CHAPTER IX. The Psychology of Death

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DEATH

The attitude of infancy and youth toward death as recapitulating that of the race--Suicide--The death-wish--Necrophilism--The Black Death--Depopulation by the next war--The evolutionary nisus and death as its queller--Death symbolism as pervasive as that of sex--Flirtations of youthful minds with the thought of death--Schopenhauer’s view of death--The separation of ghosts from the living among primitive races--The thanatology of the Egyptians--The journey of the soul--Ancient cults of death and resurrection in the religions about the eastern Mediterranean, based on the death of vegetation in the fall and its revival in the spring, as a background of Pauline Christianity--The fading belief in immortality and Protestantism which now at funerals speaks only of peace and rest--Osler’s five hundred death beds--Influential, plasmal, and personal immortality and their reciprocal relations--Moral efficacy of the doctrine of future rewards and punishments--Belief in a future life for the individual being transformed into a belief in the future of the race on earth and the advent of the superman--Does man want personal immortality--Finot’s immortality of the decomposing body and its resolution into its elements--The Durkheim school and the Mana doctrine--Schleiermacher--The Schiller-James view of the brain and consciousness as repressive of the larger life of the great Autos--The views of Plato and Kant--Have God and nature cheated and lied to us if the wish to survive is false--Noetic and mystic immortality by partaking of the deathlessness of general ideas--Views of Howison, Royce, and others--Is there a true euthanasia or thanatophilia--Diminution of the desire for personal immortality with culture and age--Thanatopsis.

From infancy to old age the conceptions of death undergo characteristic changes in the individual not unlike those through which the race has passed. The death fear or thanatophobia is, thus, a striking case of recapitulation. The infant, like the animal, neither knows nor dreads death. The death-feigning instinct in animals is only cataplexy and the horror of blood that some herbivora feel is not related to death. From Scott’s 226 cases and my own 299 returns to questionnaires it appears that the first impression of death often comes from a sensation of coldness in touching the corpse of a relative and the reaction is a nervous start at the contrast with the warmth that the contact of cuddling and hugging was wont to bring. The child’s exquisite temperature sense feels a chill where it formerly felt heat. Then comes the immobility of face and body where it used to find prompt movements of response. There is no answering kiss, pat, or smile. In this respect sleep seems strange but its brother, death, only a little more so. Often the half-opened eyes are noticed with awe. The silence and tearfulness of friends are also impressive to the infant, who often weeps reflexly or sympathetically. Children of from two to five are very prone to fixate certain accessories of death, often remembering the corpse but nothing else of a dead member of the family. But funerals and burials are far more often and more vividly remembered. Such scenes are sometimes the earliest recollections of adults. Scrappy memory pictures of these happenings may be preserved when their meaning and their mood have entirely vanished and but for the testimony of others they would remain unable to tell what it was all about.

Little children often focus on some minute detail (thanatic fetishism) and ever after remember, for example, the bright pretty handles or the silver nails of the coffin, the plate, the cloth binding, their own or others’ articles of apparel, the shroud, flowers, and wreaths on or near the coffin or thrown into the grave, countless stray phrases of the preacher, the music, the incidents of the ride to the graveyard, the fear lest the bottom of the coffin should drop out or the straps with which it is lowered into the ground should slip or break, a stone in the first handful or shovelful of earth thrown upon the coffin, etc. The hearse is almost always prominent in such memories and children often want to ride in one. This, of course, conforms to the well-known laws of erotic fetishism by which the single item in a constellation of them that alone can find room in the narrow field of consciousness is over-determined and exaggerated in importance because the affectivity that belongs to items that are repressed and cannot get into consciousness is transferred to those that can do so.

Children often play they are dead, even when alone. They stretch out in bed, fold their hands, and hold their breath as long as they can to see how it feels to be dead. A few in fancy feel ill, imagine doctor and nurse, go through the last agony, imagine others standing about weeping and praising them, or perhaps picture themselves as the bystanders and see the imaginary death of a friend and try to weep. Real grief is hard for them and late to understand and they often think tears a pretense. They sometimes pick out pretty coffins for themselves or their chums and imagine becoming burial frocks. The odor of varnish from a coffin sometimes has an incredible persistence and power to call up feelings and emotions. Many children fear the corpse will wake and sit up--“he is not dead but sleepeth,” etc. Many are the records of how by calling, touching, pounding, or otherwise doing either forbidden or commendable things children strive to provoke or coax their dead relatives to awake.

Death has many degrees to children. The buried body is deadest. It is more so in the coffin than before being placed there. A very sick person who may die begins to be invested with the same awe. Lying in bed by day, the doctor, the silent nurse, the smell of medicines, often suggest that death has begun. Toward very old people children feel something of the same awe because they must soon die. According to some of our data some young children are incipient necrophiles, persistently trying to stroke, handle, or even kiss and hug the corpse. Scott’s curves indicate that up to and at the age of five death is more likely to be interesting if not attractive, while at about nine its real horror first begins to be felt. Some, at a very tender age, acquire associations that persist for years, perhaps through life, and which are liable to be evoked by specific instances. This is, for example, the case with the sight and smell of tuberoses, a black box or boat, a crepe veil or bow on a door, hat, or garment, tolling of bells or even the ringing of them, etc. Certain phrases in Scripture and in some morbid cases all allusions to death are liable to cause hysterical outbreaks. Some thanatophobes in whom these infantile fetishistic fears persist cannot go past an undertaker’s show window but go far around to avoid it. One such young man felt a sudden and strong aversion toward a young lady to whom he was attached as soon as he learned that she was employed in an undertaker’s establishment. These aversions often spring up suddenly, perhaps in the form of a convulsive sob, tears, or inexplicable depression, although they are usually of infantile origin. Children’s funerals and interments of pets are now represented by a small literature.

For young children the dead are simply absent and curious questions are asked as to where they have gone, when they will return, why the child cannot go with them. The infantile mind often makes strange mixtures of its own naïve constructions with adult insight. The distinction between psyche and soma, of which death is the chief teacher, is hard for the realistic minds of children. Told that Papa or Mama rest or sleep in the ground, they ask why they are there, where it is so cold and dark, why they do not wake, what they eat, who feeds them, impulsions in the race that primitive burial customs often elaborately answered by preparing bodies for reanimation, leaving food and utensils with the corpse, etc. When told of heaven above, children have strange, crass fancies, such as that the body is shot up to heaven, the grave dug open by angels, the body passed down through the earth and then around up, etc. It generally gets out of the grave and goes to its abode by night.

As ideas of the soul begin to be grasped it is conceived as a tenuous replica of the body hovering about somewhere, sometimes seen though rarely felt. It may even be talked to or fancied as present, though unseen. Children’s dreams of the dead are often vivid and rarely dreadful. In general the child thinks little or nothing but good of the dead and the processes of idealization, aided by adults, often almost reach the pitch of canonization so that later the memory of a dead parent may become a power in the entire subsequent life of sentiment as if all the instincts of ancestor worship were focalized on the individual parent. Indeed, we find some adults who maintain quiet sacred hours for thought of or ideal communion with their departed dear ones and such yearnings, of course, make a favorable soil for the ghost cult of spiritism. This component of our very complex attitude toward dead friends is also the stratum that crops out in the holy communion sacrament of the ghost dances of our American Indians, in which the souls of all the great dead of their tribe are supposed to come back and commune with their living descendants. Just in proportion as the dead are loved does death work its charm of sublimation and idealization, and just as a child of either sex has loved the parent of the other will he or she idealize a chosen mate snatched away by death. Thus, too, one factor in the belief in immortality is love that must conserve its object though deceased, this factor being quite distinct from the transcendental selfishness that would conserve our own ego. Young children often seem rather to rejoice in than to fear death. The excitement of all its ceremonies is new and impressive. Some even express a wish, after a funeral is over, that someone else would die. In their funeral games they quarrel as to who shall assume the central rôle of the corpse, which they feign well. One abnormal four-year-old tried to kill a younger mate and I find records of a number of pathological children who have actually done so, largely in order to enjoy the excitement of death, funeral, and burial. A sweet young girl was found dancing on the fresh grave of her younger sister, chanting, “I am so glad she is dead and I am alive,” suggesting not the ancient days of famine when every death left more food for the survivors so much as jealousy at the diversion of parental attention and care to the younger child.

