this age as it would be for them to worry about posterity

before the dawn of adolescence. Since the life and growth of the

psyche and soma are now at their flood-tide, it would seem that every

intimation of death would be not only foreign to the very nature

of young people but would be arrestive of the course of nature and

should be veiled in reticence, like sex, before its time, with only

provisional answers to the genuine questions about it. Indeed, the

above data seem to show that the genetic impulse itself seems to shield

the child by diverting it from the central fact of death to countless

irrelevancies, trivialities, and accessories. Just as the instinct of

the race has blindly striven to avoid sex precocity, if not to delay

puberty, and more consciously and purposively to enforce a period of

repression between the age of pubescence and that of nubility, so myth,

primitive religion, and especially Christianity, have provided ways

of mitigating, even for adults but more especially for the young, the

nameless horror of direct envisagement of the fact that all must die

and cease to be, body and soul, or, like the Nirvana cult, to make this

conviction more tolerable.

Indeed, it is probably a normal instinct of compensation that often

leads young people to visit morgues and perhaps dissecting rooms,

to develop a certain immunity from such obsessive tendencies as the

above.[208] Great earthquakes, disastrous floods, and, above all, war

and pestilence compel us to face the death thought at close quarters

for a season and there are always those who revel in describing it

in its most gruesome details, although there is a tacit consensus of

the press to suppress the most horrible of them. Soldiers have to

be hardened to inflict it in its most direct and personal way, as,

for example, by the bayonet, as well as to keep cool when they are

first under fire and to carry on and not turn and flee in panic when

their comrades are torn to pieces about them. Such experiences, while

they often mature the unripe and give a new poise to character, also

tend to make human life seem cheaper, so that it is not strange that

wars are followed by crime waves and especially by marked increase in

assaults. For disguise it as we may, war is at root licensed murder and

its heroes are they who have killed the most of those who have been

declared enemies. Indeed, it is self-evident that the normal man who

can deliberately stake his life in a fight in which he knows that he

must either kill or be killed does so because he realizes that there is

something that he values more than he does his life, and to have had

one such experience marks an epoch of the utmost moral import. Perhaps

it is not too much to say that only those who have made this supreme

sacrifice in spirit are finished and complete men.

When death holds high carnival and whole populations are depleted,

long periods of readjustment follow and human nature breaks out in

strange ways. Defoe’s very realistic though fictive story of the

Great Plague showed this. J. W. Thompson[209] says that the Black

Death, A.D. 1348–1349, swept away at least one-third of the population

of Europe and brought in its train economic chaos, social unrest,

profiteering, lack of production, phrenetic gayety, dissipation, wanton

spending, recklessness, greed, debauchery, avarice, hysteria, and

decay of morals. The nerves of the people were shattered. Goods were

without owners but everything movable was immediately appropriated by

survivors. Prices first shrank very low and then rose to preposterous

heights. The Plague was like an invasion and there were great

migrations for years. There was administrative inefficiency for the

trained class was cut down. The machinery of government almost stopped

and there were thousands of ignorant and incompetent men in important

public places. The church was no better off and it had to press unfit

raw recruits into its service. Flagellants exhibited a mixture of

religion and sex rivaling the psychology of the crusades. Thought went

off on all kinds of tangents. There were charlatans, mind-readers,

sorcerers, witch doctors, soap-box preachers, and the Pied Piper

very likely really did lead the excited children with his mad antics

and weird music to wander off with him until, as in the children’s

crusade, they were lost. Thompson points out that although there are

many points of difference, there are more very significant analogues

between the after-effects of this plague and those of the World War. A

Danish historian estimates that in the latter ten million soldiers died

in battle or of wounds, three million were permanently disabled, and

probably some thirty million more people would have been alive to-day

but for it. Such a decimation of Europe has certainly brought social,

economic, and psychological changes that it would take us long to

evaluate.

Meanwhile, we cannot entirely escape the looming prospect of a far

more disastrous war that may yet come. W. Irwin[210] has cleverly hit

off some of the possibilities of the awful holocaust that death would

probably celebrate if such a conflict ever came to pass. Instead of

liquid flame we have now Lewisite gas, which is invisible, sinks, and

would search out every dugout and cellar, while it also attacks the

skin and almost always kills, having a spread fifty-five times greater

than that of any other poison gas. He quotes an expert as saying that

a dozen Lewisite air-bombs of the greatest size and under favorable

atmospheric conditions would practically eliminate the population of

Berlin and we even have hints of a gas beyond this. Gas will very

likely be the chief weapon of the future war. Moreover, the bombing

airplane has a range, of course, far beyond any gun. Bombs grew in

size during the war from that of a grapefruit to eight feet in length,

with half a ton of explosives and gas-generating chemicals, costing

some $3,000 each and the planes carrying these will be directed by

wireless, so that the airplane is thus the supergun. Hitherto warfare

has been directed against soldiers, but in the future it will be

against whole peoples and this generation may see a great metropolis

suddenly made into a necropolis. Formal declaration of war, too, will

become as obsolete as a Fauntleroy courtesy. Killing will be not by

hand but by machinery; not in retail but by wholesale. War will be not

between individual nations or small groups of them but will embrace

the entire world, even the East, so that there will be no neutrals.

Tanks will be used as super-dreadnoughts and poison gases will perhaps

paralyze the soil for years, as indeed they have done to some extent

in eastern France. Thus if war in the future becomes one hundred per

cent efficient in the use of the resources at present at its command

and those that it is only the part of common sense to anticipate, the

depopulation caused will be incalculable and the world may experience

again all the phenomena that Europe did after the Black Death, and

perhaps more.

There is an evolution larger than Darwinism and far older than science

in which all who think have everywhere and always believed. The common

phenomena of growth suggest it to every mind. It is almost of the

nature of thought to seek origins and to trace things to their simple

beginnings. Indeed, the most perfect knowledge of anything is the

description of the processes of its development. Special creation

myths, cosmogonies, and religious theories of the world and man,

philosophies and histories, are all products of the same deep instinct

to know the cosmos as a whole and also its parts genetically. And it

is a deep and dominant noetic instinct that has given us the far more

highly evolved evolutionism that now prevails in every department of

human knowledge. Thus, even those who oppose its recent applications to

man are only halting at the last step in a path that all have traveled

far and long.

The will-to-live, the struggle for survival, the _élan vital_,

libido, etc., are only new names given to the impelling forces of the

growth-urge in its higher stages; but these have become types and

symbols, if a bit anthropomorphic, of all the more basal and earlier

processes by which the homogeneous tends to differentiate itself.

Thus we may conceive the universe as being from the first in labor to

produce life. Everything that lives hungers to do so more intensely

and as for man “’tis life of which our nerves are scant, more life and

fuller--that we want.” Macrobiotism was the term used to designate the

lust to maximize our lives, to make them vivid and long, and to exhaust

all the possibilities of human experience; but, more especially, to

enlarge the pleasure field and narrow that of pain, which is arrestive.

We want to enjoy everything of which man’s estate is capable and we

want it here and now. In youth, particularly, we long for wealth,

knowledge, power, strength, fame, health, and beauty because these make

us glow and tingle with life. The things to which we ascribe worth and

value are those that enhance the joy of living. All of them are only

forms of the affirmation of the will-to-live or fulfillments of the

wish to be well, happy, and of consequence to ourselves and others.

Progress, reform, enlightenment, enterprise, efficiency, are terms

used as we climb the heights of the excelsior mount of promise. “More

life and fuller”--we want nothing else here or hereafter.

