The very fear of death has killed many. “Sick persons who gather from

their doctor a presentiment of their term usually die before reaching

it.” The Western world should take heart from the millions of Buddhists

who view the prospect of death with enchantment. For subjective

idealists like Berkeley, who tell us that we can really know nothing

of the external world, death only deprives us of our conceptions and

we may really take consolation in the fact that our individuality is

composed of a whole hierarchy of more or less independent centers,

each of them made up of more complex units, until our ideas of

immortality merge with those of the conservation of energy.

Finot’s own views begin with his conception of “life in the coffin.”

“The underground existence of our body is far more animated than that

which is led above the earth.” “The fathers of some few human beings

upon the earth, we become the fathers of myriads of beings within its

depths,” and man perhaps gives more pleasure to his grave companions

than he ever enjoyed. He specifies nine species of insects, mostly

strikingly colored flies and coleoptera, which in regular order, one

after another, live upon and copulate, lay their eggs and rear their

maggots in corpses that are paradises to them, and he praises the work

of Francisco Redi who gave us “the admirable science of the entymology

of graves,” which now takes the place of the old ideas of Tartarus and

the Elysian fields. The foods brought to the tomb and frankly meant

for the dead, who were often conceived as hungry, were really consumed

by the “worms” that devour us. He tells us of a young woman caught

singing at a grave who, seeing that she was observed, remarked, “My

mother liked the Casta Diva.” The Greeks certainly did not believe that

those beneath the earth were quite quit of existence and perhaps the

first religion was that of the grave or tomb, which was a factor in the

birth of patriotism. The tomb is democratic because all bodies suffer

exactly the same fate if exposed alike to the elements. We may really

be interested in “our offspring” in the grave, for they, at least to

biologists, have more interest than do the poetic conceptions that we

become flowers, trees, or drifting clouds. We may thus “facilitate the

body’s immortal diffusion into immortal nature.”

Indeed, each of the thirty trillion cells of our body has its own

partial elemental life and, while we live, these partake in the

general life of the common wealth. Each has to eliminate waste, ingest

food, and their energy is such that “we should need a force of several

hundred thousand horsepower to kill simultaneously” and instantly all

these cells. Even molecules have infinitely little lives, each after

its own fashion. The chemist’s view of even putrefaction, which appeals

so repulsively to one of our senses, makes it interesting. Thus the

elements of our body carry on after what we call death, for life dwells

in each cell and even molecule. The very first germ was immortal.

True, we cannot analyze the consciousness of a cell, if it has one.

Back of all this there is the life of inanimate nature. Again, many

of the organs and elements of our body continue to live and grow, if

sufficiently nourished, after the death of the body as a whole, though

a part does not have the power, as in some animals, of regenerating the

whole. The heart has been revived after thirty hours of death. Bits of

skin have been removed and preserved and grafted on to other bodies

six months after detachment and this process might go on indefinitely,

the same skin being transferred for generations to new bodies. True,

organs, like cells, lose their subordination at what we call death.[220]

At this point Finot introduces a very long argument against cremation

because it interferes with all these processes. He seems to have a

rancor against it that is somewhat like that of the Western believer in

personal immortality against Oriental pantheism, which holds that the

soul melts into the universe like a drop into the ocean. He finds great

comfort in the scientific phenomena, which he résumés as “the life of

so-called inanimate matter,” which, we are coming to realize, is by no

means dead. Indeed, molecules lead an intensely active life, changing

their place, perhaps vibrating, traveling, grouping themselves in very

many different ways, so that metals have a kind of physiology and even

therapy of their own. Perhaps, indeed, crystallized matter represents

the most perfect and stable arrangement to which the particles of the

body are susceptible. Thermodynamics shows us that motion and heat

are related in metals as in our bodies. Metals suffer fatigue and

recuperate from rest, as Bosé has shown. Perhaps even the soul of life

is here and we are just beginning to know the powers of ferments, which

seem on the borderline between the organic and inorganic. Both are

subject to evolution.

Again, there is no sharp line between animal and vegetable life.

Protoplasms are as different or must be so as individuals. Both have

variability. Both the cabbage and the rat, as standard biological

experiments show, breathe. Plants are affected by narcotics. Sick

vegetables respond to some of the same medicaments that animals do,

while some actually have a sensorium. Philosophers like Descartes have

tried to break down all the identities between man and animals and

give the former a unique place in the universe. Fechner, who believed

plants besouled, and even Haeckel knew better, although Wundt insisted

to the last that “all psychic activity is conscious.” The unconscious,

which comparative psychology must admit, opens the door downward toward

the very dawn of life, so that perhaps even unicellular organisms have

elemental souls. Very many of the earlier philosophers, when human

thought was fresh and untrammeled by tradition, insisted on the unity

of life and mind. For a long period animals were thought to be moral

beings and courts were held in which they were tried. Indeed, we may

conclude that “a living being is always living” and back of this life

merges by imperceptible gradations into the larger life of the cosmos.

All religion, says Finot, is based on a belief in a soul independent

of the body and while so many Western philosophers have insisted on

a perdurable and even immaterial personality, there has always been

a background of thought repressed by current opinion to the contrary

view, till we have developed a kind of “sentiment of the end.” In point

of fact, those near death have first a feeling of beatitude, then

complete insensibility to the outer world and to pain, and lastly great

rapidity of thought, so that dying is a kind of beatitude. Finot thinks

modern biology by its experiments, not on spontaneous generation but on

the control of fertilization, has gone some way toward realizing the

goal of the alchemists, which was to create homunculi; and he wonders

whether man may not sometime be thus able to control the very sources

of life.

Alchemy, which for centuries was the mystic philosophy of the wise

but has seemed to modern minds only a mass of felted symbols that

could never be resolved except in the new light shed upon it by the

studies of A. E. Hitchcock, Silberer, and others, represents in one

of its aspects a unique trend of the quest for immortality. The lower

alchemist strove to reduce the baser metals back to a common element,

menstruum, or materia prima, for which there were fifty mythological

expressions, and then and there to transmute them into the purest and

the most precious of all metals, gold. The later higher alchemy left

all this behind and strove to bring not only life but the homunculus

itself out of various rotting putridities or out of decomposition

backward and downward to evolve something endowed with exceptional

vitality. Near this devolutive pole lie the deep sources of creative

energy, the antæus touch of which brings regeneration. So regression to

the “within” causes the soul to arise from the body and the spirit from

the soul. It is like the transmutation of experience into heredity or

individuality reinforcing itself by contact with the mighty spirit of

the race. The personal is united with the world’s will or with that

of God and is transmuted into it. Symbols are always a product of

“apperceptive insufficiency” but the higher anagogic meaning of many

of them in the hermetic field is that askesis, sacrifice, the death of

egoism, and renunciation lead to the great treasure, the new light,

self-impregnation with Pneuma, a new birth, joy, the _summum bonum_,

etc. To some alchemists this goal was like that of the Yogi cult,

depersonalization if not annihilation, while to others it was more like

a distillation of a quintessential supersoul from its sarcous base, as

mercury and even lead are transmuted into gold. Palingenesis is the

purpose not only of experimentation but of the prayer and meditation

that must precede it. In the sex symbolisms the subject fuses with the

object as the male and female principle unite in conjugation. Old age

is regression or retreat toward the fountain heads of life and the new

life may be formed within the old body before its collapse, so that

there is no break of either conscious or physical continuity. Where and

when there is most death, there is also most life, for the two are true

reciprocals.

But the alchemists did not make gold nor evolve an homunculus nor

achieve even spontaneous generation according to our criteria.

Diligently as they sought for them, they never found the philosopher’s

stone, the fountain of youth, or the _elixir vitæ_. Active as were

their immortal longings and intricate as were their products, they

were all abortive. They groped toward chemistry and metallurgy and

these came in due time, although they were no more products of it than

the modern building trades are of freemasonry. But their quest for a

transmortal life neither achieved nor was followed by any after results

that seem to us to be of value.

Modern astronomy tells us that the stellar universe is at least

250,000 light years in diameter, so that if one of the remoter stars

went out we should not know it for that number of years. The extensions

outside the range of even our Euclidean axioms which we now know

were only provisional and where time is only a fourth dimension of

space (Einstein); suns a million times larger than ours; thousands of

millions of celestial bodies in all stages of evolution and devolution,

yet all composed of nearly the same chemical elements as our tiny

planet and all following the same laws of gravity, light, heat, the

conservation of energy through all its transformations so that none

of it is ever or anywhere lost, with illustrations of every stage of

planetary development and dissolution, some of them probably evolving

life and creatures far higher than man:--it is out of this universe

that our world and we came and back into it we shall both be resolved

sooner or later. As we advance in life we turn our backs to all this

but when the retreat begins we face the stupendous whole of it again

and death is freedom from the progressive limitations involved in

individuation and a return home to the One and All. It is restoration,

resumption, emancipation, diffusion, reversion, and all worlds and

systems as well as men are thus destined to die of old age, perhaps

by collision or other accident, since time is as boundless as space

and the history of our solar system is but a single tick of the cosmic

clock-work which we know is always running down even though it may

have the power of eternally winding itself up again. If “our hearts

like muffled drums are beating funeral marches to the grave,” so is

also the heart of the universe. As we “join the majority” when we die,

so do suns that become extinct and those we see with the strongest

telescope may be but a handful compared to those that within its range

have suffered “entropy.” Thus the true death thought is the transcender

of all horizons and its muse points us straight to infinity as our

goal. Along with this there is a deep conviction that there is no

void or vacuum but that even though the existence of universal ether

is now doubted by certain experts the cosmos is somehow a plenum

full to repletion of being as it is of energy and teeming with the

possibilities of even life far richer and more abundant than we can

conceive. Thus we see again that personality is arrest, exclusion from

all this, which ceases at death when we reënter the great current

that sweeps onward all that is. Thus the solar system, earth, man,

and finally our own ego involve descent as from a _summum_ genus

to an _infima_ species. This progressive individuation is at every

step arrest which death removes and reverses, so that the energies

which during all our lives have held up and hampered us by so many

disharmonies and conflicts are gone forever.