Neurotic children often play with unusual abandon, as if to compensate for the depression, when they have just left a room where brothers or sisters have breathed their last. A small boy who lost his father said, “Now I will milk, cut wood, bring up coal,” etc., attempting thus to assume the father’s rôle, perhaps even putting on some of his attire; while girls whose mothers die become more tender to their fathers or the other children, feeling themselves to be in some degree the surrogate of the mother. Just as children of tender age far more often fear the death of others than they do their own, so they vastly more often wish the death of those they hate than they feel any suicidal impulse. Children’s propensity to play with death-shudders in their talk and thought was well illustrated in the case of two girls of perhaps seven whom I overheard while they were watching a man on a very high roof. One said, “Oh, I wish he would fall right down backwards and kill himself.” “And they pick him up all bloody,” giggled the other. “His bones all broke,” said the first. “And put him in a black box in the grave,” said the second. “And all his children cry,” said number one. “And starve to death,” added the other. They were getting more excited and spoke lower as they passed out of my hearing. The horror and also the fascination of rooms in which people have died often shows a conflict that is psychologically the same.

If death is thus distorted by misconceptions in infancy it looms up as a great and baffling mystery to fledgling youth. So little is it really understood by them that it is hard to utilize the fear of it even for motivating hygienic regimen. To tell a boy or girl in the teens that it has been proven that by conforming to certain established laws of health life may be prolonged on an average of fifteen years seems to them a far cry and it has little power as an incentive because they are so absorbed in living out all the possibilities of the present. There are certain perils, too, in using the death fear as a euthenic motive for the young. Yet during adolescence the death problem often becomes a veritable muse inspiring endless dreads, reveries, perhaps obsessions and complexes of the most manifold kind, especially in neurotics, in whom infantile impulses and adult insights are strangely mingled, producing weird perversions in later life. All these mazes we can never thread without a knowledge of the impression death has made upon the impressionable soul of man at every stage of life and perhaps most of all in the adolescent period, when youth first comes into close contact with the death thought.

When the young are achieving adulthood at the most rapid rate they are often overwhelmed with a sense of insufficiency, inferiority, or incompleteness against which they have to react as best they can. Tolstoi gave us a good illustration of this from his own boyhood. His tutor flogged him and he reacted as the only way in which he could “get even” by not merely the thought of suicide but the vivid imagination, well set in scene, of himself as dead and his father dragging the horrified tutor before his beautiful corpse and accusing him of having murdered his son, while the friends around bemoaned him as so brilliant and so tragically slain. It seems strange that at that period of life when both vitality and viability are greatest and the will to live seems to have its maximal momentum the death thought is so prone to be obsessive. But death is very hard to conceive and interpretations of what it really means differ with every age, race, individual, and perhaps almost every moment of life. It is so negative, privative, and human nature, like physical nature, abhors a vacuum so much that the soul balks not only at the idea of annihilation but at every thought of the arrest of life. Recent studies of children’s suicides show that although they begin at the early dawn of school age they are augmented by all repressions of their natural interests and instincts. Only at puberty or after, when the life of the race begins to dominate that of the individual, do children begin to comprehend what death really means; and even then, as the 58 suicides of German school children per year from 1883 to 1905 show, many, if not most, are sudden and impulsive and probably the majority, at least those of pubescent girls, are largely for the sake of the effect their death will have upon those nearest them. What child has not seriously considered suicide, at least in reverie? Several partial censuses have been unable to find one.

As to the death wish, this may be often felt and even expressed impulsively on some special provocation and then the realization of it may bring not only horror but in neuropathic children may set up a prolonged and morbid corrective process to strangle it. We have many cases in which overtenderness to parents or relatives, which had become so insistent as to be troublesome, was motivated by the impulse to atone for a vivid death wish that took form in a moment of anger. In general we have only a life wish for our friends and reserve the death wish for enemies. Even in the most highly evolved emotional lives this is perhaps only a question of predominance, for psychoanalysts tell us that never was there a death, even of a lover, that did not bring some small modicum of joy to the survivor, swallowed up and overwhelmed as this component might be in grief. Were this not so, comforters and consolers would have no resources. We strive to think that our dear ones are happier, comforting ourselves with memories, and ascribe to the dead superior powers of transcendental enjoyment; while, conversely, no savage ever killed the bitterest foe of his tribe without elements of pity or perhaps phrases to atone for the soul of the victim or to his friends by saying propitiatory words or performing placatory rites. Even hell and devils never kill the soul and there are spots and spells of remission of torment so that surcease and nepenthe are not unknown, even in the inferno.

The death thought in some of our data seems to be spontaneous, that is, it may break out obsessively, not only on the slightest occasion but without any ascertainable cause. Some young people have spells of crying with wild abandon at the thought that they must die, which sometimes seems to sound out to them as if from the welkin. It is worst nights. It seems so unspeakably dreadful that they cannot steady their voice. The thought in the infant prayer, “If I should die before I wake,” etc., made one child more or less neurotic for years with horror of hell and judgment and she was wont to fancy herself found dead in the morning and used to pose for it to look her best. This, too, plays its rôle in revival hysteria. Some who have been very near death by drowning or other accident magnify this experience in memory until it may come to haunt them. Indeed, it seems characteristic of adolescence that although it may occur at later stages of life, in some quiet hour, perhaps when alone on the shore or in the forest or in a wakeful moment at night, the thought, “I must die,” seems to spring and fasten upon the soul like a beast of prey. It flashes out with great and absorbing vividness. Occasionally a voice seems to pronounce the sentence. In a few cases it is so intense that a child fancies itself in the act of dying and springs up in terror. Probably all morbid fears of death are regressive or reversionary and have childish features. One clergyman was so haunted by it that he could not conduct funerals and only after years was he able to find self-control in the conviction that he might live on till Christ’s second coming.

In my teens in the country I often, and with a willingness that was hard for myself or my parents to understand, took my turn in watching with the sick and dying neighbors or “setting up” with corpses. On two occasions, once entirely alone, I performed as best I could the office of “laying out” the body of an old neighbor who died in the middle of the night. Other young people of my acquaintance were generally very ready to perform such offices although they involved great nervous tension, and in general a companion watcher was sought or provided. Another personal experience illustrates the persistence of juvenile attitudes toward death in mature life. As a boy in the country I had to pass, in going to and coming from the village, a lonely country church yard, by which I used to run and in which many of my relatives for generations were buried. Only a few years ago I yielded, during a sojourn at the village inn, to the whim of revisiting this graveyard by moonlight one midnight. I forced myself to climb over the high black entrance gate, for all was surrounded by a wall of dark-colored stone and by a row of pine trees. I walked deliberately through the graveyard and back, striking a match on my grandfather’s tomb to light a cigar as a culmination of a kind of bravado that left nothing that an observer could detect as indicating anything but perfect poise and control. I did not even quite shudder when, as I stood amidst the grave stones, a dark cloud obscured the moon, and after walking back and forth there for a time I leisurely clambered out and went back. But the strange thing about it all was a nervous tension, the flitting fears and fancies that had to be kept under and that constantly impelled me to turn and run. On returning I found myself in a state of high nervous excitement and realized that almost any sudden unexpected shock would have caused me, as the sudden obscurity of the moon nearly did, to yield to precipitate flight.

Thus, we see in the young buds of about all of the many and diverse attitudes the race has assumed toward death. Most of them are polymorphic and perverse, some merely organic residua of long phyletic influences. Thus, as in sex, the components of the death attitudes are early present but are not organized into unity until puberty, when the racial experiences in both fields come to be more or less unified. It would seem that death has no business with young people or they with it and that it is as absurd for them to occupy themselves with it at this age as it would be for them to worry about posterity before the dawn of adolescence. Since the life and growth of the psyche and soma are now at their flood-tide, it would seem that every intimation of death would be not only foreign to the very nature of young people but would be arrestive of the course of nature and should be veiled in reticence, like sex, before its time, with only provisional answers to the genuine questions about it. Indeed, the above data seem to show that the genetic impulse itself seems to shield the child by diverting it from the central fact of death to countless irrelevancies, trivialities, and accessories. Just as the instinct of the race has blindly striven to avoid sex precocity, if not to delay puberty, and more consciously and purposively to enforce a period of repression between the age of pubescence and that of nubility, so myth, primitive religion, and especially Christianity, have provided ways of mitigating, even for adults but more especially for the young, the nameless horror of direct envisagement of the fact that all must die and cease to be, body and soul, or, like the Nirvana cult, to make this conviction more tolerable.