But death, ghastly, inevitable death, is our goal. It is the great

and universal negation of life and coregent with it of the world. All

that lives must die. How the death-thought sometimes springs like a

beast of prey from its ambush upon youth when life is most intense

and how it blights, sears, stings, and wounds but nevertheless charms

and fascinates! Here is the first of all dualisms, the greatest of

all contrasts, and the most universal of all conflicts. Death is

dissolution, defeat, retreat, abnegation, the processes of which begin

with life itself and even the old who still “carry on” know that they

must soon become carrion and that no funeral pomp or tomb can do more

than camouflage putridity in order to divert us from the horrid thought

to escape which the very concept of the soul itself was entified and

immortalized, just as all the devices of modesty and all the precepts

of sexual morality were evolved to divert us from the envisagement of

bare sex organs and acts. Death is not only the king of terrors but to

the genetic psychologist every fear is at bottom the fear of death,

for all the scores of phobias that prey upon man are of things and of

experiences that abate life. Death is thus a matter of infinite degrees

from the loss of a penny or a sore tooth to that of a friend or to our

own extinction. Freudians rightly ascribe many ailments of mind and

body to abnormalities and disharmonies of sex love, which presides

over the life of the race. But this now needs to be supplemented by

quite another and probably no less important psychoanalysis that will

show, when it is explored, that the fear of death or of life-abatement

for the individual is no whit less pervasive and dominant than are

love and hunger, which are so often said to rule the world. Only one

psychologist has, although but very partially, recognized this and his

findings are résuméd as follows.

W. Stekel says that not only has death played a great rôle in poetry,

folklore, myth, religion, and art, but it is a more or less disguised

theme of many dreams, especially those of neurotics.[211] He urges that

not only the death fear but the death wish, masked in very diverse

symbolic forms, is extremely common in the dreams of psychopaths.

He ascribes a thanatic meaning to very many factors that analytic

Freudians have usually interpreted as having only a sexual significance

and holds that the same mechanisms apply to both. He would have all

psychoanalysts look for the death thought, which he believes hardly

less common and quite as disguised and illusive as sex, not only in

dreams but in the illusions of the insane. To our bestial unconscious

self, which in these experiences escapes the censor, the ego is supreme

and finds its ultimate goal only in the destruction of others; and

if it does not kill those in our way, it pictures their death or

finds some way for their removal. This, indeed, is involved in the

realization of very many of our secret hopes. A woman loves a man whom

she cannot see and so she dreams that her child dies, for she knows

that he would attend the funeral and there see and also pity her. A man

has more or less unconsciously ceased to love his wife but suppresses

the realization of the fact from his waking consciousness and so dreams

of her as talking with his grandfather, long since dead. Another man in

a like state of mind dreamed that his wife suddenly and mysteriously

vanished.

The most common death symbols are going away, a journey, wandering;

or there may be still more remote focalization of the death wish upon

sandals, feet, footsteps, a path, going home, passing through a narrow

street or door, growing small; or even vehicles of any sort or anything

suggestive of transportation may signify death. Instead of a skeleton

or skull the dream may conceive death under the form of a rider,

huntsman upon a white or black horse, a deaf mute--suggestive of the

silence of the grave--or blindness, symbolic of its darkness; a doctor,

perhaps Doctor White or Doctor Black, a tailor cutting a thread, a

messenger, raven, black cat or dog, thirteen, a clergyman, priest,

weeping willow, a woodman felling a tree, a mower or reaper, a small

house or room, fire or flood.

Death in our unconscious is a wondrous masquerader and it very often

appears as sleep. The grave is a bed; the churchyard, a dormitory;

catacombs, berths. Water symbolism, too, is very common, for example,

the crossing of a dark river to the other shore, a boat, a narrow

strait, a stormy or a deep dark sea across which we pass to an island

or a new continent, the abode of the dead; and we speak of going out

with the ebb of the tide, shipwreck, stranding, etc. Death may also

appear as a fire that consumes or purifies. Processions and even crowds

may suggest burial or funerals; and so sometimes do festivals or even

weddings. A chest or trunk may mean a coffin, and graduation or even

promotion in school may stand for “passing out.” Sometimes the basis of

the primitive impulse to kill, which made man a wolf to his fellow-man,

may crop out in dreams or insanity without either camouflage or

repression and the sleeper tries poison, pistol, dagger, knife, etc.

Perhaps man still has in his unconscious, deep down at the bottom of

his soul, the sin of father-murder, as some now tell us, and reaction

to this brings remorse and later a sense of atonement from the original

sin and guilt for which man has for ages sought remission and fancied

resurrection. At any rate, many psychoneurotic souls seek to compensate

for instinctive death wishes by excessive tenderness to friends and

relatives, whose removal, they realize with horror, they have sometimes

caught themselves desiring. Nietzsche says that we should never

pity the old who are about to die; but under the law of bipolarity

the worship and even the tyranny of the dead hand, or mortmain, has

sometimes developed to such a degree that the dead have been or should

be made to die again to free us from their control.

If these views are at all correct, our larger, older unconscious soul

is still full of reverberations of suffering, inflicting, and observing

death. Man became man when he knew that he must die, and to defer or

escape death has been the basal motivation of all of his culture.

That he might not starve he accumulated property, the primitive form

of which, as Leternau has shown, was food. To escape death by the

rigors of climate he devised clothing and shelter. To avoid it by

wild beasts and human enemies he devised weapons and organized the

hunt and warfare. To keep himself alive when attacked by disease, the

medicine man and later the healing art were evolved. Now he insures

not only against death but against the partial death involved in

the loss of limbs, accident, and illness; he safeguards his person

and his goods by codes and law courts; and regulates diet, regimen,

mores, and social hygiene with a view to more and fuller life. All

these institutions are impelled by the instinct of self-preservation,

reinforced as it now is in man by the knowledge of his mortality. Man

may thus be redefined as the death-shunner. He does not and cannot

begin to realize how much he fears death and dreads it now and always

has. The reason for this is that while the knowledge that he must die

is so certain and ineluctable, the opposite impulse to forget, repress,

and deny this fact also has behind it the momentum of ages. The rank,

raw death-thought that our late dear ones are, and that we shall soon

become, masses of rotting putridity, most offensive of all things

to sense and sources of loathsome and mortal contagion, is so rarely

allowed to escape its inveterate censorship that we are all liable to

become neurotic toward it if it does so.

One envisagement of an erstwhile dear one who had become this most

loathsome of all objects drove Buddha to renounce his throne, wealth,

and family, and to become a mendicant and a seeker for, if not an

antidote at least a palliative for the awful death-thought. The great

religion he founded is essentially a religion of pity for man because

he is doomed to die. Its founder aspired to be the world’s great

consoler, accepting frankly the stark and gruesome thought of death

with all its horrifying implications.

Schopenhauer, who had a very morbid fear of death till near the close

of his life, when it seemed to quite abate, developed views about it

that have had immense influence throughout the world, especially in

Germany. He believed his views to be modern expressions of ancient

Hindu philosophy and also that all systems of philosophy are primarily

either comforts for or antidotes to death.[212] The power behind

creative evolution he calls the will-to-live, which is blind and

unreasonable. “It is not the knowing part of our ego that fears death,

but the _fuga mortis_ proceeds entirely and alone from the blind will

with which everything is filled.” Only the will as it exhibits itself

in the body is destroyed by death. We should no more dread the time

when we shall not be than we regret the time before birth when we were

not. The infinite time before us is no more dreadful than the infinite

time that preceded us. As of sleep, we may say: Where we are, death is

not; and where death is, we are not. “If one knocked on the graves and

asked the dead whether they wished to rise again, they would all shake

their heads.” We were enticed into life by the hope of more favorable

conditions of existence and death is disappointment and return to the

womb of nature, who is all the while entirely indifferent to both our

birth and death. Only small minds fear it. It is to the species what

sleep is to the individual. All that exists is worthy only of being

destroyed.