VI. Next come the noetic theories of immortality. Gnostics, illuminati,

mystics, logicians of the categories, and all who seek salvation

and perdurability by the noetic way assume that as the soul leaves

individual things and persons and passes to species, to genera, and

on to the abstract and unconditioned, certainty increases until it

tends to become cataleptic in the old Stoic sense. The ultimate goal

is pure absolute being, knowledge of which brings ecstasy, love of,

and identification with it. Self is merged and lost in the infinite.

Negatively this seems not merely death but annihilation. It should

be regarded positively as the great affirmation and realization of

true existence and the proper and only true finish and completion of

human life, the last stage of psychogenesis. It is involution, the

at last fully developed counterpart and complement of evolution. To

this the genetic life impulse with which each of us starts will take

us if its trajectory suffers no arrest and does not swerve from its

proper course. This ontological immortality is Oriental, eleatic, and

frankly pantheistic. It is a product not only of old thinkers but

of old races and civilizations. It goes with retirement from and not

with useful advent into the world. Those who begin this involution

by, for example, knowing that they know, knowing that they know they

know, etc., find that at the mathematical point when they reach the

center of the involucre, the universe bursts in upon them. By tracing

self-consciousness to its deepest root all that is conscious is lost in

an unconscious that is utterly without bounds or orientation.

The religious instinct has always been vastly wiser than it knew

but it always needs reconstruction, often radical in form. Thus, if

at death the psyche is disintegrated as much as the body is and the

disintegration goes down into molecules or any of the basal forms of

energy, death is not absolute. The difference is like that between the

mountains and the sea level when compared with that from the surface

of the earth to its center. Hering and Simon tell us that what we have

called heredity is really memory. The world beyond is like an ocean

to an ant accustomed to its own ant-hill but floating out to sea on a

straw. The subconscious is greater than the conscious and we do not

dread this in sleep and so biology is greater than psychology, just

as folklore is broader than psychology or philosophy. We want to feel

ultimately forces and powers that are not our own, to be inundated with

a larger strength, to fall back into everlasting arms. Thus, back of

Christianity is an older, larger, meta-Christian, meta-human religion

found in the love of nature, and old men ought to grow progressively

interested first in animals, then in plants, then in the inanimate

world, with a view to the ending of life in a pantheistic absorption.

This view has had another great reinforcement of late from studies

that originated with Durkheim and Lévy-Brühl, from which it appears

that back of primitive animism there are always found traces of some

kind of mana cult, which is not unlike that of Om in India. Man is

anthropic or upward-gazing. We address the sky not as “our father in

heaven” but as a vastated navel-gazing orientation toward the source

of all things. Schleiermacher, who conceived religion as absolute

dependence and in his earlier writings made it pantheistic at root,

sought to console a young widow who said that her whole soul went out

to her dead husband and she could not possibly feel that he would be

resolved back into the great One-and-All by saying that this should

bring her no grief for it meant merging into the highest life of the

infinite whole and no longer setting up for self--“If he is now living

in God and you love him eternally in God as you loved and knew God in

him, can you think of anything sublimer or anything more glorious? Is

not this the highest end of love?” etc. Mailander held that pantheistic

divinity died in giving birth to the world and that all its processes

are self-destructive, pointing ultimately to a Nirvana; that everything

is traveling the road to death, the desire for which is really the

universal motive, so that we are unconsciously seeking this kind of

absorptive death in all we do or say. Man’s business is to know the

great whole and thus he will enjoy the prospect of annihilation and

attain the full and glorious will to die. We must be resolved back into

primal energy, which is nothing only in the sense that it is too great

to be defined.

Meyer-Denfey urges that no part of the soul can be lost any more than

can any element of the body and that the fuller our life has been

the more of these modifications of cosmic matter and energy does it

effect. Pantheism has resources for meeting the death fear which the

Western world knows little of. It should also be noted that to the

psychologist consolations drawn from the persistency of the elements

of our body in the above sense are related to world-soul theories

merely by ambivalent variance. Psychogenetically there is little

difference between concepts of absolute mind back of all conscious and

sentient beings and those of preëxisting energy, stress, nebulæ, or

any other mother-lye of the universe. The Schiller-James view is that

matter limits the expression of the absolute mind back of all. Our

brain is a thin place in the veil through which the great life of soul

breaks into the world but always in restricted forms. The philosopher,

Schelling, thought mind and nature at root identical but Schiller is

more dualistic and regards the body as a “mechanism for inhibiting

consciousness.” “With our brains we are able to forget.”

Still, the mind is in rapport, however dim, in contact, if not indeed

continuous with a larger consciousness of unknown and perhaps universal

scope that is disclosed to us in our subliminal self. On this view the

brain does not secrete thought but obstructs it like a bad conductor,

so that when the thought currents of the great Autos make the nerves

glow, the phosphorescence or incandescence caused by the resistance

of the brain is what appears to our fragmentary subliminal mind as

consciousness. Ideation is thus a transmissive function of the brain

and when it perishes, personality, which means limitation, is dissolved

into the larger life of the whole. Mind stuff, like force and matter,

may preëxist in minute and disseminated fragments, which our bodies

mass and our brains combine into what we call souls. And on this view

these fragmentary psychic elements, whether they be combined in a human

or even animal ego or not, must also be immortal for all the reasons we

are. Perhaps the highest combinations may be grouped into yet higher

beings, which would be resolved back again into us on their way to more

elemental states.

If our soul is the mouthpiece of an absolute soul, as the word

_persona_ is often interpreted to imply, inadequate though it be it is

still to those lower mausolized souls somewhat as the more definite

and absolute soul is to us; and as their voices are absorbed in us so

we are in infinite being. We are bundles, vincula, or parentheses of

more ultimate elements that preceded and will survive us, but we are

somehow helping these immortal components on to their own goal, so

that the real value of life is theirs and not ours. But if subliminal

functions are most immortal, the dissolution of our consciousness

might be desiderated, for organization obscures the ultimate reals

and the massing of lower monads involves a larger sum of arrest, so

that perhaps our lives really hinder rather than help on the cosmic

process of evolution or redemption. As in chemistry the more complex

combinations are unstable and tend to disintegrate, so the higher

psychic compounds we cause and that make our minds persist a while

will be resolved into lower and simpler ones that outlast them. Thus,

at best the problem and conduct of our earthly life would be akin to

that of a careful breeder who would leave permanent variations in the

vegetable and animal species to be cultivated that would persist long

after he himself is forgotten. If this soul of the world is conscious,

as we are, death is lapsing down the evolutionary scale. But this

ideolatry of consciousness is passing. And if the unconscious is higher

and the basal cosmic energies are greater, more perfect, and more

important than our psyche and soma, then we have lost our sense of

direction and devolution is really upward.

VII. As to the philosophic attempts to prove the doctrine of personal

immortality, no genetic psychologist can to-day despise even the most

proletarian form of belief in a principle that survives death. Although

the time is past when the old theological arguments for immortality

are convincing, save to those whose religious development has been

arrested, they will always deserve respect not only because they have

done so much to sustain great souls in the past but because, as we now

interpret them, they mean a larger and more complete life for man here

in the future. Disregarding these, we must, however, briefly pass in

review the chief views that the philosophic minds have evolved that the

soul lives on.

We begin with Plato, who finds not one but many proofs of it. In the

_Phaedrus_ he finds it in the spontaneity and power of self-motion of

the soul. In the _Timaeus_ he finds it in the fact that the soul is

the _chef d’œuvre_ of the world, so wondrous and beautiful that the

gods would and could not really let it die. Elsewhere he finds proof

of its immortality in the soul’s struggle for knowledge, the impulse

to progress to ever more general ideas, which, as we have seen, he

thought akin to death. Again, he deemed it immortal because he thought

no sin or evil could kill it. Once more, as all that live must die,

so the correlate must hold that all the dead live or, as Cebes puts

it, the latter is a necessary postulate to the idea of life. The soul,

too, is simple and undecomposable and so can never be destroyed. His

doctrine of reminiscence was that we remember previous incarnations,

preëxistence being long thought to be as necessary and as demonstrable

as postexistence. Plato found Greek life and mind confused and sought

by cross-examination and induction in the psychic field to attain a

few fixed ideas that the soul could anchor to in the sophistic flux,

minds be drawn together, and Greece thus saved from disintegration

as the old theological views crumbled. The products of all this

Socratic midwifery were basal concepts, the eternal patterns of which

by participation in things made them real. These Aristotle and many

later writers elaborated and defined as a table of categories and in

nature they were interpreted as _summa genera_ or fixed species or

types. It was the persistence of belief in these that both Darwin and

Locke attacked. The species and entities of the scholastics, which

underlay even the doctrine of the Eucharist, and not only nativism and

apriorism but all forms of philosophic realism, as well as absolutism,

metaphysics, ontology, rational transcendentalism, the passion for

deducing conclusions from presuppositionless data elsewhere derived,

and even the Stoic and Kantian conscience--all rest upon the assumption

of definite and abiding norms in nature or mind that are simple and

undecomposable by psychic analysis and from which all thinking starts

and in which it ends. Thus the doctrine of ideas has been the key not

only to philosophic orthodoxy but to much of the thought and most

of the great controversies of the world. Not only theologians but

Descartes, Spinoza, Fichte, Hegel, and also no less but in a different

manner, mystics, illuminati, rationalists, scientists in their quest

for constants and laws of nature, and even the codifiers of Roman law,

were all inspired by belief in attaining ultimate principles, and all

these were looking toward immortality.