Indeed, it is probably a normal instinct of compensation that often leads young people to visit morgues and perhaps dissecting rooms, to develop a certain immunity from such obsessive tendencies as the above. Great earthquakes, disastrous floods, and, above all, war and pestilence compel us to face the death thought at close quarters for a season and there are always those who revel in describing it in its most gruesome details, although there is a tacit consensus of the press to suppress the most horrible of them. Soldiers have to be hardened to inflict it in its most direct and personal way, as, for example, by the bayonet, as well as to keep cool when they are first under fire and to carry on and not turn and flee in panic when their comrades are torn to pieces about them. Such experiences, while they often mature the unripe and give a new poise to character, also tend to make human life seem cheaper, so that it is not strange that wars are followed by crime waves and especially by marked increase in assaults. For disguise it as we may, war is at root licensed murder and its heroes are they who have killed the most of those who have been declared enemies. Indeed, it is self-evident that the normal man who can deliberately stake his life in a fight in which he knows that he must either kill or be killed does so because he realizes that there is something that he values more than he does his life, and to have had one such experience marks an epoch of the utmost moral import. Perhaps it is not too much to say that only those who have made this supreme sacrifice in spirit are finished and complete men.

When death holds high carnival and whole populations are depleted, long periods of readjustment follow and human nature breaks out in strange ways. Defoe’s very realistic though fictive story of the Great Plague showed this. J. W. Thompson says that the Black Death, A.D. 1348–1349, swept away at least one-third of the population of Europe and brought in its train economic chaos, social unrest, profiteering, lack of production, phrenetic gayety, dissipation, wanton spending, recklessness, greed, debauchery, avarice, hysteria, and decay of morals. The nerves of the people were shattered. Goods were without owners but everything movable was immediately appropriated by survivors. Prices first shrank very low and then rose to preposterous heights. The Plague was like an invasion and there were great migrations for years. There was administrative inefficiency for the trained class was cut down. The machinery of government almost stopped and there were thousands of ignorant and incompetent men in important public places. The church was no better off and it had to press unfit raw recruits into its service. Flagellants exhibited a mixture of religion and sex rivaling the psychology of the crusades. Thought went off on all kinds of tangents. There were charlatans, mind-readers, sorcerers, witch doctors, soap-box preachers, and the Pied Piper very likely really did lead the excited children with his mad antics and weird music to wander off with him until, as in the children’s crusade, they were lost. Thompson points out that although there are many points of difference, there are more very significant analogues between the after-effects of this plague and those of the World War. A Danish historian estimates that in the latter ten million soldiers died in battle or of wounds, three million were permanently disabled, and probably some thirty million more people would have been alive to-day but for it. Such a decimation of Europe has certainly brought social, economic, and psychological changes that it would take us long to evaluate.

Meanwhile, we cannot entirely escape the looming prospect of a far more disastrous war that may yet come. W. Irwin has cleverly hit off some of the possibilities of the awful holocaust that death would probably celebrate if such a conflict ever came to pass. Instead of liquid flame we have now Lewisite gas, which is invisible, sinks, and would search out every dugout and cellar, while it also attacks the skin and almost always kills, having a spread fifty-five times greater than that of any other poison gas. He quotes an expert as saying that a dozen Lewisite air-bombs of the greatest size and under favorable atmospheric conditions would practically eliminate the population of Berlin and we even have hints of a gas beyond this. Gas will very likely be the chief weapon of the future war. Moreover, the bombing airplane has a range, of course, far beyond any gun. Bombs grew in size during the war from that of a grapefruit to eight feet in length, with half a ton of explosives and gas-generating chemicals, costing some $3,000 each and the planes carrying these will be directed by wireless, so that the airplane is thus the supergun. Hitherto warfare has been directed against soldiers, but in the future it will be against whole peoples and this generation may see a great metropolis suddenly made into a necropolis. Formal declaration of war, too, will become as obsolete as a Fauntleroy courtesy. Killing will be not by hand but by machinery; not in retail but by wholesale. War will be not between individual nations or small groups of them but will embrace the entire world, even the East, so that there will be no neutrals. Tanks will be used as super-dreadnoughts and poison gases will perhaps paralyze the soil for years, as indeed they have done to some extent in eastern France. Thus if war in the future becomes one hundred per cent efficient in the use of the resources at present at its command and those that it is only the part of common sense to anticipate, the depopulation caused will be incalculable and the world may experience again all the phenomena that Europe did after the Black Death, and perhaps more.

There is an evolution larger than Darwinism and far older than science in which all who think have everywhere and always believed. The common phenomena of growth suggest it to every mind. It is almost of the nature of thought to seek origins and to trace things to their simple beginnings. Indeed, the most perfect knowledge of anything is the description of the processes of its development. Special creation myths, cosmogonies, and religious theories of the world and man, philosophies and histories, are all products of the same deep instinct to know the cosmos as a whole and also its parts genetically. And it is a deep and dominant noetic instinct that has given us the far more highly evolved evolutionism that now prevails in every department of human knowledge. Thus, even those who oppose its recent applications to man are only halting at the last step in a path that all have traveled far and long.

The will-to-live, the struggle for survival, the élan vital, libido, etc., are only new names given to the impelling forces of the growth-urge in its higher stages; but these have become types and symbols, if a bit anthropomorphic, of all the more basal and earlier processes by which the homogeneous tends to differentiate itself. Thus we may conceive the universe as being from the first in labor to produce life. Everything that lives hungers to do so more intensely and as for man “’tis life of which our nerves are scant, more life and fuller--that we want.” Macrobiotism was the term used to designate the lust to maximize our lives, to make them vivid and long, and to exhaust all the possibilities of human experience; but, more especially, to enlarge the pleasure field and narrow that of pain, which is arrestive. We want to enjoy everything of which man’s estate is capable and we want it here and now. In youth, particularly, we long for wealth, knowledge, power, strength, fame, health, and beauty because these make us glow and tingle with life. The things to which we ascribe worth and value are those that enhance the joy of living. All of them are only forms of the affirmation of the will-to-live or fulfillments of the wish to be well, happy, and of consequence to ourselves and others. Progress, reform, enlightenment, enterprise, efficiency, are terms used as we climb the heights of the excelsior mount of promise. “More life and fuller”--we want nothing else here or hereafter.

But death, ghastly, inevitable death, is our goal. It is the great and universal negation of life and coregent with it of the world. All that lives must die. How the death-thought sometimes springs like a beast of prey from its ambush upon youth when life is most intense and how it blights, sears, stings, and wounds but nevertheless charms and fascinates! Here is the first of all dualisms, the greatest of all contrasts, and the most universal of all conflicts. Death is dissolution, defeat, retreat, abnegation, the processes of which begin with life itself and even the old who still “carry on” know that they must soon become carrion and that no funeral pomp or tomb can do more than camouflage putridity in order to divert us from the horrid thought to escape which the very concept of the soul itself was entified and immortalized, just as all the devices of modesty and all the precepts of sexual morality were evolved to divert us from the envisagement of bare sex organs and acts. Death is not only the king of terrors but to the genetic psychologist every fear is at bottom the fear of death, for all the scores of phobias that prey upon man are of things and of experiences that abate life. Death is thus a matter of infinite degrees from the loss of a penny or a sore tooth to that of a friend or to our own extinction. Freudians rightly ascribe many ailments of mind and body to abnormalities and disharmonies of sex love, which presides over the life of the race. But this now needs to be supplemented by quite another and probably no less important psychoanalysis that will show, when it is explored, that the fear of death or of life-abatement for the individual is no whit less pervasive and dominant than are love and hunger, which are so often said to rule the world. Only one psychologist has, although but very partially, recognized this and his findings are résuméd as follows.