We come into life buoyant and happy but before leaving it have to pay

for all the joy by pain enough to compensate. True, the intellect,

which is an individual acquisition, is sloughed off by death, while

the will is given its freedom again. “The will of man, in itself

individual, separates itself in death from the intellect,” so that new

generations get new intellects. This is the truth that underlies the

doctrine of metempsychosis or palingenesis and is the faith of half

the world. Here, too, roots the philosophy of eternal recurrence. The

present generation in its inner metaphysical nature, that is, in its

will, is identical with every generation that has preceded, but we do

not recognize either our previous form of existence or the friends we

once knew in a former state because the intellect, with its memory

and perceptions, is only phenomenal and individual. Christianity gave

itself a needlessly hard task in representing the soul as created _de

novo_ and in failing to recognize that pre- and post-existence support

each other. “Death is the great reprimand which the will-to-live, or

more especially the egoism which is essential to this, receives through

the course of nature, and it may be conceived as a punishment for

our existence. It is the painful loosening of the knot which the act

of generation has tied with sexual pleasure, the violent destruction

coming from without of the fundamental error of our nature, the great

disillusion. We are at bottom something that ought not to be; therefore

we cease to be.” The loss of our individuality is thus only apparent

or phenomenal. “Death is the great opportunity to be no longer I.”

“During life the will of man is without freedom. Death looses his

bonds and gives him his true freedom which lies in his _esse_, not in

his _operari_.” Individuality is one-sided and “does not constitute

the inner kernel of our being” but is rather to be conceived as an

aberration of it. Thus death is a “_restitutio ad integrum_.” The wise

man wishes to die really and not merely apparently and so desires no

continuation of his personality. “The existence which we know we will

all give up; what we get instead of it is, in our eyes, nothing because

our existence with reference to that is nothing” (Nirvana).

It is an illusion to place the ego in consciousness because in fact

“my personal phenomenal existence is just as infinitely small a part

of my true nature as I am of the world.” “What is the loss of this

individuality to me who bear in me the possibility of innumerable

individualities?” Individuality is thus “a special error, a false step,

something that had better not be, nay something which it is the real

end of life to bring us back from.” Death is, thus, the awakening from

the dream of life, which is made up of trivialities and contradictions,

time being only one of the principles of individuation and having no

absolute existence but being merely a form of knowledge of it. Will

is the true thing itself. It is human nature that is perdurable.

It is true that we know only even our will as phenomenon and not

what it really and absolutely is in itself. Knowledge is entirely

distinct from will but the latter is always and everywhere primal. The

inveterate blunder of philosophers is to place the eternal element in

the intellect while in fact it lies solely in the universal will and

struggle to live, which is indestructible. We cannot know it because

of the essential limitations of consciousness _per se_, but in the

true being of things free from these forms the latter distinction

between the individual and the race disappears and the two are

identical. The continuation of the species is really the image of the

indestructibility of the individual.

We are lured into life by the hope of pleasure and retained in it by

fear of death; but both are equally illusions. It is strange that

the only thing in us that really fears death, namely, the will, is

precisely that which is never affected by it. “Thus, although the

individual consciousness does not survive death, yet that survives

it which alone struggles against it, namely, the will.” Neither the

intellect nor anything in it is indestructible for knowledge is only

secondary and derived from the objectivizations of the will. “The

intellect is dropped when it has served its purpose. Death and birth

are the constant renewal of the consciousness of the will, in itself

without end and without beginning, which alone is, as it were, the

substance of existence.” When in death the will is separated from the

intellect, it feels lost because it has so long depended on it, and

hence we fear. Life is only a heavy dream into which the will-to-live

has fallen. To the dying we may say, “Thou ceasest to be something

which thou hadst done better never to become.” Thus generations of

individuals are constantly reappearing, each fitted out with new

intellects. But every new form of life is only an assumption in another

form of the same will. Thus for Schopenhauer death is emancipation of

the will from its slavery to consciousness, a breaking down of the

wall it has erected between individuals, a regression to the ultimate

momentum that underlies evolution, so that new individuals made of the

same will, but disencumbered of the limitations life and mind impose,

are ever starting again. The race is immortal and even back of that

nature herself is still more so. The rhythm of life and death does

change the nature or the form of the eternal currents of existence.

But, leaving Schopenhauer, we must go back to the very beginnings of

humanity to realize all that the death-thought has done in the world

and to understand how man has always wrestled with it, tried to fight

it down, and devised so many ways and means of escaping from it.

Probably there was never a stage of human life so low that corpses

were not separated from the living and put away by themselves, so that

necrophilism hardly seems to be an atavistic psychic rudiment. Man

disposes of corpses by fire, water, or inhumation, towers of silence,

tombs, cemeteries and other homes set apart for them, while animals do

nothing of this kind. He alone cannot endure the spectacle of the fate

that nature provides and so shroud, coffin, flowers, monuments, shrubs,

trees, serve to divert attention from what is going on in the sepulchre

below.

But the great diversion, coeval with the beginning of corpse disposal,

was the conception of a soul separable from the body and surviving it,

and this is as old as animism. Other factors, of course, contributed to

the primitive belief in souls but when and wherever it arose it became

the chief distractor from and the great negator of the death-thought.

Now, as the body is not all, death is not complete and some part of

us, however tenuous, lives on. Let the carcass rot. We can now focus

our attention upon a spirit that outlives the flesh and this invention

is the chief panacea mankind has found against the most gruesome of

all its ills. In the very crudest and crassest form of belief in a

separable soul lie the promise and potency of all the quellers of

death-thoughts that have arisen from it; and so, when in the course of

time it came that the air was becoming as full of ghosts as the earth

was of corpses, they too had to be partitioned off from the living

and given their own abode beyond some river, sea, mountain or other

barrier, or beneath or above the earth. Whatever betide, the souls of

the departed must be driven and kept away by apotropic rites or by

sacrifices, the motto of which was _do ut abais_. Thus the living had

to herd the souls of the dead as they had their bodies in order that

they themselves might be free and sane. This was a great achievement,

which spiritists and psychic researchers tend to undo, for ghosts must

be laid just as bodies must be buried and the decomposing souls that

appear in seances are only less offensive to common sense than the

mouldering bodies are to sense.

Thus the fear of death has always called attention more strongly than

anything else to the soul and to psychology. Something leaves the

human body at death and has some power of independent existence; but

just as the body must be put away so ghosts must be laid or driven

off. In primitive culture the souls of the dead tend to linger near

the body. Sometimes widows are plunged into water to drown off the

souls of their dead husbands before they can marry again. Some tribes

turn out _en masse_ at stated times to frighten away the spirits, as

they do to get rid of vermin and rats or to clean house. Ghosts may be

burned in effigy. A window or hole in the roof must be opened for the

soul of the dead to escape and afterwards closed. The body is carried

several times around the house so that the soul cannot find its way

back. Those unjustly treated or not buried may return for vengeance.