Now, all noetic theories of immortality agree in holding that it

is attained when the intellect intuits or grasps one or more of

these ultimate truths and thus partakes of or participates in their

perdurability. They are so high and abstract that Plato considered

philosophy not only as the withdrawal from sense and the world toward

the solitariness of the infinite but as the active practice of death.

Hegel thought them the inner constitution of the mind of God, and to

know God is eternal life. The great bliss and peace of what Aristotle

described and praised as the theoretic life have thus often been

interpreted as a foretaste of heaven. Thus the love and struggle

for knowledge have been said to be motivated by the desire for an

incorporeal existence.

Wordsworth’s “truths that wake to perish never,” “high instincts before

which our mortal nature trembles like a guilty thing surprised,” is

based upon the doctrine of reminiscence. When the soul has attained

the unconditioned, and even when it experiences a love that is felt to

be stronger than death, or a pure autonomous oughtness, or conceives

the idea of God as the greatest and best being, which Descartes said

it could not do if such a being did not exist; when it envisages a

beauty that is transcending and seems to take the mind above time and

space into pure being and whenever we reach generalizations of such a

high degree that they include soul and body, life and death, and all

things else, man has been told in countless ways that he was becoming

immortal, that in such experiences the soul was outsoaring mortality,

as if the subject were parasiting on to its object, absorbed in ecstasy

of contemplation, till the subject and object fused in a unique way.

The soul that harbors such great thoughts and has passed through such

experiences thereby acquires a quality of permanence, whether it acts

by _apperçus_ or by severe logical ratiocination.

All such arguments, however, from their very nature are fallacious.

Knowledge is not participation in this sense. A being of low may know

one of a far higher order, but the chasm between subject and object

remains unbridged. To know beauty and power is not to attain them. The

further epistemological assumption that the world of ideas is itself

a projection, just as subjective idealism asserted the world of sense

to be, would also be necessary. But even this colossal postulate would

not suffice for a world that is all eject and ends as well as begins

with man. On this hypothesis the mind creates its own saving principle

and was saved by its products. Indeed, such a method begs the whole

question, which becomes again one of fact. Does or does not such a

power exist in our psychic nature? The only possible support for such

a hypothesis is the degree of coherence of its own parts with each

other and with experience. All such arguments, however, are really

pantheistic and leave little room for personality but are rather

destructive of it. Nothing individual can persist in the absolute for

in it all distinctions are merged.

Connected with this view is that which assumes that because we have the

idea of or the wish for immortality and because this is so generally

implanted in human nature, the latter is a lie if it is not a fact. Of

this class of proofs the most common are those that urge it because

of its practical utility for morality. In the other-worldness of

early Christian centuries, where eschatology was more developed than

cosmology, fear of hell and hope of heaven performed the greatest

service for virtue and its progress was advanced by these artificial

and extraneous supports. The danger is lest they have undue weight and

be relied on long after their function should have been progressively

replaced by the conception of virtue as its own reward. Luther thought

that the chief motive of morality would be gone if there were no future

life. Andrews Naughton said there could be no religion without it.

Theodore Parker said: “If I perish in death I know no law but passion.”

Chalmers urged that without it God would be stripped of wisdom,

authority, and honor. Walt Whitman exclaimed: “If rats and maggots end

us, then alarum! for we are betrayed.” Human nature has been called

a lie and God a liar if there is no future life and those who do not

desire it have been called in reality already dead. It is a potent

motive to escape eternal pain and secure eternal bliss for our own ego

hereafter. “If,” says one, “our souls do not hold the latchstring of

a new world’s wicket, then goodbye, put out the lights, ring down the

curtain. We have had our turn and it is all so nauseating that even

suicide is a welcome spectacle.” One need only glance over a few of the

five thousand titles of Alger’s very incomplete and quite out-of-date

bibliography upon the subject to be able to draw up a long list of

desperate things that would happen in the world and that individual

writers would do, or of imprecations on God’s character and the nature

of the universe, if it were proven false or if none of the strands in

the complex net of theories and demonstrations that have been flung to

the other shore should hold. All virtues, piety, honor, integrity, and

civilization itself would perish, men become brutes, God a malign fiend

gloating over the unbridled lust and supreme selfishness that would

slowly sweep man from the earth, etc.

The most vivid portraitures of heaven and hell have been made. Isaac

Taylor deemed the sun heaven although a later contemporary thought it

hell, adding that its dark spots were the souls of the damned. The

great comets in the last century were called hell making its rounds

to gather its victims. The old Saxon catechist pronounced the setting

sun red because it looked on hell. Thus the flood of evil now held in

restraint would deluge the earth and chaos break loose if, when pay day

came, men found a future life of rewards and punishments bankrupt.

All this assumes that it is proven because it has aided virtue

and because a belief so general must be true. But even the good

Bishop Butler argued that men must be prepared to find themselves

misled--“Light deceives, why not life?” From childhood to the grave,

from savagery to the present, man’s history has been one of disillusion

and disenchantment. His mind has been far more fertile of error than of

truth. Few of his wants have been satisfied and no wise man would feel

secure in arguing from desire to attainment. The impetuous diathesis of

the West may have grown neurotic as it became free, rich, and powerful,

but it is all unavailing. Despite all that pragmatism can say, truth

is very different from utility. In view of all this we might, with

Bishop Courtney, refute all proofs of post-mortem existence, insisting

that all men die, body and soul, and are extinguished but at some

appointed time their spirits are resurrected by the power of God. The

other alternative is more familiar. “If our ship never reaches port and

if there be no haven, it becomes us to keep all taut and bright, sails

set, and to maintain discipline.” All we want even of a future life is

opportunity for virtue.

A special form of this argument from ideas to reality was developed

by Kant. Reason always seeks the unconditioned by its very nature and

nothing but the _summum bonum_ will satisfy it. This includes two

things, perfection and happiness, the two great desires of the ages.

The ancients thought each implied the other. The old Hebrews believed

that righteousness brought happiness in this world. The Stoics held

that the highest joy was implicit in the practice of virtue from its

very nature, while the Epicureans taught, conversely, that the highest

happiness involved virtue. This does not suffice. The unity between

the two must not be analytic but synthetic and causal. That is, each

must bring out the other. In the world of experience this is not true

and yet they belong together and so must find each other in a higher

intelligible world.

Thus the very idea of immortality is the greatest perfection joined

to the greatest happiness. They must be united completely. Whereas in

the phenomenal world their development and union are only partial,

there must be an infinite progression to bring them completely together

because a being destined for perfection cannot be arrested. If this

were the case there would be no perfect virtue and we are immortal

because the latter must be attainable. Thus, heaven and hell must rise

and fall together. True, the sense of justice by which we judge life,

the drama, literature, and novels demands that the good always get

their reward and the bad their punishment. This instinct is very deep

and underlies law and society but we have no warrant for believing

that the universe is built upon this principle. There is abundant

evidence to the contrary. Neither intellectual intuition nor conscience

are constitutive principles. Moreover, only the Western world demands

personal immortality, so that the conviction that no evil can befall

a good man is only a sentiment or postulate. Who knows but what it is

only the _hubris_ or fatal pride of man, which the gods would destroy,

that has impelled him to believe that his wishes, ideas, or even his

ego itself are too good to be allowed to perish.

Pluralistic views of immortality may be very roughly grouped together.

Howison,[221] for example, makes pluralism absolute by advocating an

eternal or metaphysical world of many minds, all self-active, the

items and orders of experience of which constitute real existence,

even time and space. About everything is logically implicit in their

self-developing consciousness, and the recognition of each by the

other constitutes the moral order. This makes an eternal republic or

city of God, who is “the fulfilled type of their mind and the living

bond of their union.” They control the natural world, are sources of

law, and are free, for their essence is mutual relation. In the world

of spirits God is not solitary and there is room for the freedom of

all. The joint movement that we call evolution is transient and can

never enter the real world. Creation is not an event with a date but a

metaphor. The key of everything is conscience and teleology. This view

differs from Leibnitz’s monadology only in denying grades and castes in

these figurations of God. It makes objects in nature the manifestations

of mental activity and therefore just as real as they. So the eternal

reality of the individual is the supreme fact.

Royce, too, does not teach a psychology without a soul.

Individualities are basal and teleological. They are aspects of the

absolute life and therefore have a meaning. But in this present life,

much as we strive to know and love individuals, there are no true

individuals which our present minds can know or express. As we strive,

therefore, to find real others, we realize that all we know of them

is but a system of hints of an individuality not now revealed to us

which cannot be represented by a consciousness that is made up of our

own limited experience. Therefore the real individualities we loyally

seek to express get from the absolute viewpoint their final expression

in a life that is conscious, the only life that idealism recognizes

and that in its meaning, but not in time and space, is continuous with

the fragmentary, flickering existence wherein we now see so dimly our

relations to God and to eternal truth.[222]

This argument, so dear to and so ably advocated by its author, is

obviously suggested by the Kantian postulate. Is it true in fact,

however, that the closest companionship, friendship, and even love

do not take us to the real individuality of the objects of these

impulsions? Though man has always been gregarious and social, it would

seem that this instinct is abortive if Royce is correct and also that

the reality of such an individuality as he postulates would not be

conscious but rather trans-conscious or frankly unconscious.