W. Stekel says that not only has death played a great rôle in poetry, folklore, myth, religion, and art, but it is a more or less disguised theme of many dreams, especially those of neurotics. He urges that not only the death fear but the death wish, masked in very diverse symbolic forms, is extremely common in the dreams of psychopaths. He ascribes a thanatic meaning to very many factors that analytic Freudians have usually interpreted as having only a sexual significance and holds that the same mechanisms apply to both. He would have all psychoanalysts look for the death thought, which he believes hardly less common and quite as disguised and illusive as sex, not only in dreams but in the illusions of the insane. To our bestial unconscious self, which in these experiences escapes the censor, the ego is supreme and finds its ultimate goal only in the destruction of others; and if it does not kill those in our way, it pictures their death or finds some way for their removal. This, indeed, is involved in the realization of very many of our secret hopes. A woman loves a man whom she cannot see and so she dreams that her child dies, for she knows that he would attend the funeral and there see and also pity her. A man has more or less unconsciously ceased to love his wife but suppresses the realization of the fact from his waking consciousness and so dreams of her as talking with his grandfather, long since dead. Another man in a like state of mind dreamed that his wife suddenly and mysteriously vanished.

The most common death symbols are going away, a journey, wandering; or there may be still more remote focalization of the death wish upon sandals, feet, footsteps, a path, going home, passing through a narrow street or door, growing small; or even vehicles of any sort or anything suggestive of transportation may signify death. Instead of a skeleton or skull the dream may conceive death under the form of a rider, huntsman upon a white or black horse, a deaf mute--suggestive of the silence of the grave--or blindness, symbolic of its darkness; a doctor, perhaps Doctor White or Doctor Black, a tailor cutting a thread, a messenger, raven, black cat or dog, thirteen, a clergyman, priest, weeping willow, a woodman felling a tree, a mower or reaper, a small house or room, fire or flood.

Death in our unconscious is a wondrous masquerader and it very often appears as sleep. The grave is a bed; the churchyard, a dormitory; catacombs, berths. Water symbolism, too, is very common, for example, the crossing of a dark river to the other shore, a boat, a narrow strait, a stormy or a deep dark sea across which we pass to an island or a new continent, the abode of the dead; and we speak of going out with the ebb of the tide, shipwreck, stranding, etc. Death may also appear as a fire that consumes or purifies. Processions and even crowds may suggest burial or funerals; and so sometimes do festivals or even weddings. A chest or trunk may mean a coffin, and graduation or even promotion in school may stand for “passing out.” Sometimes the basis of the primitive impulse to kill, which made man a wolf to his fellow-man, may crop out in dreams or insanity without either camouflage or repression and the sleeper tries poison, pistol, dagger, knife, etc. Perhaps man still has in his unconscious, deep down at the bottom of his soul, the sin of father-murder, as some now tell us, and reaction to this brings remorse and later a sense of atonement from the original sin and guilt for which man has for ages sought remission and fancied resurrection. At any rate, many psychoneurotic souls seek to compensate for instinctive death wishes by excessive tenderness to friends and relatives, whose removal, they realize with horror, they have sometimes caught themselves desiring. Nietzsche says that we should never pity the old who are about to die; but under the law of bipolarity the worship and even the tyranny of the dead hand, or mortmain, has sometimes developed to such a degree that the dead have been or should be made to die again to free us from their control.

If these views are at all correct, our larger, older unconscious soul is still full of reverberations of suffering, inflicting, and observing death. Man became man when he knew that he must die, and to defer or escape death has been the basal motivation of all of his culture. That he might not starve he accumulated property, the primitive form of which, as Leternau has shown, was food. To escape death by the rigors of climate he devised clothing and shelter. To avoid it by wild beasts and human enemies he devised weapons and organized the hunt and warfare. To keep himself alive when attacked by disease, the medicine man and later the healing art were evolved. Now he insures not only against death but against the partial death involved in the loss of limbs, accident, and illness; he safeguards his person and his goods by codes and law courts; and regulates diet, regimen, mores, and social hygiene with a view to more and fuller life. All these institutions are impelled by the instinct of self-preservation, reinforced as it now is in man by the knowledge of his mortality. Man may thus be redefined as the death-shunner. He does not and cannot begin to realize how much he fears death and dreads it now and always has. The reason for this is that while the knowledge that he must die is so certain and ineluctable, the opposite impulse to forget, repress, and deny this fact also has behind it the momentum of ages. The rank, raw death-thought that our late dear ones are, and that we shall soon become, masses of rotting putridity, most offensive of all things to sense and sources of loathsome and mortal contagion, is so rarely allowed to escape its inveterate censorship that we are all liable to become neurotic toward it if it does so.

One envisagement of an erstwhile dear one who had become this most loathsome of all objects drove Buddha to renounce his throne, wealth, and family, and to become a mendicant and a seeker for, if not an antidote at least a palliative for the awful death-thought. The great religion he founded is essentially a religion of pity for man because he is doomed to die. Its founder aspired to be the world’s great consoler, accepting frankly the stark and gruesome thought of death with all its horrifying implications.

Schopenhauer, who had a very morbid fear of death till near the close of his life, when it seemed to quite abate, developed views about it that have had immense influence throughout the world, especially in Germany. He believed his views to be modern expressions of ancient Hindu philosophy and also that all systems of philosophy are primarily either comforts for or antidotes to death. The power behind creative evolution he calls the will-to-live, which is blind and unreasonable. “It is not the knowing part of our ego that fears death, but the fuga mortis proceeds entirely and alone from the blind will with which everything is filled.” Only the will as it exhibits itself in the body is destroyed by death. We should no more dread the time when we shall not be than we regret the time before birth when we were not. The infinite time before us is no more dreadful than the infinite time that preceded us. As of sleep, we may say: Where we are, death is not; and where death is, we are not. “If one knocked on the graves and asked the dead whether they wished to rise again, they would all shake their heads.” We were enticed into life by the hope of more favorable conditions of existence and death is disappointment and return to the womb of nature, who is all the while entirely indifferent to both our birth and death. Only small minds fear it. It is to the species what sleep is to the individual. All that exists is worthy only of being destroyed.

We come into life buoyant and happy but before leaving it have to pay for all the joy by pain enough to compensate. True, the intellect, which is an individual acquisition, is sloughed off by death, while the will is given its freedom again. “The will of man, in itself individual, separates itself in death from the intellect,” so that new generations get new intellects. This is the truth that underlies the doctrine of metempsychosis or palingenesis and is the faith of half the world. Here, too, roots the philosophy of eternal recurrence. The present generation in its inner metaphysical nature, that is, in its will, is identical with every generation that has preceded, but we do not recognize either our previous form of existence or the friends we once knew in a former state because the intellect, with its memory and perceptions, is only phenomenal and individual. Christianity gave itself a needlessly hard task in representing the soul as created de novo and in failing to recognize that pre- and post-existence support each other. “Death is the great reprimand which the will-to-live, or more especially the egoism which is essential to this, receives through the course of nature, and it may be conceived as a punishment for our existence. It is the painful loosening of the knot which the act of generation has tied with sexual pleasure, the violent destruction coming from without of the fundamental error of our nature, the great disillusion. We are at bottom something that ought not to be; therefore we cease to be.” The loss of our individuality is thus only apparent or phenomenal. “Death is the great opportunity to be no longer I.” “During life the will of man is without freedom. Death looses his bonds and gives him his true freedom which lies in his esse, not in his operari.” Individuality is one-sided and “does not constitute the inner kernel of our being” but is rather to be conceived as an aberration of it. Thus death is a “restitutio ad integrum.” The wise man wishes to die really and not merely apparently and so desires no continuation of his personality. “The existence which we know we will all give up; what we get instead of it is, in our eyes, nothing because our existence with reference to that is nothing” (Nirvana).

It is an illusion to place the ego in consciousness because in fact “my personal phenomenal existence is just as infinitely small a part of my true nature as I am of the world.” “What is the loss of this individuality to me who bear in me the possibility of innumerable individualities?” Individuality is thus “a special error, a false step, something that had better not be, nay something which it is the real end of life to bring us back from.” Death is, thus, the awakening from the dream of life, which is made up of trivialities and contradictions, time being only one of the principles of individuation and having no absolute existence but being merely a form of knowledge of it. Will is the true thing itself. It is human nature that is perdurable. It is true that we know only even our will as phenomenon and not what it really and absolutely is in itself. Knowledge is entirely distinct from will but the latter is always and everywhere primal. The inveterate blunder of philosophers is to place the eternal element in the intellect while in fact it lies solely in the universal will and struggle to live, which is indestructible. We cannot know it because of the essential limitations of consciousness per se, but in the true being of things free from these forms the latter distinction between the individual and the race disappears and the two are identical. The continuation of the species is really the image of the indestructibility of the individual.