Some think tombstones were primitively to hold down the souls of the

dead, just as the Tiber was turned and Attila buried in its bed and

it was then made to flow back again so as to keep him in the land

of spirits. In Gurney’s _Phantasms of the Living_ ghosts have their

chief power at or near the moment of death. It is one of the great

functions of the medicine man to dispose of the spirits of the dead and

many rites were devised to relegate them to some place appointed. The

living have their own domain and their own rights, which the dead must

respect. Only the witch makes havoc with this order by bringing back

the souls of the departed. Thus many kinds of barriers grew up between

the living and the dead--distance, oblivion, a stream, a belt of fire,

a deep chasm, a high divide, etc., so that the ghost world became hard

to get to or from. Thus, in general, man does not wish to go to the

realm of ghosts or to have them trespass upon his preserves. The New

Zealanders conceived such preserves for their dead over the precipice

of Reinga; the Fiji Islanders in their deep and fiery cañons; the

Sandwich Islanders in the subterranean abodes of Akea; the Kamchatkans

in an underground Elysium; the Indians in a Happy Hunting Ground; the

Greenlanders deep under the sea; the old Teutons in Walhalla, the

temple of the slain with its columns of spears and roof of shields; and

the Greeks and Romans in the realm of Pluto. There are many roads and

many ushers to conduct souls to their own home--sunbeams, the Milky

Way, paths through caverns, or over the rainbow bridge Bifröst; while

in Greece Charon and in Egypt Anubis carried souls across or through

the interval or partition. In all these ways man has sought to conceive

of the souls of the dead as effectively shepherded in folds of their

own.

Other studies show that there is a sense in which every incident of a

funeral tends to lay ghosts. If we simply hear at a distance of the

death of our friends, we are far more liable to receive visits from

their revenient spirits or dream of them as alive than if we have

actually seen them buried, because all the incidents of this ceremony

bring home, even to our unconscious selves, the fact that they are

really dead and gone from us, soul and body. Thus the tears, Scripture

reading, badges of mourning, and even the expense tend to reef in our

sense of our dead friend’s personality and to make it powerless to

project ghostly phantasms, because such ceremonials are cathartic and

preventative of all such hallucinations.

Thus, at this stage of the story of the immortality cult we have two

worlds well apart and the _Jenseits_, or the realm of death, can

perhaps be reached from the _Diesseits_ of the body only by a long and

dangerous journey that the psyche must take after leaving the soma to

moulder. Why has man always stood in such awe of the ghosts of even

his friends? The answer is not simple. It is partly because he wanted

to be free from their constraint. They included his parents, from

whose control even youth, at a certain stage, wants to be well rid.

Even his dearest ones might cherish some secret grudge that could now

be indulged in with impunity. As spirits they have certain unknown

new powers for mischief, whereas if they were enemies they could use

these powers for revenge. Toward the dead we generally have a bad

conscience. They can often read our secret motives while we cannot read

theirs. Thus man propitiated the pallid shades of Orcus by offerings

and sacrifices to abate their malevolence and secure their good-will.

However remotely he banished them, he has never been able to realize

the fact that they were utterly dead forever, soul as well as body.

All his will to rid himself of them has always stopped short of entire

fulfillment.

On the contrary, some of the great dead he has not only immortalized

but deified. Others may still come back at midnight in a dream or

vision at some weird haunted spot or in dire emergencies; or if

conjured by constraining spells of sufficient potency; perhaps if they

have not been rightly buried; or to deliver some pregnant message; or,

again, to pronounce a curse or benediction. It is generally hard for

them to get to us and also, having done so, to make their presence felt

and they are perhaps so exhausted by this effort that they can tell us

nothing; while it is given to but few mortals to visit their abode and

come back unscathed and to fewer yet it is given to bring back others

with them.

One of the most momentous steps in culture was taken by the ancient

Egyptians, whose religion, more than that of any other race, might,

in view of our recent knowledge of it, be called the cult of the dead

_par excellence_. The new step here taken consisted, in a word, in

making the postmortem status of the soul dependent upon virtue in this

life, thus enlisting the mighty power of the next world in behalf of

morals. Their famous book of the dead presupposes “a religious belief

in the actual revivification of the body,” because of which hoped-for

event the Egyptians took the greatest possible care to preserve and

afterwards to hide the bodies of the dead. This famous book treats of

the soul’s journey through Amenti, of the gods and other residents

there, with formulæ that will deliver the migrant thither from foes.

It contains prayers and hymns to the great gods intended to recommend

him to all of them; texts that must be inscribed on both the amulets

and bandages of the mummies; plan and arrangement of the mourning

chamber; the confession before the assessors; the scene where the heart

is weighed in the hall of Osiris; and a representation of the Elysian

fields, etc.

At death, relatives and mourners emerged from their houses to the

streets, placed mud upon their heads, fasted, and priests pronounced

an oration describing the good works of the great dead. There were

sometimes accusations and formal judgments by the forty elders as to

whether or not the burial should be in due form to convey the soul to

the gods. If the verdict was favorable, the gods were entreated to

admit him into the place reserved for the good; if not, he was deprived

of burial and must lie in his own house. If there were debts, the body

was given to creditors as a pledge until the sacred duty of redeeming

it was performed. The details of embalmment during the seventy-two days

of mourning were given in great profusion for each part of the body.

Each bandage had its text and the tomb must be made a proper dwelling

place for the ka, or soul, which will stay there as long as the body

does. Each process, pledget, and wrapping, had its name and there was

an elaborate trade in bitumen, which is the meaning of the word mummy.

The people felt great satisfaction in preserving and seeing the

simulated features of their ancestors, whom they came to regard in

some sense as contemporaneous. The welfare of the soul in the nether

world depended upon the completeness of all the funeral processes.

At the height of this central cult of Egypt, bulls, antelopes,

cats, crocodiles, ibis, hawk, frog, toad, scorpion, snake, fish,

hippopotamus, cow, lion, sphinx, were sacred to the gods and were

mummified, while the scarab was loaded down with symbolic meanings and

became central in all funeral rites. These ceremonials did not decline

until the third or fourth century of our era and only when Christianity

taught that the body would be given back in a changed and incorruptible

form, did it cease to be necessary to preserve it with drugs. This

necrophilism was all for the sake of the soul and both expressed and

strengthened belief in it. The cult of no race has been so saturated

with thanatism.

In all we know of the folk-soul there is no more striking illustration

of geneticism than the slow but sure establishment in recent years, by

comparing ancient myths and rites with the findings of excavations, of

the fact that in the great countries about the eastern Mediterranean,

especially Thrace, Asia Minor, and Egypt, the highest religious

consciousness of these races was expressed in elaborate cults of death

and resurrection, to have participated in which is said to have made

the celebrants over and initiated them into a new and higher life.

All was so secret and oath-bound that it found little representation,

save the most incidental allusions in history and literature, so

that it was reserved for modern research to uncover, reconstruct, and

understand its tremendous power.

