DEATH AND DECAY
"All, that doth live, lives always!"--EDWIN ARNOLD
Consider now the happenings to the discarnate body. In the first
place, I repeat, it is undesirable to concentrate attention on
a grave. The discarnate body must be duly attended to when done
with; the safety of the living is a paramount consideration; the
living must retain control over what is dead. Uncontrolled natural
forces are often dangerous: the only thing harmful about a flood
or a fire is the absence of control. Either the operations must be
supervised and intelligently directed, or they must be subjected
to such disabilities that they can do no harm. But to associate
continued personality with a dead body, such as is suggested by
phrases like "lay him in the earth", or "here lies such an one," or
to anticipate any kind of physical resuscitation, is unscientific and
painful. Unfortunately the orthodox religious world at some epochs
has attached superstitious importance, not to the decent disposal,
but to the imagined future of the body. Painful and troublesome to
humanity those rites have been. The tombs of Egypt are witness to the
harassing need felt by the living to provide their loved ones with
symbols or tokens of all that they might require in a future state of
existence,--as if material things were needed by them any more, or as
if we could provide them if they were.[35] The simple truth is always
so much saner and happier than the imaginings of men; or, as Dr.
Schuster said in his Presidential address to the British Association
at Manchester, 1915,--"The real world is far more beautiful than any
of our dreams."
What is the simple truth? It can be regarded from two points of view,
the prosaic and the poetic.
Prosaically we can say that the process of decay, if regarded
scientifically, is not in itself necessarily repugnant. It may be
as interesting as fermentation or any other chemical or biological
process. Putrefaction, like poison, is hostile to higher living
organisms, and hence a self-protecting feeling of disgust has arisen
round it, in the course of evolution. An emotional feeling arises
in the mind of anyone who has to combat any process or operation of
nature,--like the violent emotions excited in an extreme teetotaller
by the word 'drink': a result of the evil its profanation has done;
for the verb itself is surely quite harmless. Presumably a criminal
associates disagreeable anticipations with the simple word 'hanging.'
The idea of a rank weed is repulsive to a gardener, but not to a
botanist; the idea of disease is repellent to a prospective patient,
not to a doctor or bacteriologist; the idea of dirt is objectionable
to a housewife, but it is only matter out of place; the word 'poison'
conveys nothing objectionable to a chemist. Everything removed from
the emotional arena, and transplanted into the intellectual, becomes
interesting and tractable and worthy of study. Living organisms of
every kind are good in themselves, though when out of place and
beyond control they may be harmful. A tiger is an object of dread to
an Indian village: to a hunting party he may be keenly attractive.
In any case he is a lithe and beautiful and splendid creature.
Microscopic organisms may have troublesome and destructive effects,
but in themselves they can be studied with interest and avidity. All
living creatures have their assuredly useful function, only it may
be a function on which we naturally shrink from dwelling when in an
emotional mood. Everything of this kind is an affair of mood; and,
properly regarded, nothing in nature is common or unclean. That a
flying albatross is a beautiful object every one can cordially admit,
but that the crawling surface of a stagnant sea can be regarded with
friendly eyes seems an absurdity; yet there is nothing absurd in it.
It is surely the bare truth concerning all living creatures of every
grade, that "the Lord God made them all"; and it was of creeping
water-snakes that the stricken Mariner at length, when he had learnt
the lesson, ejaculated:--
"O happy living things!
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware."
For what can be said poetically about the fate of the beloved body, the
poets themselves must be appealed to. But that there is kinship between
the body and the earth is literal truth. Of terrestrial particles it is
wholly composed, and that they should be restored to the earth whence
they were borrowed is natural and peaceful. Moreover, out of the same
earth, and by aid of the very same particles, other helpful forms of
life may arise; and though there may be no conscious unification or
real identity, yet it is pardonable to associate, in an imaginative and
poetic mood, the past and future forms assumed by the particles:--
"Lay her i' the earth;--
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh,
May violets spring!"
Quotations are hardly necessary to show that this idea runs through
all poetry. An ancient variety is enshrined in the Hyacinthus and
Adonis legends. From spilt blood an inscribed lily springs, in the
one tale; and the other we may quote in Shakespeare's version (_Venus
and Adonis_):--
"And in his blood that on the ground lay spilled,
A purple flower sprung up chequered with white,
Resembling well his pale cheeks and the blood
Which in round drops upon their whiteness stood."