We are lured into life by the hope of pleasure and retained in it by fear of death; but both are equally illusions. It is strange that the only thing in us that really fears death, namely, the will, is precisely that which is never affected by it. “Thus, although the individual consciousness does not survive death, yet that survives it which alone struggles against it, namely, the will.” Neither the intellect nor anything in it is indestructible for knowledge is only secondary and derived from the objectivizations of the will. “The intellect is dropped when it has served its purpose. Death and birth are the constant renewal of the consciousness of the will, in itself without end and without beginning, which alone is, as it were, the substance of existence.” When in death the will is separated from the intellect, it feels lost because it has so long depended on it, and hence we fear. Life is only a heavy dream into which the will-to-live has fallen. To the dying we may say, “Thou ceasest to be something which thou hadst done better never to become.” Thus generations of individuals are constantly reappearing, each fitted out with new intellects. But every new form of life is only an assumption in another form of the same will. Thus for Schopenhauer death is emancipation of the will from its slavery to consciousness, a breaking down of the wall it has erected between individuals, a regression to the ultimate momentum that underlies evolution, so that new individuals made of the same will, but disencumbered of the limitations life and mind impose, are ever starting again. The race is immortal and even back of that nature herself is still more so. The rhythm of life and death does change the nature or the form of the eternal currents of existence.

But, leaving Schopenhauer, we must go back to the very beginnings of humanity to realize all that the death-thought has done in the world and to understand how man has always wrestled with it, tried to fight it down, and devised so many ways and means of escaping from it. Probably there was never a stage of human life so low that corpses were not separated from the living and put away by themselves, so that necrophilism hardly seems to be an atavistic psychic rudiment. Man disposes of corpses by fire, water, or inhumation, towers of silence, tombs, cemeteries and other homes set apart for them, while animals do nothing of this kind. He alone cannot endure the spectacle of the fate that nature provides and so shroud, coffin, flowers, monuments, shrubs, trees, serve to divert attention from what is going on in the sepulchre below.

But the great diversion, coeval with the beginning of corpse disposal, was the conception of a soul separable from the body and surviving it, and this is as old as animism. Other factors, of course, contributed to the primitive belief in souls but when and wherever it arose it became the chief distractor from and the great negator of the death-thought. Now, as the body is not all, death is not complete and some part of us, however tenuous, lives on. Let the carcass rot. We can now focus our attention upon a spirit that outlives the flesh and this invention is the chief panacea mankind has found against the most gruesome of all its ills. In the very crudest and crassest form of belief in a separable soul lie the promise and potency of all the quellers of death-thoughts that have arisen from it; and so, when in the course of time it came that the air was becoming as full of ghosts as the earth was of corpses, they too had to be partitioned off from the living and given their own abode beyond some river, sea, mountain or other barrier, or beneath or above the earth. Whatever betide, the souls of the departed must be driven and kept away by apotropic rites or by sacrifices, the motto of which was do ut abais. Thus the living had to herd the souls of the dead as they had their bodies in order that they themselves might be free and sane. This was a great achievement, which spiritists and psychic researchers tend to undo, for ghosts must be laid just as bodies must be buried and the decomposing souls that appear in seances are only less offensive to common sense than the mouldering bodies are to sense.

Thus the fear of death has always called attention more strongly than anything else to the soul and to psychology. Something leaves the human body at death and has some power of independent existence; but just as the body must be put away so ghosts must be laid or driven off. In primitive culture the souls of the dead tend to linger near the body. Sometimes widows are plunged into water to drown off the souls of their dead husbands before they can marry again. Some tribes turn out en masse at stated times to frighten away the spirits, as they do to get rid of vermin and rats or to clean house. Ghosts may be burned in effigy. A window or hole in the roof must be opened for the soul of the dead to escape and afterwards closed. The body is carried several times around the house so that the soul cannot find its way back. Those unjustly treated or not buried may return for vengeance. Some think tombstones were primitively to hold down the souls of the dead, just as the Tiber was turned and Attila buried in its bed and it was then made to flow back again so as to keep him in the land of spirits. In Gurney’s Phantasms of the Living ghosts have their chief power at or near the moment of death. It is one of the great functions of the medicine man to dispose of the spirits of the dead and many rites were devised to relegate them to some place appointed. The living have their own domain and their own rights, which the dead must respect. Only the witch makes havoc with this order by bringing back the souls of the departed. Thus many kinds of barriers grew up between the living and the dead--distance, oblivion, a stream, a belt of fire, a deep chasm, a high divide, etc., so that the ghost world became hard to get to or from. Thus, in general, man does not wish to go to the realm of ghosts or to have them trespass upon his preserves. The New Zealanders conceived such preserves for their dead over the precipice of Reinga; the Fiji Islanders in their deep and fiery cañons; the Sandwich Islanders in the subterranean abodes of Akea; the Kamchatkans in an underground Elysium; the Indians in a Happy Hunting Ground; the Greenlanders deep under the sea; the old Teutons in Walhalla, the temple of the slain with its columns of spears and roof of shields; and the Greeks and Romans in the realm of Pluto. There are many roads and many ushers to conduct souls to their own home--sunbeams, the Milky Way, paths through caverns, or over the rainbow bridge Bifröst; while in Greece Charon and in Egypt Anubis carried souls across or through the interval or partition. In all these ways man has sought to conceive of the souls of the dead as effectively shepherded in folds of their own.

Other studies show that there is a sense in which every incident of a funeral tends to lay ghosts. If we simply hear at a distance of the death of our friends, we are far more liable to receive visits from their revenient spirits or dream of them as alive than if we have actually seen them buried, because all the incidents of this ceremony bring home, even to our unconscious selves, the fact that they are really dead and gone from us, soul and body. Thus the tears, Scripture reading, badges of mourning, and even the expense tend to reef in our sense of our dead friend’s personality and to make it powerless to project ghostly phantasms, because such ceremonials are cathartic and preventative of all such hallucinations.

Thus, at this stage of the story of the immortality cult we have two worlds well apart and the Jenseits, or the realm of death, can perhaps be reached from the Diesseits of the body only by a long and dangerous journey that the psyche must take after leaving the soma to moulder. Why has man always stood in such awe of the ghosts of even his friends? The answer is not simple. It is partly because he wanted to be free from their constraint. They included his parents, from whose control even youth, at a certain stage, wants to be well rid. Even his dearest ones might cherish some secret grudge that could now be indulged in with impunity. As spirits they have certain unknown new powers for mischief, whereas if they were enemies they could use these powers for revenge. Toward the dead we generally have a bad conscience. They can often read our secret motives while we cannot read theirs. Thus man propitiated the pallid shades of Orcus by offerings and sacrifices to abate their malevolence and secure their good-will. However remotely he banished them, he has never been able to realize the fact that they were utterly dead forever, soul as well as body. All his will to rid himself of them has always stopped short of entire fulfillment.

On the contrary, some of the great dead he has not only immortalized but deified. Others may still come back at midnight in a dream or vision at some weird haunted spot or in dire emergencies; or if conjured by constraining spells of sufficient potency; perhaps if they have not been rightly buried; or to deliver some pregnant message; or, again, to pronounce a curse or benediction. It is generally hard for them to get to us and also, having done so, to make their presence felt and they are perhaps so exhausted by this effort that they can tell us nothing; while it is given to but few mortals to visit their abode and come back unscathed and to fewer yet it is given to bring back others with them.

One of the most momentous steps in culture was taken by the ancient Egyptians, whose religion, more than that of any other race, might, in view of our recent knowledge of it, be called the cult of the dead par excellence. The new step here taken consisted, in a word, in making the postmortem status of the soul dependent upon virtue in this life, thus enlisting the mighty power of the next world in behalf of morals. Their famous book of the dead presupposes “a religious belief in the actual revivification of the body,” because of which hoped-for event the Egyptians took the greatest possible care to preserve and afterwards to hide the bodies of the dead. This famous book treats of the soul’s journey through Amenti, of the gods and other residents there, with formulæ that will deliver the migrant thither from foes. It contains prayers and hymns to the great gods intended to recommend him to all of them; texts that must be inscribed on both the amulets and bandages of the mummies; plan and arrangement of the mourning chamber; the confession before the assessors; the scene where the heart is weighed in the hall of Osiris; and a representation of the Elysian fields, etc.