Osiris, Persephone, Attis, the lover of the all-mother Cybele, Demeter

and Dionysius in the Eleusinian mysteries, Astar in her restoration of

Phanæus and many others, some with very high and full and some with

very scanty and fragmentary developments of the myth and cult, died

and perhaps went to Hades and came back bringing, now one, now many

with them. Typical of these ceremonies were the funereal sadness,

death dirge, wailings, active symbolic manifestations of grief and

despair, as if to attain the very acme of psychalgia. The great, good,

beautiful, divine hero is not only dead but has perhaps gone over

into the nether-world to defy death and the power of evil in their

stronghold and to conquer and bind them. There is, then, a phase of

painful, anxious, silent suspense. Will he succeed and return or will

he fail and never reappear? Then, when the tension is at the very

breaking-point, comes the thumic ebb, rebound, or reversal. Someone

whispers or cries aloud, “He has won and comes back,” and then all

is changed. Lights flare out in the darkness. Instead of tears and

sobs there is joy unrestrained, congratulations, embraces, and soon

frantic ecstasy, leaping, shouting, wine, song, revelry, bells,

fireworks, and sometimes in degenerate days, drunkenness and gluttony

with the sacramental elements and, in token of the triumphs of the

higher love, perhaps carnal debauch and revelry and always ecstasy and

inebriation with euphoria. Thus from three to six centuries B.C. men

strove to attain an immunity bath that should safeguard them from all

excessive pain and pleasure of life by participation in a pageantry or

dramatization of the eternal struggle between the greatest evil, death,

and the dread of it and the greatest joy of the most intense living,

thus ensuring their souls against being led captive by the pleasures

or pains of life, neither of which could be so extreme as these, by

keeping wide open the way from the extremest depression to the maximum

of exaltation.

Now all this rests in every case where it can be traced upon the

retreat of the sun and the death of the world, symbolized by winter

and the return of spring, reinforced, of course, by the alternations

of day and night. These deities or their prototypes were originally

gods of vegetation and their resurrections are vernal. The everlasting

bars that broke were snow and ice. The king of glory that came in when

the gates were lifted was spring, the conqueror, or dawn; and in these

secular changes of the year are found the first preformations of the

soul and the momentum that still subconsciously reinforces belief in a

life after death and supplies always an anodyne and often an antidote

for the death-fear.

It was on this basis that Christianity, especially as interpreted by

Paul, arose.[213] The culminating event in its story took place in the

few days between the burial of Jesus and the Pentecostal outburst.

Never in history, if it be history, and never in the subject story of

Mansoul, if this be the stage on which it was all accomplished, has

there been such an _au rebours_ from the nadir of depression of the

disciples, because the type-man of their race, who had grown to their

minds to be a fully diplomated God-man, was completely dead--and that

in shame and ignominy--and his corpse sealed up to moulder and rot in

a rock. Then came first the timid and then the plenary conviction that

He had conquered death and even hell, risen from the dead, walked and

conversed with friends in an attenuated body and had visibly ascended

to Heaven and God. Once fully convinced that this was all veritably

true, witnessed and attested by every sense and proof, the great

incubus of ages was thrown off and Death, the supreme terror, was

abolished. This brought an ecstasy or intoxication of joy called the

gift of the Holy Spirit, which possessed the lives of believers. The

ecstatic disciples shouted in weird unknown tongues until onlookers

thought them “full of new wine” (Acts 2:13, 15), gazed all day into

Heaven, henceforth the home of souls, and had to be exhorted to

cease their raving jubilations and go to work. In this exhilarating

new joy and freedom they, and later their successors, met the nine

persecutions, during which martyrdom became a passion and tender youths

and maidens could hardly be restrained from throwing themselves to the

wild beasts in the arena as the supreme crown and testimony to their

faith.

So, too, Christian asceticism followed from the same motive. This life

was mean and it mattered little how squalid it was, for it was only

a provisional, probationary moment compared to the eternal joy and

happiness where all real worths and values were confidently awaited

and compared to which those of earth were only dross. “There is no

death. What seems so is transition” to an infinitely higher state than

this. Never did the other world so absorb the power of this. Visions,

trances, homilies, poems, poetry and theology fitted the other world

out with every good and the chief offices of the church were to keep

the keys of the transcendental world and to wield its tremendous

sanctions in a way to dominate life and determine good and evil. Thus

never was the greatest _Verdrängung_ (repression) that ever oppressed

the human race so completely removed. The most essential claim of

Christianity is to have obviated the fear of death and made the king

of terrors into a good friend, if not into a boon companion, by this

the most masterly of all psychotherapies. If it be only a pragmatic

postulate or hypothesis or _Als Ob_ (As If) in Vaihinger’s sense,

it has worked well on the whole. Despite the ever present dangers of

transcendental selfishness that prompts only to save one’s own soul,

it is nevertheless the supreme demonstration of the “_Allmacht_”

(omnipotence) of the folksoul to minister to its own gravest diseases

and banish its greatest enemy, the death fear.

Thus Jesus is most widely known as the Man of the Cross and the

crucifix and even the fragments of the Cross are revered throughout

the Christian world. In no other religion has the death of the founder

had such prominence or efficacy. All the events of Holy Week have

been wrought out in great detail by tradition and art. Its story is

the world’s great masterpiece of pathos. The ecstasy of the passover

represents the culmination of the conquest of the death-fear by

Mansoul. The gift of the Holy Spirit was simply the conviction that

death itself was dead. For centuries preaching consisted of nothing

else than telling this story, which was the gospel of the gladdest of

all glad tidings. If Christ is not arisen, our faith is vain. To doubt

this has always been the most culpable of all heresies save that of

atheism itself.

Thus night, day; sleep, waking; autumn, spring--cadence the soul to

life and death. To these were added the higher symbolisms of sin and

holiness, illness and health, old age and rejuvenation, crushing

despair and triumphant hope, pessimism and optimism, with the latter

and not the former, as had often been the case before, final and

triumphant. Every known race of man initiates the young at puberty by

a ritualized pain and pleasure treatment that anticipates all this.

Youth was isolated, made to fast, scarified, tattooed, made to endure

extreme hardship, fatigue, sometimes partial burial; and then followed

remission, dance, feasting, perhaps orgies, only after which did the

young become full members of the tribe. Thus it is the inveterate

consensus of man through all his history that on the threshold of

mature life each individual should be oriented to its sovereign

master’s pain and pleasure by extreme experience with each in turn,

as if thereby to develop the power of elasticity, resilience, and

reaction, and to impress upon it throughout all its profoundest depths

the conviction that there is no defeat that should not be followed

by victory, no darkness so black as that which just precedes day, no

virtue like that which has just overcome evil, no passivity that will

not tend to react toward progressiveness. Indeed, this is a kind of

modulus that Christianity has impressed upon the entire occidental

world and it is this that has given it its courage, _élan_, and

enterprise. This is the chief imprint it has left upon the human soul,

even for those who have forgotten or denied all its tenets. Thus there

is a deep psychological sense in which all those who have not passed

rigorously through the experience that Christianity symbolizes by the

phrase “dying and rising with Jesus” are not initiated into life and

remain immature.

It is they who are more liable to be arrested in the trough of the

wave and to become discouraged or even melancholic and when they meet

the ills and hardships of life to flee from reality and seek some

refuge from its stern demands, because life in them has not conquered

death. They have not learned the great law of taking their pleasure and

pain in the things they ought and in a measure proportionate to each.

Indeed, modern psychotherapy is, for the most part, a new application

of this old mode of rescue for such souls in distress. Maeder[214] has

well and wisely found all its processes typified in Dante’s descent

into hell at the nethermost center of the earth where Satan himself

was; and his emergence a slow ascent up the purgatorial mount to the

infinite joys of paradise, first under the guidance of a human sage

and then led by Beatrice, a type of the supreme self-directing oracle

within. Dante, as everyone knows, called his poem a comedy because it

had a happy ending, but every modern novel and drama is constructed

according to the same formula that Christianity made current.