Miss Calkins in her various writings, although not consciously intent

upon proving immortality, belongs to this group. The constant sense

of self, which she postulates in the teeth of the modern studies of

multiple personality, harks back to Descartes and she seems to be a

good illustration of Royce’s persistent quest for a self that from

its very nature cannot be known, a quest that in her has its chief

strength, if analytically considered, in the personal satisfaction

coming from the subconscious reinforcement by reading and thinking in

maturity of a juvenile stage of development, which originated in a

theological and here deploys in a metaphysical stage.

C. T. Stockwell[223] assumes that there is something related to the

germ plasm from which the individual sprang as it is to the rest of the

body, and Shaler[224] concludes: “We may therefore say that the most

complicated part of life is not that which goes out with the body’s

death but that which is cradled in the infinitesimal molecule that is

known to us as the germ of another life evolution.” Edwin Arnold[225]

is platonic in assuming that life is so beautiful that “we may rightly

feel betrayed if dysentery and maggots end everything.” So our fears

may be as ridiculous as those of Don Quixote hanging from a window by

the wrist over what he thought was an abyss but, when the thong was

cut, falling only four inches. Such an authentic and transfiguring Yes

might be pronounced if we could recombine the chemical elements of a

man analyzed in the South Kensington museum into a vigorous youth.

An anonymous author asks why should the soul, the noblest and last

goal of evolution, perish and the cosmos throw away its crown. It is

the entelechy of all evolution. In general the best survive and only

the worst become extinct. The great _biologos_ has wrought from the

beginning to give itself an organ to think through and mirror itself

in, and this momentum of self-preservation is too great to be entirely

arrested at death. So individuality must have absolute worth and be

eternized because it is the key to and the paragon of existence. It

must be an _ens realissimum_ because it has cost so much. Democracy,

too, hypertrophies individuality. The Orient knew _one_ was eternal;

the Middle Ages knew a _few_ were; and only lately did man begin to

think _all_ were so. Our motto, thus, must be _Impavi progrediamur_

shouted with bravura. Self-conscious life is the highest of all

possible categories, the model of all other units by which they are

understood, and not merely a symbol of ultimate reality but the thing

itself.

S. D. McConnell revives the somewhat patristic idea that man is by

nature mortal but is also immortable and can attain another life by

piety and knowledge, as of old the Eucharist developed the potentiality

of another life or as the infant is a man, only dynamically. Man may

become indestructible by a higher process of biogenesis. John Fiske,

too, says, “At some period in the evolution of humanity this divine

spark may have acquired sufficient concentration and steadiness to

survive the wreck of material form and endure forever.” To be deified

by righteousness would be a fit climax. This life is a period of

probation and gestation in a new sense. Thus, too, hell is obsolete and

the bad die, so that the great choice is now between continuation and

extinction. Some crude prelusions of this were found among the Taoists,

who held that “the grosser elements of man’s nature may be refined

away and immortality attained even in this world.” This could be done

by an elixir of life, the desire to discover which a century or two

before and even after Christ became in many places a veritable craze.

So-called pills of immortality taken in connection with certain rites

and regimen, like alchemy, which could make gold out of baser metals,

would purge away mortal elements and transfiguration and sublimation

might result, even for animals. But where do we draw the line between

the mortal and immortal, for this may be as far above as the Taoists

thought it was below us?

All arguments of this kind are provincial. Man may be a mere microbe

on our little dirt ball, which the high gods could hardly see if the

lentiform Milky Way were the object-glass of a celestial microscope.

What reason have we to think that the cosmos accepts us at our own

valuation? The great sphinx has for ages suckled children at its breast

only to destroy them with its claws and when men die it recks and cares

not. As Fechner says, the plant world might say it was supreme and

that insects, animals, and men lived to manure its seeds. Vegetation

preceded, nourishes, and might at any time send out bacteria and miasma

to rid the world of all animal life. Man is perhaps mean compared to

the denizens of other worlds and even his type, so precious compared

to individuals, may be worthless or serving other ends. Despite his

decadent but titanic pride and monumental nescience of self he is

really pathetic. So tempting to the vengeance of the gods is his pride

that to be disappointed about another life serves him right. The

great saurians were once the highest creatures and seemed the pets of

nature and the goal of all, but although their period was far longer

than man’s they have passed. So, perhaps the superman will sometime

quarry and explore, trace by trace, the evidences of a human biped

representing our own stage of existence, and man as he is to-day be

classified in a tongue as yet unborn. Are we really nearer any ultimate

goal than was the amphioxus? We may be only a link to the higher man

and that link may sometime be missing.

What right have we to assume anything so sacrosanct and fetchingly

irresistible in the human type that the great Goodheart will never seek

to evolve anything better but accept us as a stereotype of finality.

Such suppositions are naïve and man as a race ought to rejoice if

he can serve even infinitesimally in a greater purpose. In fact, in

many quarters it is now bad form to even discuss the question of

personal immortality because the world is becoming--in the phrase

of Osler--Laodicean, indifferent, or even antagonistic to such views

and leaves passionate affirmations of a future life, so in fashion in

the days of Tennyson and Browning, to mystics, clerical rhapsodists,

pectoralists, or to those steeped in cardiac emotions.

There are many reasons challenging the generality or strength of

the desire for another life. From a questionnaire of the Psychic

Research Society it was found that very many did not feel it of urgent

importance, did not wish to know for certain about it, and many did

not desire it, although a few, like Huxley, “would prefer hell, if

the conditions were not too rigorous,” to annihilation. Perhaps we

are still haunted by submerged reminiscences of the immortality of

our primeval unicellular ancestors, which, as we have seen, divide

forever and never die. Man is certainly at present a very defective

creature, a bundle of anachronisms with organs new and old. Even the

aged die with a minority, and very often a majority of their organs

and faculties charged with potencies of a longer life. Man may be not

a paragon but a fluke or sport of the anthropoid apes and his death is

commonly a gruesome execution by microbes, accidents, or hereditary

handicaps. His sex nature may be abnormal. Unlike the beasts, he seems

to have lost his hygienic or dietetic instinct or conscience. He knows

more than he can practice. His consciousness is often abnormal and not

remedial as it should be. It is very fallible, always partial, and by

no means the oracle he has deemed it to be. It may be nothing but a

thing of shreds and patches, extemporized, accidental, transient, made

up of fragmentary outcrops of unconscious forces that, deep below the

threshold, rule his life. To truly know himself he must go down stratum

by stratum, study every outcrop of older formations, every denudation

caused by disease, every psychic fossil of tics, obsessions, whims,

every anatomical clue, every hint from comparative psychology, disease,

crime, rudimentary organs of body or soul; and in his efforts to

maximize himself must realize that if all the studies of his nature

that have been made were to be depurated of the lust for a future life

it would leave a vast void, for the passion for immortality has left

its mark on all his cultural history.

But the fear of death and the forms of mitigating this fear are

chiefly because man still dies young. If we had experienced and

explored senescence fully we should find that the lust of life is

supplanted later by an equally strong counter will to die. We should

have no immortality mania for we should be satisfied with life here

without demanding a sequel to it. Our present dreams of all forms of

post-mortem existence would become a nightmare. True macrobiotism

means not only more years but completeness of experience, absence of

repression and limitation. Had we lived out the whole of our lives

and drained all the draughts of bitter and sweet that nature has ever

brewed for us, we should feel sated. The fact is, man is now cut off

in his prime with many of his possibilities unrealized. Hence he is a

pathetic creature doomed to a kind of Herodian slaughter and because he

has dimly felt this he has always cried out to the gods and to nature

to have mercy. He has imagined answers to the heartrending appeal he

shouted into the void: if a man dies shall he live again? and on the

warrant of fancied answers has supplemented this by another life,

which, when psycho-analyzed in all its processes, means only that he

has a sense that the human race is unfinished and that the best is yet

to come. And so it is. Man’s future on this earth is the real, only,

and gloriously sufficient fulfillment of this hope. It will be found

only in the prolonged and enriched life of posterity here. The man of

virtue will realize all desires and live himself completely out so

that nothing essentially human will be foreign to his own personal

experience.

Thus the wish for and belief in immortality is at bottom the very best

of all possible augurs and pledges that man as he exists to-day is

only the beginning of what he is to be and do. He is only the pigmoid

or embryo of his true and fully entelechized self. Thus when he is

completed and has finished all that is now only begun in him, heavens,

hells, gods, and discarnate ghosts will all fade like dream fabrics

or shadows before the rising sun. All doctrines of another life are

thus but symbols and tropes in mythic form of the true superman as he

will be when he arrives. The great hope so many have lived and died by

will be fulfilled, every jot and tittle of it, not in our own lives

but in the perfect man whose heralds we really are without knowing it.

Deathbed visions will come true more gloriously than the dying thought.

They hunger for more life but the perfect man will die of satiety

passing over into aversion and the story will be completed not in a

later number but in this.