At death, relatives and mourners emerged from their houses to the streets, placed mud upon their heads, fasted, and priests pronounced an oration describing the good works of the great dead. There were sometimes accusations and formal judgments by the forty elders as to whether or not the burial should be in due form to convey the soul to the gods. If the verdict was favorable, the gods were entreated to admit him into the place reserved for the good; if not, he was deprived of burial and must lie in his own house. If there were debts, the body was given to creditors as a pledge until the sacred duty of redeeming it was performed. The details of embalmment during the seventy-two days of mourning were given in great profusion for each part of the body. Each bandage had its text and the tomb must be made a proper dwelling place for the ka, or soul, which will stay there as long as the body does. Each process, pledget, and wrapping, had its name and there was an elaborate trade in bitumen, which is the meaning of the word mummy.

The people felt great satisfaction in preserving and seeing the simulated features of their ancestors, whom they came to regard in some sense as contemporaneous. The welfare of the soul in the nether world depended upon the completeness of all the funeral processes. At the height of this central cult of Egypt, bulls, antelopes, cats, crocodiles, ibis, hawk, frog, toad, scorpion, snake, fish, hippopotamus, cow, lion, sphinx, were sacred to the gods and were mummified, while the scarab was loaded down with symbolic meanings and became central in all funeral rites. These ceremonials did not decline until the third or fourth century of our era and only when Christianity taught that the body would be given back in a changed and incorruptible form, did it cease to be necessary to preserve it with drugs. This necrophilism was all for the sake of the soul and both expressed and strengthened belief in it. The cult of no race has been so saturated with thanatism.

In all we know of the folk-soul there is no more striking illustration of geneticism than the slow but sure establishment in recent years, by comparing ancient myths and rites with the findings of excavations, of the fact that in the great countries about the eastern Mediterranean, especially Thrace, Asia Minor, and Egypt, the highest religious consciousness of these races was expressed in elaborate cults of death and resurrection, to have participated in which is said to have made the celebrants over and initiated them into a new and higher life. All was so secret and oath-bound that it found little representation, save the most incidental allusions in history and literature, so that it was reserved for modern research to uncover, reconstruct, and understand its tremendous power.

Osiris, Persephone, Attis, the lover of the all-mother Cybele, Demeter and Dionysius in the Eleusinian mysteries, Astar in her restoration of Phanæus and many others, some with very high and full and some with very scanty and fragmentary developments of the myth and cult, died and perhaps went to Hades and came back bringing, now one, now many with them. Typical of these ceremonies were the funereal sadness, death dirge, wailings, active symbolic manifestations of grief and despair, as if to attain the very acme of psychalgia. The great, good, beautiful, divine hero is not only dead but has perhaps gone over into the nether-world to defy death and the power of evil in their stronghold and to conquer and bind them. There is, then, a phase of painful, anxious, silent suspense. Will he succeed and return or will he fail and never reappear? Then, when the tension is at the very breaking-point, comes the thumic ebb, rebound, or reversal. Someone whispers or cries aloud, “He has won and comes back,” and then all is changed. Lights flare out in the darkness. Instead of tears and sobs there is joy unrestrained, congratulations, embraces, and soon frantic ecstasy, leaping, shouting, wine, song, revelry, bells, fireworks, and sometimes in degenerate days, drunkenness and gluttony with the sacramental elements and, in token of the triumphs of the higher love, perhaps carnal debauch and revelry and always ecstasy and inebriation with euphoria. Thus from three to six centuries B.C. men strove to attain an immunity bath that should safeguard them from all excessive pain and pleasure of life by participation in a pageantry or dramatization of the eternal struggle between the greatest evil, death, and the dread of it and the greatest joy of the most intense living, thus ensuring their souls against being led captive by the pleasures or pains of life, neither of which could be so extreme as these, by keeping wide open the way from the extremest depression to the maximum of exaltation.

Now all this rests in every case where it can be traced upon the retreat of the sun and the death of the world, symbolized by winter and the return of spring, reinforced, of course, by the alternations of day and night. These deities or their prototypes were originally gods of vegetation and their resurrections are vernal. The everlasting bars that broke were snow and ice. The king of glory that came in when the gates were lifted was spring, the conqueror, or dawn; and in these secular changes of the year are found the first preformations of the soul and the momentum that still subconsciously reinforces belief in a life after death and supplies always an anodyne and often an antidote for the death-fear.

It was on this basis that Christianity, especially as interpreted by Paul, arose. The culminating event in its story took place in the few days between the burial of Jesus and the Pentecostal outburst. Never in history, if it be history, and never in the subject story of Mansoul, if this be the stage on which it was all accomplished, has there been such an au rebours from the nadir of depression of the disciples, because the type-man of their race, who had grown to their minds to be a fully diplomated God-man, was completely dead--and that in shame and ignominy--and his corpse sealed up to moulder and rot in a rock. Then came first the timid and then the plenary conviction that He had conquered death and even hell, risen from the dead, walked and conversed with friends in an attenuated body and had visibly ascended to Heaven and God. Once fully convinced that this was all veritably true, witnessed and attested by every sense and proof, the great incubus of ages was thrown off and Death, the supreme terror, was abolished. This brought an ecstasy or intoxication of joy called the gift of the Holy Spirit, which possessed the lives of believers. The ecstatic disciples shouted in weird unknown tongues until onlookers thought them “full of new wine” (Acts 2:13, 15), gazed all day into Heaven, henceforth the home of souls, and had to be exhorted to cease their raving jubilations and go to work. In this exhilarating new joy and freedom they, and later their successors, met the nine persecutions, during which martyrdom became a passion and tender youths and maidens could hardly be restrained from throwing themselves to the wild beasts in the arena as the supreme crown and testimony to their faith.

So, too, Christian asceticism followed from the same motive. This life was mean and it mattered little how squalid it was, for it was only a provisional, probationary moment compared to the eternal joy and happiness where all real worths and values were confidently awaited and compared to which those of earth were only dross. “There is no death. What seems so is transition” to an infinitely higher state than this. Never did the other world so absorb the power of this. Visions, trances, homilies, poems, poetry and theology fitted the other world out with every good and the chief offices of the church were to keep the keys of the transcendental world and to wield its tremendous sanctions in a way to dominate life and determine good and evil. Thus never was the greatest Verdrängung (repression) that ever oppressed the human race so completely removed. The most essential claim of Christianity is to have obviated the fear of death and made the king of terrors into a good friend, if not into a boon companion, by this the most masterly of all psychotherapies. If it be only a pragmatic postulate or hypothesis or Als Ob (As If) in Vaihinger’s sense, it has worked well on the whole. Despite the ever present dangers of transcendental selfishness that prompts only to save one’s own soul, it is nevertheless the supreme demonstration of the “Allmacht” (omnipotence) of the folksoul to minister to its own gravest diseases and banish its greatest enemy, the death fear.

Thus Jesus is most widely known as the Man of the Cross and the crucifix and even the fragments of the Cross are revered throughout the Christian world. In no other religion has the death of the founder had such prominence or efficacy. All the events of Holy Week have been wrought out in great detail by tradition and art. Its story is the world’s great masterpiece of pathos. The ecstasy of the passover represents the culmination of the conquest of the death-fear by Mansoul. The gift of the Holy Spirit was simply the conviction that death itself was dead. For centuries preaching consisted of nothing else than telling this story, which was the gospel of the gladdest of all glad tidings. If Christ is not arisen, our faith is vain. To doubt this has always been the most culpable of all heresies save that of atheism itself.

Thus night, day; sleep, waking; autumn, spring--cadence the soul to life and death. To these were added the higher symbolisms of sin and holiness, illness and health, old age and rejuvenation, crushing despair and triumphant hope, pessimism and optimism, with the latter and not the former, as had often been the case before, final and triumphant. Every known race of man initiates the young at puberty by a ritualized pain and pleasure treatment that anticipates all this. Youth was isolated, made to fast, scarified, tattooed, made to endure extreme hardship, fatigue, sometimes partial burial; and then followed remission, dance, feasting, perhaps orgies, only after which did the young become full members of the tribe. Thus it is the inveterate consensus of man through all his history that on the threshold of mature life each individual should be oriented to its sovereign master’s pain and pleasure by extreme experience with each in turn, as if thereby to develop the power of elasticity, resilience, and reaction, and to impress upon it throughout all its profoundest depths the conviction that there is no defeat that should not be followed by victory, no darkness so black as that which just precedes day, no virtue like that which has just overcome evil, no passivity that will not tend to react toward progressiveness. Indeed, this is a kind of modulus that Christianity has impressed upon the entire occidental world and it is this that has given it its courage, élan, and enterprise. This is the chief imprint it has left upon the human soul, even for those who have forgotten or denied all its tenets. Thus there is a deep psychological sense in which all those who have not passed rigorously through the experience that Christianity symbolizes by the phrase “dying and rising with Jesus” are not initiated into life and remain immature.