And who would read a story or see a play in which at the end the hero

or heroine did not achieve all they desired? And, again, why do we

love to experience all the desperate miseries to which our favorites

in story and on the stage are subjected before the happy dénouement

begins to show but that we are dead sure that in the end both the

villain and the virtuous will get their deserts. Indeed, at least one

German “pithiatric” psychiatrist prescribes a drastic experience of the

story of the Cross as a therapeutic method in certain cases. All this,

of course, has no reference to the question whether the story is all

fact or all fancy. The psychologist only studies its effects and its

inner mechanisms, which, save for those who have grown scrupulous under

the influence of modern controversy, are no more relevant than is the

historicity of Hamlet, Lear, or Portia to the audience in a theater.

In the patristic and in the Middle Ages, and even now, children and

neurotics have suffered almost to the point of stigmatization at any

realistic description or at the Ober-Ammergau dramatization of the

items of the crucifixion and feel with all the vicariousness that

sympathy can yield the thorns, bitter cup, nails, spear, etc., as we

have elsewhere shown in detail.[215]

But despite all the realistic pedagogy of the church the conviction of

another life is very rapidly fading from the modern consciousness and

even within the church itself is becoming an ineffective shadow of a

shade. Dr. George A. Gordon of the Old South Church, Boston, preaching

to the Congregational State Association in 1902, said: “We ministers

of the Lord Jesus Christ know as no other persons in the community

what a paralysis has come over intelligent and thinking people in

regard to the reality of the other life. So many doubt it; so few have

any strong confidence in regard to it.” This opinion, of course, was

posited not only on the confidences of the pastor’s study but also on

the confidences of the sick room and the death chamber. The tendency

has steadily increased and in funeral services we hear little of future

rewards and punishments and only of rest and peace. The old evidence

from death-beds is fallacious.

Sir William Osler[216] says:

I have careful records of about five hundred death-beds,

studied particularly with reference to the modes of death and

the sensations of the dying. The latter alone concerns us here.

Ninety suffered bodily pain or distress of one sort or another,

eleven showed mental apprehension, two positive terror, one

expressed spiritual exaltation, one bitter remorse. The

great majority gave no sign one way or the other; like their

birth, their death was a sleep and a forgetting. The Preacher

was right: in this matter man hath no preëminence over the

beast--“as the one dieth so dieth the other.”[217]

This belief persists, thus, only as a dead article of faith which men

no longer live by. It is a desiccated herbarium specimen and not a

living plant. If common observation did not sufficiently show this,

it has appeared very significantly and statistically in many recent

studies.[218] These showed that it diminishes progressively as we go

up the educational grades from high school through the university and

that, in general, the more cultivated man becomes, the less he believes

in any form of personal survival. If we had a similar investigation

of the old as compared with the young, my own partial studies incline

me to believe that this conviction of personal persistence beyond the

grave in general loses its force in senescence, as indeed it becomes

vital only at adolescence. If it be thus a creed that first blossoms

with the advent and tends to decay at the close of sexual life, we have

a new key for understanding both its function and its limitations.

True, it often persists, if only feebly, as with the momentum of a

spent force, in those who have not fully realized the senium, although

they all do not wish to be conserved as old as they really are but to

be rejuvenated as they once were.

In what follows we believe it will appear that upon analysis by

mechanisms akin to metonymy or synecdoche the vigor with which we have

clung to a belief in personal is really motivated by a deeper belief in

racial immortality and that in this latter, when the strophe of life is

succeeded by its antistrophe, the deeper faith tends to come out and

true sages realize what the soul meant by what the tenuous and falsetto

faculty called faith blindly groped its way toward.

The psychic factors that have so overdetermined the hope-wish of

personal immortality are as follows.

I. First is the desire to be remembered and esteemed by survivors.

The soul abhors oblivion somewhat as it does extinction. We wish

our friends not only to think of us but to think well of us. How

satisfying this is both to those who die and to those who live is

seen in Confucianism, where ancestor worship vicariates for belief

in personal immortality. It would almost seem that some of the good

and great would think more of the certainty of being canonized in due

time or perpetuated in the form of bronze or marble, or enrolled in

some temple of fame, than of personal immortality. At any rate, this

mundane, would in some degree compensate for the loss of celestial

perpetuation. Those who die in more or less full consciousness are

prone in their last moments to dwell upon their friends far more than

they do upon their own future state, as if the enshrinement they

chiefly sought were in the hearts and minds of those they leave behind.

Conversely, those who die alone, friendless, or with the execration

of survivors, cling the more to the rehabilitation that death itself

always tends to bring. On the basis of questionnaire data it would seem

that some about to die shudder more at the thought that others would

think they were totally extinct at death than from inwardly facing this

conviction for themselves. We want others to think we are enjoying the

best the universe can provide for its favorites, because in that case

they will think more highly of us since we have obtained the diploma

of the cosmos, that we have stood the test and have graduated _summa

cum laude_ from the terrestrial curriculum. Perhaps if we were early

Christians we should begin to “put on airs” and affect the manners

of a higher life here to impress our own valuation of ourselves upon

others. An ancient sage would rather that others thought him bad and

hated him than to be forgotten. Thus, in fine, if all knew that they

and all their good deeds would never fade from grateful memory of

their descendants, the conviction of a conscious personal existence

beyond the grave would lose one of its preforming determinants and

reinforcements. Therefore, those concerned to keep alive the fate and

hope of another life should foster any agency that keeps the memory of

the dead green. There really ought to be those who sum up effectively

the good lessons and meaning of every life when it closes, as a

kind of mundane judgment day so that no good influence be lost and

no warning fail to have its due effect--a court of the dead to pass

impartially upon each life as it sets out to sea. We censor books and

are beginning to test eugenic marriages, etc.; and so, if all knew that

upon their death an impartial tribunal would pass upon their lives in

the interests of the common weal, even if their verdict came late or

was given only to those most interested to know, ethical culture would

mark a great advance and the fear of death, instead of consoling itself

with belief in a future life, would be set to work in the interests of

normal lives here.

II. The second mundane surrogate for transcendental immortality is

doing things that will affect those who survive or will perpetuate our

will and works to those who know little or nothing of us or of our

name. Many last wills and testaments benefit those who knew nothing

of the donor. Many such have reared buildings, started movements,

built organizations, written books, invented, created works of art,

transformed the face of nature with an instinct of workmanship in

which all thought of self was merged. All our lives are thus greatly

influenced by those who are unknown. The egoistic element tends to

merge in a disinterested desire to make part of the world in some

way better for our having lived. Sometimes, indeed, anonymity is

actively striven for and the individuality of benefactors is hidden.

The phobia here is that we may have lived for naught. Here the idea

of God as an All-Discerner who sees virtue and vice, and rewards or

punishes in secret, coöperates. Such hidden service to the race, with

no thought of any compensation here or hereafter, has a unique charm

all its own. Scientific discoveries and beneficent inventions have

sometimes thus been given freely to all without any personal benefit

and without a personal label. True love sometimes lavishes every gift,

opportunity, and joy upon its object, with no stipulation of love or

gratitude or even recognition in its turn. Indeed, the possession of

wealth compels more or less attention to this field of the immortality

of influence. Unlike the pauper, the millionaire must forecast if he

would try to shape the future; and even if great givers attach their

names to their bequests, they know that to most who profit by them

their name will soon mean nothing. Jubal invented music and wandered

afar and when he came back he found a great festival in honor of his

art and of his name, but could not identify himself and was cast out

as an impostor. “Jubal’s fame and art filled all the sky, while Jubal

lonely laid him down to die,” supremely happy in the thought that he

had done the race a great service. To love and serve man is far higher

than to love and serve God, for we can do nothing for Him save in this

way and He needs and expects no help from us save this. Men come and

go but institutions and influence go on forever and those who start

them share their mundane deathlessness long after they are forgotten.