Is there any true thanatophilia, the opposite of thanatophobia? Does

the most complete and harmonious life bring not only the quest for

death but an active striving toward Nirvana? Will man ever come to

observe the approach of death in himself and in others just as we love

to study and observe growth? The records of centenarians do not show

it; nor do the superannuated now generally feel it. Even Nothnagel, who

observed himself clinically almost up to the moment of his death, did

not find it. True euthanasia is not mere resignation or the exhaustion

of the momentum to live or satiety with life. We know nothing of truly

natural death. But we do know that psychogenetically the old lust for

personal immortality has made man now more anxious to prolong and

enlarge this mundane life. We can no longer postpone our ideas of

happiness. The great and good things man once expected beyond he now

strives to attain here. He wants more, not less in this life because he

expected so much of the other. Thus the belief in immortality is one

of the psychic roots of modern hygiene although the question whether

it can all go over into orthobiosis and humaniculture still remains

open. If all were cut off in their prime, like Jesus, for example,

another life would be even more desired and believed in, for the longer

and better we live the less we care about it. Thus the answer to the

problem of euthanasia strictly considered must remain in abeyance,

at least until humanity is more complete. Biological studies and new

therapies may develop, give more importance to, and help us to a far

better knowledge of, the gerontic stage of life. At any rate, I hope

and believe that the data I have gathered and presented in this volume

may contribute its mite to make the status of the old more interesting

to themselves and to increase the sense that they still owe important

duties to a world never more in need of the very best that is in them.

THANATOPSIS

By WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

When thoughts

Of the last bitter hour come like a blight

Over thy spirit, and sad images

Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,

And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,

Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;--

Go forth, under the open sky, and list

To Nature’s teachings, while from all around--

Earth and her waters, and the depths of air--

Comes a still voice--Yet a few days, and thee

The all-beholding sun shall see no more

In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,

Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears,

Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist

Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim

Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,

And, lost each human trace, surrendering up

Thine individual being, shalt thou go

To mix forever with the elements,

To be a brother to the insensible rock

And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain

Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak

Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould.

Yet not to thine eternal resting-place

Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish

Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down

With patriarchs of the infant world--with kings,

The powerful of the earth--the wise, the good,

Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,

All in one mighty sepulchre. The hills

Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun,--the vales

Stretching in pensive quietness between;

The venerable woods--rivers that move

In majesty, and the complaining brooks

That make the meadows green; and, poured round all,

Old Ocean’s gray and melancholy waste,--

Are but the solemn decorations all

Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun,

The planets, all the infinite host of heaven,

Are shining on the sad abodes of death,

Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread

The globe are but a handful to the tribes

That slumber in its bosom.--Take the wings

Of morning, pierce the Barcan wilderness,

Or lose thyself in the continuous woods

Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound,

Save his own dashings--yet the dead are there;

And millions in those solitudes, since first

The flight of years began, have laid them down

In their last sleep--the dead reign there alone.

So shalt thou rest, and what if thou withdraw

In silence from the living and no friend

Take note of thy departure? All that breathe

Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh

When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care

Plod on, and each one as before will chase

His favorite phantom; yet all these shall leave

Their mirth and their employments, and shall come

And make their bed with thee. As the long train

Of ages glide away, the sons of men,

The youth in life’s green spring, and he who goes

In the full strength of years, matron and maid,

The speechless babe, and the gray-headed man--

Shall one by one be gathered to thy side,

By those, who in their turn shall follow them.

So live, that when thy summons comes to join

The innumerable caravan, which moves

To that mysterious realm, where each shall take

His chamber in the silent halls of death,

Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,

Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed

By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,

Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch

About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

CROSSING THE BAR

By ALFRED TENNYSON

Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

When I put out to sea.

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep,

Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,

And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

When I embark.

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place

The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crost the bar.

THE END

FOOTNOTES

[1] In the preceding paragraphs I have incorporated, with minor

changes, parts of my anonymous article on “Old Age” in the _Atlantic

Monthly_ of January, 1921, with the kind permission of the editor.

[2] _Scientific American_, March 25, 1905.

[3] See _Pop. Sci. Mo._, July, 1902.

[4] “Age and Eminence,” _Pop. Sci. Mo._, vol. 66, 1904–05, p. 538.

[5] _The Age of Mental Virility_, The Century Co., 1908.

[6] “What the World Might Have Missed,” _Century_, 1908, p. 113, _et

seq._

[7] “The Age Limit,” _Living Age_, 1914, p. 214.

[8] “The Old Folks and the War,” _Living Age_, 1918.

[9] _The Psychology of Senescence_, Master’s Thesis, Clark University,

Worcester, Mass., 1912.

[10] P. Birukoff, _Leo Tolstoy, His Life and Work_. London, 1906; A.

Maude, _The Life of Tolstoy_, London, 1908.

[11] W. Wundt, _Gustav Theodor Fechner_, Leipzig, 1901; K. Lasswitz,

_Gustav Theodor Fechner_, Stuttgart, 1896; G. S. Hall, _Founders of

Modern Psychology_, New York, 1907.

[12] See J. Croley, _The Love Life of Auguste Comte_, Modern Thinker,

2d ed., 1870; also J. Mill, _Auguste Comte and Positivism_, London,

1907, 5th ed.; also A. Poey, _The Three Mental Crises of Auguste

Comte_, Modern Thinker, 2d ed., London, 1870.

[13] G. Trobridge, _Emanuel Swedenborg, His Life, Teachings, and

Influence_, London, 1911; also B. White and B. Barrett, _Life and

Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg_, 1876; also J. Wilkinson, _Emanuel

Swedenborg, a Biography_, Boston, 1849. See also Emerson’s essay.

[14] See Karl Abraham’s work of this title (Leipzig, 1911), based on

Seravia’s biography.

[15] J. Sadger, _Aus dem Liebeslebens Nicolaus Lenaus_, Leipzig, 1909,

96 p. See also his biography by B. E. Castle.

[16] J. Sadger in _Grenzfragen des Nerven und Seelenlebens_, 1910, pp.

5–63.

[17] G. Vorberg, _Guy de Maupassant’s Krankheit_, 1908, 27 p.

[18] Otto Kaus, _Schriften des Vereins freie psychoanalytische

Forschung_, No. 2, 1912, 81 p.

[19] P. J. Moebius, _Ueber Scheffel’s Krankheit_, 1907, p. 40.

[20] E. T. Cook, _Life of John Ruskin_, _London_, 1911, vol. ii, p. 19.

[21] Frau Foerster-Nietzsche, _The Life of Nietzsche_.

[22] “On Growing Old,” _Atlan._, 1915, p. 803.

[23] “Concerning Age,” _Sci. Amer. Sup._, Nov. 15, 1919.

[24] “The Moral and Religious Psychology of Late Senescence,” _Biblical

World_, 1918, p. 75.

[25] _The Dangerous Age_, London, 1912.

[26] See W. L. Comfort’s _Midstream_ for the same crisis in men (1914).

[27] _The Salvaging of Civilization: The Probable Future of Mankind_,

New York, 1921. 199 p.

[28] _The Old World in the New_, 1914, p. 27.

[29] _The Longevity of Birds._

[30] _On the Comparative Longevity of Man and Animals_, 1870.

[31] _Men of the Old Stone Age_, New York, 1915, p. 40.

[32] See my “What We Owe to the Tree-life of Our Ape-like Ancestors,”

_Ped. Sem._, 23:94–116, 1916.

[33] _Adolescence_, Ch. XIII, “Savage Pubic Initiations,” etc.

[34] _Primitive Folk_, p. 42.

[35] _The American Indian_, p. 177.

[36] _Among the Eskimos of Labrador_, p. 111.

[37] “Old Age and Death,” _Am. Jour. Psychol._, October, 1896.

[38] _With a Prehistoric People: The Akikuyu of British East Africa_,

p. 157.

[39] _Savage Man in Central Africa_, p. 176.

[40] _The Life of a South-African Tribe_, p. 131.

[41] “Physiological and Medical Observations on the Indians of

Southwest United States and Mexico,” Bureau Amer. Ethnol., Bull. 34.

[42] _Das Weib in der Natur- und Völkerkunde_, Chap. 74.

[43] _On Centenarians and the Duration of the Human Race_, 1899.

[44] A few even recent writers have gone to the extreme of doubting the

authenticity of every record of human life beyond a century, although

Young seems to have demonstrated it in his twenty-two annuitants. All

such contentions are only doctrinnaire. Lives exceptionally prolonged

may be abnormal, like dwarfs and giants, and extreme skepticism here

has hardly more justification than extreme credulity. In 1799 James

Easton believed he had demonstrated that 712 persons between the years

A.D. 66 and the above date had attained a century or upward. He found

three whom he thought had lived between 170 and 175 years; two who had

lived 160 to 170; three, 150–160; seven, 140–150; twenty-six, 130–140;

eighty-four, 120–130; and thirteen hundred and ten, 100–110. Even

Babbage assumed 150 as the limit of age in his abstract tables based

upon seventeen hundred and fifty-one persons who had attained 100 or

more. A. Haller (1766) accepted the age of Parr and Jenkins and is

quite uncritical, saying that over one thousand men have lived to be

100–110, and twenty-five have lived to between 130–140. He even accepts

Pliny’s story of a man who lived to be 300, and another 340 years.

Hufeland seems to approve the traditional 157 years of Epimenides, 108

of Gorgias, 139 of Democritus, 100 of Zeno, 105 of St. Anthony, and

credited J. Effingham in Cornwall with 144 years. W. J. Thoms (_Human

Longevity: Its Facts and Its Fictions_, 1873) is skeptical of great

longevities and found no sure case of centenarians in any noble family.