It is they who are more liable to be arrested in the trough of the wave and to become discouraged or even melancholic and when they meet the ills and hardships of life to flee from reality and seek some refuge from its stern demands, because life in them has not conquered death. They have not learned the great law of taking their pleasure and pain in the things they ought and in a measure proportionate to each. Indeed, modern psychotherapy is, for the most part, a new application of this old mode of rescue for such souls in distress. Maeder has well and wisely found all its processes typified in Dante’s descent into hell at the nethermost center of the earth where Satan himself was; and his emergence a slow ascent up the purgatorial mount to the infinite joys of paradise, first under the guidance of a human sage and then led by Beatrice, a type of the supreme self-directing oracle within. Dante, as everyone knows, called his poem a comedy because it had a happy ending, but every modern novel and drama is constructed according to the same formula that Christianity made current.

And who would read a story or see a play in which at the end the hero or heroine did not achieve all they desired? And, again, why do we love to experience all the desperate miseries to which our favorites in story and on the stage are subjected before the happy dénouement begins to show but that we are dead sure that in the end both the villain and the virtuous will get their deserts. Indeed, at least one German “pithiatric” psychiatrist prescribes a drastic experience of the story of the Cross as a therapeutic method in certain cases. All this, of course, has no reference to the question whether the story is all fact or all fancy. The psychologist only studies its effects and its inner mechanisms, which, save for those who have grown scrupulous under the influence of modern controversy, are no more relevant than is the historicity of Hamlet, Lear, or Portia to the audience in a theater. In the patristic and in the Middle Ages, and even now, children and neurotics have suffered almost to the point of stigmatization at any realistic description or at the Ober-Ammergau dramatization of the items of the crucifixion and feel with all the vicariousness that sympathy can yield the thorns, bitter cup, nails, spear, etc., as we have elsewhere shown in detail.

But despite all the realistic pedagogy of the church the conviction of another life is very rapidly fading from the modern consciousness and even within the church itself is becoming an ineffective shadow of a shade. Dr. George A. Gordon of the Old South Church, Boston, preaching to the Congregational State Association in 1902, said: “We ministers of the Lord Jesus Christ know as no other persons in the community what a paralysis has come over intelligent and thinking people in regard to the reality of the other life. So many doubt it; so few have any strong confidence in regard to it.” This opinion, of course, was posited not only on the confidences of the pastor’s study but also on the confidences of the sick room and the death chamber. The tendency has steadily increased and in funeral services we hear little of future rewards and punishments and only of rest and peace. The old evidence from death-beds is fallacious.

Sir William Osler says:

I have careful records of about five hundred death-beds, studied particularly with reference to the modes of death and the sensations of the dying. The latter alone concerns us here. Ninety suffered bodily pain or distress of one sort or another, eleven showed mental apprehension, two positive terror, one expressed spiritual exaltation, one bitter remorse. The great majority gave no sign one way or the other; like their birth, their death was a sleep and a forgetting. The Preacher was right: in this matter man hath no preëminence over the beast--“as the one dieth so dieth the other.”

This belief persists, thus, only as a dead article of faith which men no longer live by. It is a desiccated herbarium specimen and not a living plant. If common observation did not sufficiently show this, it has appeared very significantly and statistically in many recent studies. These showed that it diminishes progressively as we go up the educational grades from high school through the university and that, in general, the more cultivated man becomes, the less he believes in any form of personal survival. If we had a similar investigation of the old as compared with the young, my own partial studies incline me to believe that this conviction of personal persistence beyond the grave in general loses its force in senescence, as indeed it becomes vital only at adolescence. If it be thus a creed that first blossoms with the advent and tends to decay at the close of sexual life, we have a new key for understanding both its function and its limitations. True, it often persists, if only feebly, as with the momentum of a spent force, in those who have not fully realized the senium, although they all do not wish to be conserved as old as they really are but to be rejuvenated as they once were.

In what follows we believe it will appear that upon analysis by mechanisms akin to metonymy or synecdoche the vigor with which we have clung to a belief in personal is really motivated by a deeper belief in racial immortality and that in this latter, when the strophe of life is succeeded by its antistrophe, the deeper faith tends to come out and true sages realize what the soul meant by what the tenuous and falsetto faculty called faith blindly groped its way toward.

The psychic factors that have so overdetermined the hope-wish of personal immortality are as follows.

I. First is the desire to be remembered and esteemed by survivors. The soul abhors oblivion somewhat as it does extinction. We wish our friends not only to think of us but to think well of us. How satisfying this is both to those who die and to those who live is seen in Confucianism, where ancestor worship vicariates for belief in personal immortality. It would almost seem that some of the good and great would think more of the certainty of being canonized in due time or perpetuated in the form of bronze or marble, or enrolled in some temple of fame, than of personal immortality. At any rate, this mundane, would in some degree compensate for the loss of celestial perpetuation. Those who die in more or less full consciousness are prone in their last moments to dwell upon their friends far more than they do upon their own future state, as if the enshrinement they chiefly sought were in the hearts and minds of those they leave behind. Conversely, those who die alone, friendless, or with the execration of survivors, cling the more to the rehabilitation that death itself always tends to bring. On the basis of questionnaire data it would seem that some about to die shudder more at the thought that others would think they were totally extinct at death than from inwardly facing this conviction for themselves. We want others to think we are enjoying the best the universe can provide for its favorites, because in that case they will think more highly of us since we have obtained the diploma of the cosmos, that we have stood the test and have graduated summa cum laude from the terrestrial curriculum. Perhaps if we were early Christians we should begin to “put on airs” and affect the manners of a higher life here to impress our own valuation of ourselves upon others. An ancient sage would rather that others thought him bad and hated him than to be forgotten. Thus, in fine, if all knew that they and all their good deeds would never fade from grateful memory of their descendants, the conviction of a conscious personal existence beyond the grave would lose one of its preforming determinants and reinforcements. Therefore, those concerned to keep alive the fate and hope of another life should foster any agency that keeps the memory of the dead green. There really ought to be those who sum up effectively the good lessons and meaning of every life when it closes, as a kind of mundane judgment day so that no good influence be lost and no warning fail to have its due effect--a court of the dead to pass impartially upon each life as it sets out to sea. We censor books and are beginning to test eugenic marriages, etc.; and so, if all knew that upon their death an impartial tribunal would pass upon their lives in the interests of the common weal, even if their verdict came late or was given only to those most interested to know, ethical culture would mark a great advance and the fear of death, instead of consoling itself with belief in a future life, would be set to work in the interests of normal lives here.

II. The second mundane surrogate for transcendental immortality is doing things that will affect those who survive or will perpetuate our will and works to those who know little or nothing of us or of our name. Many last wills and testaments benefit those who knew nothing of the donor. Many such have reared buildings, started movements, built organizations, written books, invented, created works of art, transformed the face of nature with an instinct of workmanship in which all thought of self was merged. All our lives are thus greatly influenced by those who are unknown. The egoistic element tends to merge in a disinterested desire to make part of the world in some way better for our having lived. Sometimes, indeed, anonymity is actively striven for and the individuality of benefactors is hidden. The phobia here is that we may have lived for naught. Here the idea of God as an All-Discerner who sees virtue and vice, and rewards or punishes in secret, coöperates. Such hidden service to the race, with no thought of any compensation here or hereafter, has a unique charm all its own. Scientific discoveries and beneficent inventions have sometimes thus been given freely to all without any personal benefit and without a personal label. True love sometimes lavishes every gift, opportunity, and joy upon its object, with no stipulation of love or gratitude or even recognition in its turn. Indeed, the possession of wealth compels more or less attention to this field of the immortality of influence. Unlike the pauper, the millionaire must forecast if he would try to shape the future; and even if great givers attach their names to their bequests, they know that to most who profit by them their name will soon mean nothing. Jubal invented music and wandered afar and when he came back he found a great festival in honor of his art and of his name, but could not identify himself and was cast out as an impostor. “Jubal’s fame and art filled all the sky, while Jubal lonely laid him down to die,” supremely happy in the thought that he had done the race a great service. To love and serve man is far higher than to love and serve God, for we can do nothing for Him save in this way and He needs and expects no help from us save this. Men come and go but institutions and influence go on forever and those who start them share their mundane deathlessness long after they are forgotten. The cup of cold water illustrates the way of the gentleman or lady born and bred, best attested by the desire that others be happy and not that they themselves shine, be aggrandized, or have pleasure. This is the most ideal conduct and appeals most strongly of all things to the two great and ultimate standards of conduct, namely, honor and an approving conscience. And as we achieve this we belong to the order of the immortals and have triumphed over death. Desjardins, the founder of the order of the new life, said in substance, “We are never so impelled to snap our fingers in the face of death, to despise all its pomp and horror, and to defy him to do his worst to body and soul, as when we have just performed some such act of pure but passionate duty or kindness.” Then only can we truly feel that “no evil can befall a good man living or dead” and that the cosmos is moral to the core.