The cup of cold water illustrates the way of the gentleman or lady

born and bred, best attested by the desire that others be happy and

not that they themselves shine, be aggrandized, or have pleasure. This

is the most ideal conduct and appeals most strongly of all things to

the two great and ultimate standards of conduct, namely, honor and an

approving conscience. And as we achieve this we belong to the order of

the immortals and have triumphed over death. Desjardins, the founder of

the order of the new life, said in substance, “We are never so impelled

to snap our fingers in the face of death, to despise all its pomp and

horror, and to defy him to do his worst to body and soul, as when

we have just performed some such act of pure but passionate duty or

kindness.” Then only can we truly feel that “no evil can befall a good

man living or dead” and that the cosmos is moral to the core.

III. The third killer of the death-fear is children and posterity. To

die childless, knowing that our heredity that began with the amœba

and came down to us in an unbroken line dies, sharpens the sting of

death; while, on the other hand, to have many well born and well reared

children to rise up and call us blessed is one of the best antidotes

to its baleful psychic virus. As every one knows, every creature, man

included, lives about as long after the maximum power to propagate

as his offspring requires to become mature, so that the prolongation

of the period of immaturity means the prolongation of old age. Our

foremost duty is to transmit the sacred torch of life undimmed, to give

the maximal momentum and right direction to the nature and nurture of

offspring and to bring rising generations to their full maturity--that

is the highest criterion of an ever rising nation, including

civilization itself. The true parent lives not only in and for the

children but is the ancestor of their souls as well as of their bodies

and even his belief in a future life is a good or bad thing according

as it affects this. We feel this life incomplete, unfinished, and in

need of a supplement because its possibilities are as yet unrealized.

But we feel all this so much the less if we have children, while the

dread of the inevitable hour becomes that of a kind of second or dual

death for the childless because not only they but their line die in

them. Yet, on the other hand, they have less ties and so less to lose,

even though they may feel that they have, in a sense, lived in vain.

What parent was ever so world-weary, so strong a believer in postmortem

joy, that he would not rather live on here and see his children’s

children thrive than go on hence to any conceivable future state?

Those who leave offspring have had less time to develop morbid fears

of Lethe’s waters and if they expect to enter a great peace beyond,

they often find their chief joy in contemplating the fruits of their

loins on earth. We have seen how the death thought begins with the life

of sex and when the latter, if it has been normal and happy, comes

to an end, death has already begun and we are advancing deeper into

the shades of the dark valley, so that there is already less to lose.

Thus the death of the aged is less tragic and less inconsolable; and,

what is far more important, normal and cultured souls think and care

progressively less about another life.

IV. As for the good old doctrine of personal immortality, we cannot yet

escape the great law that the next life is compensatory. If men are

wretched here, the future becomes a refuge and grows not only actual

but attractive; while, conversely, if this life is rich and abounding,

the next tends to fade. No Christian age was ever so heedless of

the latter as our own. For most intelligent, prosperous women, and

especially men, it has lapsed to little more than a mere convention

or trope or fetish of an effete orthodoxy, and hell is at most

only a nightmare of the past, a childish phantom. Our actual _modus

vivendi_ is as if another life did not exist and death were the end. No

priestcraft can longer make men content with misery here in the hope of

compensation hereafter. All make the most and best of this life as if

it were all they were sure of and the motto of most believers is, “One

life at a time and this one now.” Only in a kind of secondary falsetto

Sunday consciousness do their thoughts turn to the future and does a

flickering hope that death is not the end appear. Extinction is black

by contrast in proportion as life is bright, happy, and absorbing, so

that the death dread is in some respects growing as our life becomes

richer, while it is at the same time being more and more banished from

consciousness. The chief attractiveness it now has is that it brings

rest and peace, for our tropes of it are more and more borrowed from

sleep. Thus if the idea of the negation of life was never so dreadful,

there was never such diversion from its closer envisagement. Thus,

too, although suppressed, it was never so potent a factor in governing

conduct, in improving hygiene, and providing for our offspring.

Although we take a chance at saving our souls by church membership it

is more and more bad form to discuss such matters. The real treasure

of the soul is laid up elsewhere than in heaven and the growing phobia

of death has now psychotherapies that are more and more effective.

Its power is far greater than we know and there are endless uses to

which it can yet be put in helping on the world’s work. Just as every

pain that depresses the vital spirits a few points on the scale of

euphoria, though they still remain far above zero, inclines to death,

so when life is at its optimum or flood-tide man is wonderfully immune

and recuperative in body and soul and the higher up the euphoric scale

we live, the more difficult it is to fear or even think of death.

Thus every legitimate fear of death is in a sense a life-preserver and

-prolonger. Our business is to live and not to die, to keep at the very

top of our condition and as far as possible from death, which is the

_summum malum_.

As to the relation of these four immortalities, nominal, influential,

plasmal, and orthodox, to each other, geneticism and the revelations

of the dynamism of the folk-soul have shed much new light. This may

be summarized in the statement that each of them is correlated with

all the others. Even he who is chiefly intent on perpetuating his name

is gratifying the deep instinct of transcending the limits of his

own personal life and to know that he is remembered is not without

consoling power even in the loss of property or if the conviction

arises that death means extinction; while, conversely, the prospect

of death in utter obscurity and of being completely forgotten tends

to reinforce any or all of the other immortalities. Were we to

rehabilitate hell in a modern sense, one of its horrors would be a

sentence of summary oblivion even to our friends: “Let his name be

forever taboo from mention or even from memory.” Of course, we shall

all sooner or later fall under this sentence despite all our pathetic

efforts to leave durable names behind.

As to anonymous influence, we are all sure of it to a degree, for the

world we are born into is made by those who preceded us and we help to

shape the future. In the social field we have endless illustrations

of a service that involves more or less emulation. The case in

point is a woman I knew who, having lived a most disinterested and

self-sacrificing life, when told that God would reward her in the next

world replied that she had never had either conviction or interest

about another life but had been too busy doing good to think about it.

If another life was in the order of things, all would be well, but

if annihilation were in store, that, too, would be just as welcome,

for she had found her pay in the satisfaction that each day’s work

brought. She had no children and wanted no outer recognition but was

content that her good deeds registered in others’ lives would follow

her and nothing else really mattered in her scheme of life. The point

is that in any other ages or environments the same instinct to enlarge

life might have found expression in either of the other forms. Some

even commit colossal crimes from a perverted form of _Geltung’s_

propensity. Because they cannot be potent for good they make themselves

so for evil. Anonymity is often a passion and finds outcrops not only

in religion and philosophy but also in science. Indeed, very much of

our civilization is composed of innumerable influences originated by

those whose names no history or _Acta Sanctorum_ have preserved and are

products of this deep basal trend in the human soul.