J. Pinney (1856) went to the limit of credulity, believing that there

were three eras in which men lived to 900, 450, and 70 respectively. G.

C. Lewis thinks there is no authentic record of a life exceeding 100

years. W. Farr in 1871 said that in 1821 there were 216 centenarians in

England; in 1841, 249; 1851, 215; 1861, 201; 1871, 160, making a total

of 1,041, of whom 716 were females. Walford (in his _Insurance Guide

and Handbook_) compiled a list of 218 centenarians from what he deemed

authentic sources, and J. B. Bailey in 1888 in his _Modern Methuselahs_

discussed the question; while Humphry (1889) in his nine hundred

returns, found 52 centenarians, 36 of whom were women.

[45] “The days of our years are three-score years and ten, and if by

reason of strength they may be four-score years, yet is there strength,

labor, and sorrow for it is cut off and we fly away.”

[46] _Oriental Studies_, Boston, 1894.

[47] _Das Lebensalter in der Jüdischen Literatur_, 1875.

[48] M. D. Conway, _The Wandering Jew_, 1881, and T. Kappstein,

_Ahesver in der Weltpoesie_, 1906.

[49] _Greek Life and Thought_, London, 1896.

[50] E. Bard, in _Chinese Life in Town and Country_, p. 39, says,

“In the worship of ancestors we have the keystone to the arch of the

social structure of this strange country [China]. Hundreds of millions

of living Chinese are bound to thousands of millions of dead ones.

The cult induces parents to marry off their children almost before

maturity so that they should have offspring to make their lives after

death pleasant by means of worship and oblations. No matter how great

the squalor, there must be many children in the family,” etc. “Funeral

expenses for parents are the most sacred of all obligations, and it

is not uncommon for the living to sell their estates to the very last

foot and often their houses to be able to render proper homage to the

deceased.” Presents of coffins, elaborate ones, are often very common.

The sons of a deceased parent must at least wear mourning for three

years, though this has been lately reduced to twenty-seven months. The

expenses of elaborate funerals are enormous.

[51] Mahaffy, _Social Life in Greece from Homer to Menander_, p. 34.

[52] _The Greek Genius and Its Meaning to Us_, 1912.

[53] _Republic_, 329.

[54] _Talks with Athenian Youth, tr. anon._, New York, 1893, 178 p.

[55] _Aristotle on Youth and Old Age, Life and Death and Respiration_,

tr. by Ogle, London, 1897, 135 p.

[56] Book II, Chap. 13.

[57] _Ibid._, Book I, Chap. 5.

[58] See Black’s _Law Dictionary_, 2d ed., 1910.

[59] Cicero, _Cato Major or Old Age_, tr. by Benjamin Franklin.

[60] “Woman as Witch” in his _Chances of Death_, 1897, vol. 2, pp. 1–50.

[61] _History of Witchcraft in England, 1557–1718_, p. 114.

[62] _Notes on Witchcraft_, Amer. Antiquarian Society.

[63] _The New Stone Age in Northern Europe._ New York, Scribner, 1921.

[64] “Old Age and Death.” _Amer. Jour. Psychol._, Oct., 1896, vol. 8,

pp. 67–122.

[65] _Die Hygiene des Lebensalters._

[66] “Four Types of Protestants: A Comparative Study in the Psychology

of Religion,” _Jour. of Relig. Psychol._, Nov., 1908, vol. 3, pp.

165–209.

[67] _The Vedanta Philosophy_, London, 1914, p. 16 _et seq._

[68] R. H. Lowie, _Primitive Society_, 1920.

[69] _Altersklassen und Männerbünde_, 1902.

[70] _Atlantic Monthly_, 1915, p. 385.

[71] See Le Bon: _The World in Revolt_, 1921.

[72] _The Art of Living Long_, tr. 1914, 207 p.

[73] _History of Life and Death._

[74] _Spectator_, Oct. 17, 1711.

[75] _The Anatomy of Melancholy._

[76] _Gulliver’s Travels_, Chap. X.

[77] _After Noontide_, Boston, 1883, 168 p.

[78] _Old People_, Boston, 1909, 236 p.

[79] _Three-score and Ten._ Dedicated to Chauncey Depew.

[80] _The Secret of Long Life_, London, 1871, 146 p.

[81] _Masters of Old Age_, Milwaukee, 1915, 280 p.

[82] “When Is Man Immortal?” _Technical World_, March, 1914.

[83] “A Physical Marvel at Seventy-three,” _Amer. Mag._, Dec., 1917.

[84] _Old Age: Its Cause and Preservation_, The story of an old body

and face made young, New York, 1912, 309 p.

[85] “Young at Seventy,” _Am. Rev. of Revs._, vol. 57, p. 415.

[86] _The Secret of a Much Longer Life and More Pleasure in Living It_,

1906.

[87] “Why I am Well at Eighty,” _Ladies Home J._, April, 1919.

[88] “How I Came to Be Doing More Work at Seventy-Seven than at

Forty-Seven,” _Ibid._

[89] “Viewpoint of a Sexagenarian Contributor,” _Unpartizan Rev._,

July, 1920.

[90] James M. Ludlow, _Along the Friendly Way_, Reminiscences and

Impressions, New York, 1919, 362 p.

[91] “Confessions of a Septuagenarian Contributor,” _Unpartizan Rev._,

July, 1920.

[92] _Old Age._

[93] _The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_, Chap. VII, and also in

_Over the Teacups_, p. 26, _et seq._

[94] _Old Age and Immortality_, 1893.

[95] “Eighty Years and After,” _Harper’s_, 1919, p. 21.

[96] “De Senectute,” _Atlantic_, 1913, p. 163.

[97] “I Refuse to Grow Old,” _Amer. Mag._, Sept., 1919.

[98] “The Passing of Old Age,” _Independent_, Jan., 1914.

[99] “At Seventy-Three and Beyond,” _Atlan._, 1914, p. 123.

[100] _The Pursuit of Happiness_, 1893.

[101] _The Individual: A Study of Life and Death_, 1910, especially

Chap. 13, “The Period of Old Age.”

[102] _The Fixed Period_, New York, 1881.

[103] _The Man in the Street_, 1907, 405 p.

[104] Richard le Gallienne, “Not Growing Old,” _Harper’s_, 1921.

[105] “Young and Old,” _Nineteenth Century_, June, 1920.

[106] _Worry and Old Age_, 1909, Chap. 14.

[107] London, 1908.

[108] _Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch_, New York,

1921, 400 p.

[109] See my _Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology_, New York,

1917, Chap. XI, p. 694, _et seq._

[110] See the end of the last chapter.

[111] _Ibid._

[112] By permission of, and special arrangement with, Doubleday, Page &

Co.

[113] By permission of, and special arrangement with, Houghton Mifflin

Co.

[114] From Webb’s _New Dictionary of Statistics_, 1911, p. 471.

[115] _A Discussion of Age Statistics_, Rept. 13, Bull. Bur. Census,

1904.

[116] _Life Insurance_, N. Y., 1915.

[117] _World Almanac_, 1921, p. 438.

[118] _Report of a Special Inquiry Relative to Aged and Dependent

Persons in Massachusetts_, 1915.

[119] _The Elements of Vital Statistics_, Lond., 1909, 326 pp.

[120] “Death Rate and Expectation of Life,” _Science_, vol. 43, 1916.

[121] _Table of Mortality Statistics._

[122] “The Influence of Vital Statistics on Longevity.” Address at the

sixth annual meeting of the Association of American Life Insurance

Presidents, Dec., 1912.

[123] _The Duration of Life and Conditions Associated with Longevity_:

A study of the Hyde genealogy (dealing with 8,797 persons) ending, for

the most part, with the year 1825.

[124] “Who Shall Inherit Long Life?” _Nat. Geog. Mag._, June, 1919.

[125] _Social Adjustment_, New York, 1911.

[126] “Report on National Vitality,” Bulletin of the Committee of One

Hundred on National Health, July, 1909, No. 30.

[127] _How to Live_, New York, 1915, Section 7.

[128] “The Extension of Human Life,” _Sci. Am. Sup._, May 4, 1916.

[129] _Social Insurance_, New York, 1913, Chap. 12, “The Old Man’s

Problem in Modern Industry.”

[130] “The Biology of Death,” _Sci. Mo._, March-Sept, 1921, _incl._

[131] _Old Age Pensions: Their actual working results in the United

Kingdom_, London, 1915, 196 pp.

[132] Edith Sellers, “From the Old Age Pensioners’ Standpoint,”

_Nineteenth Century_, Jan., 1920.

[133] _Report of the Massachusetts Commission on Old Age Pensions,

Annuities and Insurance_, Jan., 1910, 409 pp.

[134] “Canadian Government Annuities,” _Polit. Sci. Quar._, 1915, p.

425 _et seq._

[135] _Old Age Poverty in Greenwich Village_, 1915, 105 pp.

[136] Joseph Swain, “State Pension Systems for Public School Teachers,”

_Bureau of Education Bull._, 1916.

[137] “Report on Teachers’ Pensions,” _N. E. A. Proc._, 1919, vol. 57,

p. 145 _et seq._

[138] See Paul Studensky, _Teachers’ Pension Systems in the United

States_, New York, 1920, and the companion volume of Lewis Meriam,

entitled _Principles Governing the Retirement of Public Employees_, New

York, 1918.