So also Tennyson:--
"And from his ashes may be made
The violet of his native land."
_In Memoriam_
We find the same idea again, I suppose, in the eastern original of
Fitzgerald's well-known stanza:--
"And this delightful Herb whose tender Green
Fledges the River's Lip on which we lean--
Ah, lean upon it lightly! for who knows
From what once lovely Lip it springs unseen!"
The soil of a garden is a veritable charnel-house of vegetable and
animal matter, and from one point of view represents death and decay,
but the coltsfoot covering an abandoned heap of refuse, or the briar
growing amid ruin, shows that Nature only needs time to make it all
beautiful again. Let us think of the body as transmuted, not as
stored.
The visible shape of the body was no accident, it corresponded to
a reality, for it was caused by the indwelling vivifying essence;
and affection entwines itself inevitably round not only the true
personality of the departed, but round its material vehicle also--the
sign and symbol of so much beauty, so much love. Symbols appeal to
the heart of humanity, and anything cherished and honoured becomes
in itself a thing of intrinsic value, which cannot be regarded with
indifference. The old and tattered colours of a regiment, for which
men have laid down their lives--though replaced perhaps by something
newer and more durable--cannot be relegated to obscurity without a
pang. And any sensitive or sympathetic person, contemplating such
relics hereafter, may feel some echo of the feeling with which they
were regarded, and may become acquainted with their history and the
scenes through which they have passed.
* * * * *
In such cases the kind of knowledge to be gained from the relic,
and the means by which additional information can be acquired,
are intelligible; but in other cases also information can be
attained, though by means at present not understood. It may sound
superstitious, but it is a matter of actual experience, that some
sensitives have intuitive perception, of an unfamiliar kind,
concerning the history and personal associations of relics or
fragments or personal belongings. The faculty is called psychometry;
and it is no more intelligible, although no less well-evidenced, than
the possibly allied faculty of dowsing or so-called water-divining.
Psychometry is a large subject on which much has already been
written: this brief mention must here suffice.
It seems to me that these facts, when at length properly
understood, will throw some light on the connexion between mind
and matter; and then many another obscure region of semi-science
and semi-superstition will be illuminated. At present in all such
tracts we have to walk warily, for the ground is uneven and insecure;
and it is better, or at least safer, for the majority to forgo the
recognition of some truth than rashly to invade a district full of
entanglements and pitfalls.
TRANSITION
Longfellow's line, "There is no death; what seems so is transition,"
at once suggests itself. Read literally the first half of this
sentence is obviously untrue, but in the sense intended, and as
a whole, the statement is true enough. There is no extinction,
and the change called death is the entrance to a new condition of
existence--what may be called a new life.
Yet life itself is continuous, and the conditions of the whole of
existence remain precisely as before. Circumstances have changed
for the individual, but only in the sense that he is now aware of a
different group of facts. The change of surroundings is a subjective
one. The facts were of course there, all the time, as the stars are
there in the daytime; but they were out of our ken. Now these come
into our ken, and others fade into memory.
The Universe is one, not two. Literally there is no 'other'
world--except in the limited and partial sense of other planets--the
Universe is one. We exist in it continuously all the time; sometimes
conscious in one way, sometimes conscious in another; sometimes aware
of a group of facts on one side of a partition, sometimes aware of
another group, on the other side. But the partition is a subjective
one; we are all one family all the time, so long as the link of
affection is not broken. And for those who believe in prayer at
all to cease from praying for the welfare of their friends because
they are materially inaccessible--though perhaps spiritually more
accessible than before--is to succumb unduly to the residual evil
of past ecclesiastical abuses, and to lose an opportunity of happy
service.
[Footnote 35: It is rash to condemn a human custom
which has prevailed for centuries or millenniums, and
it is wrong to treat it _de haut en bas_. I would not
be understood as doing so, in this brief and inadequate
reference to the contents of Egyptian tombs. Their fuller
interpretation awaits the labour of students now working
at them.
In the same spirit I wish to leave open the question of
what possible rational interpretation may be given to the
mediæval phrase "Resurrection of the body"; a subject on
which much has been written. What I am contending against
is not the scholarly but the popular interpretation. For
further remarks on this subject see Chapter VII below.]