As to plasmal immortality, who knows how much of all the good done

in the world, if traced to its genetic roots, comes straight from

the original momentum of the instinct to make the world better for

posterity? To be sure, many of them are now broken erratic trends,

forgetful of their source, which is really a nest-building instinct

so irradiated and sublimated as to have lost orientation toward

both its origin and goal. The first constructions in the world were

nidifications. The first animal societies were stirpicultural. The

primal examples of self-sacrifice were for the young. Everything for

the world is good that squares with the functions of parenthood broadly

conceived, and all is bad that contravenes it. Psychotherapy is slowly

leading us to the astonishingly new insight that aberrations of the

life-transmitting, young-rearing propensities constitute very many

if not most of our mental abnormalities and that the rectification

of these functions has marvelous therapeutic efficiency. The race is

immortal, at least back to the first protozoan and indeed infinitely

beyond. And so, in the future, our race and it only is immortal to the

cosmic end. If we are tips of the twigs of a vast buried tree, these

twigs may become themselves roots of a yet greater one and even a

true superman may yet be born in the line of any of us. Thus, perhaps

all the other immortalities have their dynamogeny in the instincts of

parenthood.

As to the venerable belief in personal immortality, it was of course

selfishness transcendentalized so as to subordinate every other goal in

life to that of insuring our own happiness in a postmortem world. And

we have to-day only contempt for the squalid ascetic who made his life

miserable with the prime end of saving his own soul. But this crude

doctrine now stands forth in a very new light, for psychology shows it

to have been an ugly cyst or cast that enclosed and sheltered through

hard dark ages a precious and beauteous thing now just emerging. Its

content, as now revealed by analysis, is really man’s ineluctable

conviction that his own life was insignificant compared with its larger

meanings. Its real lesson is the subordination of the individual to

the greater whole toward which it gave him a correct _Einstellung_.

The close attachment of this doctrine to the ego was incorrect, for

the self is only a trope or metaphor of the race, but even this was

necessary at an earlier stage of race pedagogy. The transcendentality

ascribed to a self freed from the body was inevitable because that

was the only symbol by which the greater life of the race could be

described or comprehended. This belief stored up and conserved the

psychic promise and potency that is now again flowing over by transfer

to the other outcrops of the immortality instinct. It did not say what

it meant but was a pragmatic masterpiece, like so many great creations

of the folksoul. From the soul of the race it went straight home to

that of the individual and if it overstressed individuation for a time,

that, too, was at first needful. Had man not so long or so inevitably

believed in the great work of saving souls for the next world, he would

now be less effective in saving them from the evils of this world.

Had he not so cherished the conviction of a future heaven, he would

have lost much of the very energy of his soul, which now strives to

transform this world into a paradise and to populate it well. Thus

we have here a great field in which the laws of the transposition of

psychic trends into their kinetic equivalents, with very many different

forms but with persistence of identical content, are abundantly shown.

Man’s instinct has always been right and only his more superficial

conscious interpretations of it wrong.

Excess or defect of either of at least the first three immortalities

hypertrophies or dwarfs the others. The doctrine of conscious personal

survival was not only developed in unconscious conformity to this

principle but has an even more important pedagogic rôle for the young

than we had hitherto supposed. It is a pragmatic, artistic, and in no

sense a scientific fact. It utterly fails before the criteria of reason

but it has worked far better results than it could have done had these

requirements been alone regarded. It should not only be inculcated in

the young but has immense therapeutic value and to doubt this is only

another side illustration of the fact that cultivated adults have, the

world over and particularly in our country, unprecedentedly lost touch

with youth. Wherever the instincts of parenthood have not degenerated,

it must be clear that belief in future personal rewards and punishments

is a wholesome regulative of the lives of the young at a stage when

feeling and impulse are at their strongest and before reason is mature.

V. But there is a fifth form of immortality concept somewhat more apart

and uncorrelated with the others because newer and which comes from

the lure of the infinitesimal elements which science now finds at the

basis of the universe. What Dalton called atoms are now known to be

planetary systems of unimaginably minute corpuscles, one thousandth the

mass of an atom of hydrogen and, if they are solely electrical, “their

size must be one millionth of the linear dimensions of an atom,” or

relatively as a period on the printed page is to a large theater. Their

groupings constitute the chemical elements, so that matter is dynamic

to a degree we cannot conceive; and if so-called inorganic matter were

proven to contain germs of man and mind, this would add but little to

the new marvel of it. Matter is so active and subtle that the modern

conceptions of it that have come from the study of radium make us

feel that in a sense it is more spiritual than we have ever conceived

spirit itself to be. In this new world, which may be homogeneous with

mind, there is nothing like death anywhere to be found, and there is

an unbroken gradation from the corporative unity of electrons in an

atom up to the aggregations of man in society--and some think further

still. On this view death is not only non-existent but inconceivable.

True, more complex aggregations are reduced to simpler, more transient

to more permanent ones by it, but matter is not only not dead but

more intensely active than mind, so that the student of the ultimate

constitution of matter and the persistence of energy is in a sense

studying immortality, for this is the basis from which all orders of

animal nature arose and into which they will all be resolved.

Thus we are told that the new physics and chemistry are really

investigating death and regeneration. Our brains have little sense of

the marvelous and lawful processes that underlie all their activities.

While we have deemed evolution upward, there is another sense in

which it is a fall or a series of departures from a more durable and

elemental state, so that the gain is not all one way and catabolism

has its own attractions. If our lives affect these more permanent

electrons, this is survival and our ego is only part of a larger

continuum and is without end or beginning, although inconceivably

changed. The disintegration of our elements is the harvest-home back to

the cosmos from which we arose and may involve increase, not decrease,

to the sum total of good. This unselfing or “fusing with all we flow

from” is the direction in which love, whether of man, woman, animals,

or nature itself, as well as subordination of self to others and the

world, inclines us. Thus the conscious soul of man is swept by tides

of which our poor psychology as yet knows but little. Should such a

conception of the world become general, it could still use many of our

religious phrases, litanies, and symbols, but they would be inundated

with fresh meanings.

Jean Finot’s book[219] is marvelously learned, his view is unique, and

his style fascinating. It rapidly passed through fourteen editions and

was translated into many languages. He has almost nothing to say of

the soul, so that his volume might be entitled The Immortality of the

Body, or Death, the Great Illusion. He is bitter against theologians

for having made death such an all-dominating fear fetish in the world.

Tolstoi feared death all his life and writes, “Nothing is worse than

death, and when we consider that it is the inevitable end of all which

lives, we must also recognize that nothing is worse than life.” We

are told that the dread of it poisoned the life of Daudet and that

Zola trembled before the thought, “which obsessed him and caused him

nightmares and insomnia.” Renan says, “We may sacrifice all to truth

and good, which are the ends of life, and when we have done say,

‘Following the call of this interior siren we have reached the turn

where the rewards should lie. Oh, dreadful consoler, there is none!’

The philosophy which promised us the secret of death stammers excuses.”

Finot says, “A study of the evolution of death in the literature of the

past and to-day would become almost a history of literature itself.”

“The meditations of the fathers of the church and the monks of the

Middle Ages would shine particularly in this concert of vociferations

against death (‘If the slightest wound made on one finger can cause

so great a pain, what a horrible torture must be death, which is the

corruption or dissolution of the entire body’). We can look fixedly

neither at the sun nor at death.” Mme. de Sévigné says, “I am swallowed

up in the thoughts of death and find it so terrible that I hate life

more because it leads there.” It is no great consolation to say with

Renan, “We shall live by the trace which each of us leaves upon the

bosom of the infinite.” “All that lives is simply preparing for death.”

Belief in the perdurability of the soul is an alternative or placation,

a mirage. Only Confucianism and Taoism, if they had remained faithful

to the teachings of their creators, would close to their initiates all

possibilities of an after life; but they did not remain faithful. Even

Luther at the beginning of his campaign against Rome classed the dogma

of immortality of the soul as amongst “the monstrous fables which are

part of the Roman dung heap,” although he later became reconciled to it.