[139] “Problem of Poverty and Pensions in Old Age,” _Amer. J. Soc._,

vol. xiv, 1908–9, p. 282 _et seq._

[140] See Spender, _Treatise on State Pensions in Old Age_, London,

1892; G. Drage, _The Problems of the Aged Poor_, London, 1895, 375 pp.;

Metcalf, _Universal Old Age Pensions_, London, 1899, 200 pp.; Booth,

_Pauperism and the Endowments of Old Age_, New York, 1906. For extended

inquiries see _The Report of the Royal Commission on Old Age Pensions_

by the Commonwealth of Australia, 1906; also, William Sutherland, _Old

Age Pensions in Theory and Practice_, London, 1907.

[141] _Old Age Dependency in the United States_, New York, 1912, 361

pp. a masterly book.

[142] _The Survey_, vol. 31, 1914–15, p. 483.

[143] _Clinical Lectures on Senile and Chronic Diseases_, Lond., 1881,

Lecture 1.

[144] “Old Age and the Changes Incident to it,” _Brit. Med. J._, March

9, 1885.

[145] “Old Age,” _Brit. Med._, Oct 2, 1891.

[146] “Senility, Premature Senility, and Longevity,” _Med. Jour._, New

York, July 10, 1915.

[147] “Nature of Old Age and of Cancer,” _Brit. Med. J._, Dec. 27, 1913.

[148] “Degeneration, Senescence, and New Growth,” _J. Med. Research_,

vol. 33, 1918, p. 485.

[149] _The New Pathology of Syphilis_, Harvey Lectures 1917–19, p. 67.

[150] “Die Psychosen des Rückbildungs- und Greisenalters,” _Handbuch

der Psychiatrie_, Spezieller Teil, 5 Abteilung, Leipzig, 1912.

[151] “Senile Mentality,” _Inter. Clin._, vol. 4, 1916, p. 48.

[152] “Some Clinical Indications of Senility,” _Inter. Clin._, vol. 2,

1914, p. 93.

[153] _Old Age: Its Care and Treatment in Health and Disease_, London,

1913, 312 pp.

[154] _Old Age Deferred: The Causes of Old Age and Its Postponement by

Hygienic and Therapeutic Measures_, Philadelphia, 1911, 572 pp.

[155] “The Medical Significance of Old Age,” _Med. Press and Circ._,

London, May 20, 1914.

[156] “The Delay of Old Age and the Alleviation of Senility,” _Jour.

Amer. Med. Assn._, July 15, 1905.

[157] “Centenarians and Nonagenarians,” _Med. Rec._, Feb. 15, 1913.

[158] “Ancient and Modern Theories of Age,” _Maryland Med. Jour._, vol.

49, Feb., 1906.

[159] _Fads of on Old Physician_ (Sequel to _Plea for a Simpler Life_),

London, 1897.

[160] “The Conservation of Energy in Those of Advancing Years,” _Pop.

Sci. Mo._, 1903.

[161] “Evidences of Full Maturity and Early Decline,” _Pop. Sci. Mo._,

1917, p. 411.

[162] _Über Altern und Sterben_, Wien, 1913, 33 pp.

[163] See his articles in _Sci. Mo._, March-Sept., 1921.

[164] _The Germ Plasm_, 1893, p. 198 _et seq._

[165] See his _Essays Upon Heredity and Other Biological Problems_,

vol. i, 1889, especially Chaps. I, “The Duration of Life,” and III,

“Life and Death.”

[166] In his able and brilliant discussion on “The Biology of Death,”

_Scientific Monthly_, March, 1921, p. 202.

[167] _American Handbook of Physiology_, 1897, p. 883.

[168] Mildly challenging Weismann’s non-inherited ability of acquired

qualities is Irving Fisher’s “Impending Problems of Eugenics,” _Sci.

Mo._, Sept., 1921.

[169] _The Nature of Man_, 1904, 309 pp. and _The Prolongation of

Life_, 1907, 343 pp.

[170] See a valuable but unprinted thesis of W. T. Sanger, a pupil of

mine, “The Study of Senescence,” Clark University, 1915.

[171] In her fascinating life of her husband, “Life of Elie

Metchnikoff,” (1920) the widow of Metchnikoff describes him in his last

days as anxious “that his end, which seemed premature at first sight,

did not contradict his theories but had deep causes, such as heredity,

and the belated introduction of a rational diet, which he began to

follow only at fifty-three.” He was very anxious that his example of

serenity in the face of death should be encouraging and comforting.

He had no illusions and knew for a long time that he was living only

from day to day. He speculated whether the end would come to-day or

to-morrow and had several specific “death sensations,” pledging his

wife to hold his hand when the end came. He was interested in the

completion of her biography of him, begged for enough pantopon to bring

an eternal sleep, directed his friend how to perform his autopsy and

what to look for in the different organs, provided for his cremation

and the final disposition of his ashes, etc. All was done as he wished,

with no funeral and no speeches, flowers, or invocations, and his

ashes now lie in an urn, as he directed, in the library of the Pasteur

Institute.

[172] _The Problem of Age, Growth, and Death; A study of

Cytomorphosis_, 1908, 280 pp.

[173] See his monumental textbook, _A Laboratory Textbook of

Embryology_, 1903, 380 pp.

[174] _Senescence and Rejuvenescence_, 1915, 481 pp.

[175] For our purpose his views are best summed up in his _The Organism

as a Whole from a Physiochemical Viewpoint_, 1916, 379 pp. See more

specifically his “Natural Death and Duration of Life,” _Science_, 1919,

p. 578 _et seq._

[176] Prof. W. J. V. Osterhout, “On the Nature of Life and Death,”

_Science_, April 15, 1921, thinks that we can measure by quantitative

methods such fundamental conceptions as vitality, injury, recovery,

and death, by electrical resistance, which, he thinks, is an excellent

index of what is normal condition. He believes that this holds for

both plants and animals, for all agents known to be injurious change

the electrical resistance at once. He also thinks this resistance

proportional to a substance he believes he found and decomposed by a

series of consecutive reactions and that on this basis we can write an

equation that permits us to predict the course of the death process

under various conditions, so that we can say that at a certain stage

it is one-fourth or one-half completed. Stated chemically, the normal

life process consists of a series of reactions in which a substance

_O_ is broken down into _S_, and this in turn breaks down into _A_,

_M_, _B_, and so on. “Under normal conditions _M_ is formed as readily

as it is decomposed and this results in a constant condition of the

electrical resistance and other properties of the cell. When, however,

conditions are changed so that _M_ is decomposed more rapidly than it

is formed, the electrical resistance decreases” and other properties

are simultaneously altered. Thus death results from a disturbance in

the relative rates of the reactions that constantly go on.

[177] _Sci. Mo._, Aug., 1921.

[178] _Sci. Mo._, Apr., 1921.

[179] Genevieve Grandcourt, “The Immortality of Tissues: Its Bearing

on the Study of Old Age,” _Sci. Am._, Oct. 20, 1912. Also “What is Old

Age?: Carrel’s Research on the Mechanism of Physical Growth,” _Sci.

Am._, Nov. 23, 1918.

C. Pozzi, “_Vie Manifestée Permanente de La Tissue_,” _La Preusse

Médicale_, p. 532.

Alexis Carrel, “Present Condition of a Strain of Connective Tissue

Twenty-eight Months Old,” _Jour. Exper. Med._, July 1, 1914, and

“Contributions to the Study of the Mechanism of the Growth of

Connective Tissue,” _Jour. Exper. Med._, Sept., 1913. See also

_Science_, vol. 36, 1912, p. 789.

[180] “Geschlechtstrieb und echt sekundäre Geschlechtsmerkmale als

Folge der Innersekretorischen Funktion der Keimdrüsen,” _Zeit. f.

Physiologie_, Sept., 1910.

[181] “Pubertätsdrüsen und Zwitterbildung,” _Archiv. f. Entwicklung der

Organismen_, vol. 42, 1916, pp. 307–332.

[182] “Erhöhte Wirkungen der inneren Sekretion bei Hypertrophie der

Pubertätsdrüsen,” _Archiv. f. Entwicklungsmechanik der Organismen_,

vol. 42, 1916, pp. 490–507.

[183] “Klima und Mannbarkeit,” _Archiv. f. Entwicklungsmechanik der

Organismen_, vol. 46, 1920, p. 391.

[184] “Verjüngung durch Experimentelle Neubelebung der alternden

Pubertäts Drüse,” _Archiv. f. Entwicklungsmechanik der Organismen_,

vol. 46, 1920, Part 4.

[185] “Steinach’s Forschungen über Entwicklung, Beherrschung,

und Wandlung der Pubertät,” _Ergebnisse der Inneren Medizin und

Kinderheilkunde_, 1919, vol. 17, pp. 295–398.

[186] “Eugene Steinach’s Work on Rejuvenation,” _N. Y. Med. J._, vol.

112, 1920, p. 612.

[187] “Steinach’s Rejuvenation Operation,” _Central. f. Chirurgie_,

Sept. 11, 1920.

[188] “Further Observations on Sex-Gland Implantation” _Jour. Am. Med.

Assn._, vol. 72, 1919, p. 396.

[189] H. E. Goodale of the Massachusetts Experiment Station, Amherst,

says (_Science_, Oct. 23, 1914, p. 594.): “A brown Leghorn male was

castrated completely when twenty-four days of age, and the ovaries from

two brood sisters, cut in several pieces, were placed beneath the skin

and also in the abdominal cavity. At the date of writing the bird is as

obviously female as its brood sisters. Skilled poultrymen have called

it a pullet. While it has all the female characteristics, there can be

little doubt, from the scars still visible as well as other things,

that it was a male.” It is not likely that its peculiar individuality

was feminized owing to constitutional condition. The author believes it

was feminized by the implanted ovaries in similar fashion to the rats

and guinea pigs of Steinach.

[190] _Life: A Study of the Means of Restoring Vital Energy and

Prolonging Life_, New York, 1920, 160 p.

[191] _The Glands Regulating Personality_: A study of the glands of

internal secretion in relation to the types of human nature. New York,

MacMillan, 1921. 300 p.

[192] Book X, Epigram 23 D.

[193] _Spoon River Anthology._

[194] _Morale: The Supreme Standard of Life and Conduct_, New York, D.

Appleton Co., 1920. 376 pp.

[195] _Belief in God and Immortality: A Psychological, Anthropological,

and Statistical Study_, Boston, 1906.

[196] See my _Adolescence_, vol. ii, p. 113 _et seq._

[197] “The Psychology of the Teacher,” _Ped. Sem._, vol. 24, p. 531 _et

seq._

[198] See Burton’s _Anatomy of Melancholy_, sec. 3.

[199] _Monologen._

[200] _Ethics_, Book II, Chaps. 3 and 6 and Book IV, Chap. 3.

[201] In the last few paragraphs I have, thanks to the courtesy of

the editor of the _Atlantic Monthly_, freely used material from my

anonymous article on “Old Age” in the January, 1921, number.

[202] _The World in Revolt_, New York, 1921, 256 pp.

[203] See my _Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology_, Chapters

VII and XI.

[204] _Am. J. Psychology_, vol. 8, p. 67 _et seq._

[205] “A Study of Fears,” _Am. J. Psy._, vol. 8, pp. 147–249; see also

Street, “A Genetic Study of Immortality,” _Ped. Sem._, vol. 6, p. 167

_et seq._

[206] L. Proal, _L’éducation et le suicide des enfants_, Paris, 1907,

p. 204; G. Budde, _Schülerselbstmorde_, Hanover, 1908, p. 59; E. Neter,

_Der Selbstmord im kindlichen und jugendlichen Alter_, 1910, p. 28;

L. Gurlitt, _Schülerselbstmorde_, n. d., p. 59; Baer, _Der Selbstmord

im Kindesalter_, Liepzig, 1901, p. 85; Eickhoff, “Die Zunahme der

Schülerselbstmorde an den höheren Schulen,” _Zts. f. d. evangel.

Religionsunter, an höheren Lehranstalten_, 1909, vol. 4; Eulenberg,

“Schülerselbstmorde” in _Der Saemann_, 1909, vol. 5, p. 30; Gebhard,

“Über die Schülerselbstmorde,” _Monatss. f. höhere Schulen_, 1909,

vols. 3 and 4, p. 24; Wehnert, _Schülerselbstmorde_, Hamburg, 1908, p.

81.

[207] Mersey “La Tanatophilie dans la famille des Hapsbourg,” _Rev. d.

Psychiatr._ Nr. 12, 1912, p. 493, describes the strange case of love of

death in the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella and also Charles V. The

former, after the death of her husband, Philip the Beautiful, whom she

loved with a consuming jealousy, had his body embalmed and only with

great difficulty could she leave the coffin where it lay. Sometimes

she had it open for a time to kiss the bare corpse and did so with the

greatest passion. This state had periods of remission and exacerbation.

The history of Charles, too, can be paralleled in many modern

instances, while dreams show us still more clearly how necrophilic man

can be.

Witry says that from his own practice he believes thanatophobiacs are

almost always from the professional or upper middle classes, those from

the lower classes meeting death with more stoicism than those of the

upper. Catholics, he says, have little fear of death. Thanatophobes

are usually neuropaths of degenerate heredity. One of his cases, a

girl of 18, was suddenly seized by a violent fear that she was to die

within an hour. She was put to sleep by suggestion and woke up normal.

A woman teacher of 49 had three acute attacks, cured by suggestion. A

middle-aged physician, after being drunk, had acute fear of death and

Hell, which yielded to medical treatment. Old priests, we are told, are

especially subject to it if neuropathic or “_scrupuleux_.” Some feel

it acutely when, after fighting a long reluctance to do so, they have

compelled themselves to make a will.

Ferrari, “La peur de la morte,” _Rev. Scient._, 1896, vol. 5, p. 59,

describes several cases of tolerably healthy people who have had sudden

premonitions of death, with acute fear, and who have shortly thereafter

died, some of them from no ascertainable cause. Hence he raises the

question whether an obsession of death can be so strong as to cause it.

Fiessinger gives a case, which he thinks directly due to the symptoms

of _angina pectoris_, and discusses whether patients should be told

their disease and its gravity, in view of this possible phobia.

Ferrero, “La crainte de la morte,” _Rev. Scient._, 1895, vol. 3, p.

361, thinks the natural man has little fear or thought of death and its

representations in art and religion are not painful, on account of the

sustaining influences of our organic sensations. Still, the thought

of death does have much influence upon our ideas, and to some extent

our sentiments. The mathematical chances of death plays a small rôle

in affecting the choice of professions. It is only the prospect of

impending death that shocks. Chronic invalids have little fear but only

hope for life, for example, consumptives, while to some, for example,

Indian widows, lovers, it is attractive. Hence he thinks it normally

indifferent and sometimes agreeable but becomes an object of fear only

by association.

Levy, “Die agoraphobie,” _Wien. allg. medizin. Zeitung_, 1911, nr. 10,

gives a case of an agoraphobia that was rooted in a very distinct dread

of death by a special disease. A Dubois psychotherapeutic conversation,

which proved the fallacy of its grounds and to which the patient

attended, although with great effort, did not quiet but only increased

excitement. Excitement and exhaustion were the chief symptoms and the

case yielded only to isolation and rest.

[208] A striking illustration of this comes to me, as I write, in

a popular song with lugubrious music that many of my young friends

persist in singing and humming as if haunted by it.

SOME SWEET DAY

Did you ever think as the hearse rolled by

That some day or other you must die?

In an old churchyard, in a tiny lot,

Your bones will wither and then they’ll rot.

The worms’ll crawl up, the worms’ll crawl in,

They’ll crawl all over your mouth and chin.

They’ll bring their friends, and their friends’ friends, too;

You’ll look like hell when they’re through with you.

[209] _Am. J. Sociology_, March, 1921.

[210] _The Next War_, New York, 1921.

[211] _Die Sprache des Traumes_, 1911, pp. 214–284.

[212] _The World as Will and Idea_, vol. iii, p. 249 _et seq._

[213] See my _Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology_, Chap. XI,

“Death and Resurrection of Jesus.”

[214] _Guérison et Evolution dans la Vie de l’Âme._

[215] See my _Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology_, Vol. II,

Ch. 11.

[216] _Science and Immortality_, Boston, 1904, 54 pp.

[217] G. Lionel Taylor (_The Stages of Human Life_, N. Y., Dutton,

1921, 363 p.) says that there are four stages in the process of what

he believes to be normal dying: first there is an appealing, anxious,

puzzled look at the approach of a great crisis, as if wondering what

the person will meet in the great darkness that is supervening, all not

without an element of fear; then there supervenes a peace and poise, in

which stage leavetakings are often made; third, when the last breath

is drawn there is a strong impression on the bystanders that there has

been a real departure, that something very actual has left, so that

the body is no longer the friend. Then for perhaps an hour there is on

the face of the dead a look of unnatural beauty and tranquillity which

slowly fades and corruption begins.

Some in contemplating their own demise think chiefly of the isolation

it involves. The most sympathetic friend can only go to the brink

of the dark river which we must all cross absolutely alone. Suicide

lovers sometimes vainly attempt companionship. Those about to die who

are conscious of their impending departure may bid sad farewells to

their friends. Aging and sickly people conscious of an impending end

but with their faculties intact realize the inevitableness of dying

alone no matter how many friends are about but are silent about it with

an instinctive reluctance to betray any of the perturbations which

weaklings, patheticists, and hystericals seek refuge in.

To others the thought of their own death centers in the idea of

their body. They see themselves in thought pale, rigid, insentient,

and follow the fate of their corpse in every detail at least up

to interment or cremation, and some cannot resist a rather strong

imaginative experience as to how their living sentient body would feel

the rigidity, the cold, the treatment to which it is subjected, the

gazing of friends, a custom which some interdict.

A third group focus on the cessation of activities which begins in the

dimming of the senses and the weakening of motor or other powers, and

here, too, we find two attitudes: that of compulsive but regretful

renunciation, and the other of longing as for rest. In this sense death

begins with the first abatement of powers, and as we have time slowly

to adjust to progressive enfeeblement we do so more and more readily.

[218] See especially J. H. Leuba, _The Belief in God and Immortality_,

1916, 340 pp.

[219] _The Philosophy of Long Life_, Tr. from the French by Harry

Roberts, 1903, 305 pp.

[220] See Chapter VI.

[221] _The Limits of Evolution and Other Essays_, New York, 1901.

[222] _The Conception of Immortality._ Also _The World and the

Individual_.

[223] _The Evolution of Immortality._

[224] _The Study of Life and Death._

[225] _Death and Afterward._

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a

predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they

were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation

marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left

unbalanced.

Page 425: “so they we have come” was printed that way, but may

be a misprint for “so that we have come”.