III. The third killer of the death-fear is children and posterity. To die childless, knowing that our heredity that began with the amœba and came down to us in an unbroken line dies, sharpens the sting of death; while, on the other hand, to have many well born and well reared children to rise up and call us blessed is one of the best antidotes to its baleful psychic virus. As every one knows, every creature, man included, lives about as long after the maximum power to propagate as his offspring requires to become mature, so that the prolongation of the period of immaturity means the prolongation of old age. Our foremost duty is to transmit the sacred torch of life undimmed, to give the maximal momentum and right direction to the nature and nurture of offspring and to bring rising generations to their full maturity--that is the highest criterion of an ever rising nation, including civilization itself. The true parent lives not only in and for the children but is the ancestor of their souls as well as of their bodies and even his belief in a future life is a good or bad thing according as it affects this. We feel this life incomplete, unfinished, and in need of a supplement because its possibilities are as yet unrealized. But we feel all this so much the less if we have children, while the dread of the inevitable hour becomes that of a kind of second or dual death for the childless because not only they but their line die in them. Yet, on the other hand, they have less ties and so less to lose, even though they may feel that they have, in a sense, lived in vain. What parent was ever so world-weary, so strong a believer in postmortem joy, that he would not rather live on here and see his children’s children thrive than go on hence to any conceivable future state? Those who leave offspring have had less time to develop morbid fears of Lethe’s waters and if they expect to enter a great peace beyond, they often find their chief joy in contemplating the fruits of their loins on earth. We have seen how the death thought begins with the life of sex and when the latter, if it has been normal and happy, comes to an end, death has already begun and we are advancing deeper into the shades of the dark valley, so that there is already less to lose. Thus the death of the aged is less tragic and less inconsolable; and, what is far more important, normal and cultured souls think and care progressively less about another life.

IV. As for the good old doctrine of personal immortality, we cannot yet escape the great law that the next life is compensatory. If men are wretched here, the future becomes a refuge and grows not only actual but attractive; while, conversely, if this life is rich and abounding, the next tends to fade. No Christian age was ever so heedless of the latter as our own. For most intelligent, prosperous women, and especially men, it has lapsed to little more than a mere convention or trope or fetish of an effete orthodoxy, and hell is at most only a nightmare of the past, a childish phantom. Our actual modus vivendi is as if another life did not exist and death were the end. No priestcraft can longer make men content with misery here in the hope of compensation hereafter. All make the most and best of this life as if it were all they were sure of and the motto of most believers is, “One life at a time and this one now.” Only in a kind of secondary falsetto Sunday consciousness do their thoughts turn to the future and does a flickering hope that death is not the end appear. Extinction is black by contrast in proportion as life is bright, happy, and absorbing, so that the death dread is in some respects growing as our life becomes richer, while it is at the same time being more and more banished from consciousness. The chief attractiveness it now has is that it brings rest and peace, for our tropes of it are more and more borrowed from sleep. Thus if the idea of the negation of life was never so dreadful, there was never such diversion from its closer envisagement. Thus, too, although suppressed, it was never so potent a factor in governing conduct, in improving hygiene, and providing for our offspring. Although we take a chance at saving our souls by church membership it is more and more bad form to discuss such matters. The real treasure of the soul is laid up elsewhere than in heaven and the growing phobia of death has now psychotherapies that are more and more effective. Its power is far greater than we know and there are endless uses to which it can yet be put in helping on the world’s work. Just as every pain that depresses the vital spirits a few points on the scale of euphoria, though they still remain far above zero, inclines to death, so when life is at its optimum or flood-tide man is wonderfully immune and recuperative in body and soul and the higher up the euphoric scale we live, the more difficult it is to fear or even think of death. Thus every legitimate fear of death is in a sense a life-preserver and -prolonger. Our business is to live and not to die, to keep at the very top of our condition and as far as possible from death, which is the summum malum.

As to the relation of these four immortalities, nominal, influential, plasmal, and orthodox, to each other, geneticism and the revelations of the dynamism of the folk-soul have shed much new light. This may be summarized in the statement that each of them is correlated with all the others. Even he who is chiefly intent on perpetuating his name is gratifying the deep instinct of transcending the limits of his own personal life and to know that he is remembered is not without consoling power even in the loss of property or if the conviction arises that death means extinction; while, conversely, the prospect of death in utter obscurity and of being completely forgotten tends to reinforce any or all of the other immortalities. Were we to rehabilitate hell in a modern sense, one of its horrors would be a sentence of summary oblivion even to our friends: “Let his name be forever taboo from mention or even from memory.” Of course, we shall all sooner or later fall under this sentence despite all our pathetic efforts to leave durable names behind.

As to anonymous influence, we are all sure of it to a degree, for the world we are born into is made by those who preceded us and we help to shape the future. In the social field we have endless illustrations of a service that involves more or less emulation. The case in point is a woman I knew who, having lived a most disinterested and self-sacrificing life, when told that God would reward her in the next world replied that she had never had either conviction or interest about another life but had been too busy doing good to think about it. If another life was in the order of things, all would be well, but if annihilation were in store, that, too, would be just as welcome, for she had found her pay in the satisfaction that each day’s work brought. She had no children and wanted no outer recognition but was content that her good deeds registered in others’ lives would follow her and nothing else really mattered in her scheme of life. The point is that in any other ages or environments the same instinct to enlarge life might have found expression in either of the other forms. Some even commit colossal crimes from a perverted form of Geltung’s propensity. Because they cannot be potent for good they make themselves so for evil. Anonymity is often a passion and finds outcrops not only in religion and philosophy but also in science. Indeed, very much of our civilization is composed of innumerable influences originated by those whose names no history or Acta Sanctorum have preserved and are products of this deep basal trend in the human soul.

As to plasmal immortality, who knows how much of all the good done in the world, if traced to its genetic roots, comes straight from the original momentum of the instinct to make the world better for posterity? To be sure, many of them are now broken erratic trends, forgetful of their source, which is really a nest-building instinct so irradiated and sublimated as to have lost orientation toward both its origin and goal. The first constructions in the world were nidifications. The first animal societies were stirpicultural. The primal examples of self-sacrifice were for the young. Everything for the world is good that squares with the functions of parenthood broadly conceived, and all is bad that contravenes it. Psychotherapy is slowly leading us to the astonishingly new insight that aberrations of the life-transmitting, young-rearing propensities constitute very many if not most of our mental abnormalities and that the rectification of these functions has marvelous therapeutic efficiency. The race is immortal, at least back to the first protozoan and indeed infinitely beyond. And so, in the future, our race and it only is immortal to the cosmic end. If we are tips of the twigs of a vast buried tree, these twigs may become themselves roots of a yet greater one and even a true superman may yet be born in the line of any of us. Thus, perhaps all the other immortalities have their dynamogeny in the instincts of parenthood.

As to the venerable belief in personal immortality, it was of course selfishness transcendentalized so as to subordinate every other goal in life to that of insuring our own happiness in a postmortem world. And we have to-day only contempt for the squalid ascetic who made his life miserable with the prime end of saving his own soul. But this crude doctrine now stands forth in a very new light, for psychology shows it to have been an ugly cyst or cast that enclosed and sheltered through hard dark ages a precious and beauteous thing now just emerging. Its content, as now revealed by analysis, is really man’s ineluctable conviction that his own life was insignificant compared with its larger meanings. Its real lesson is the subordination of the individual to the greater whole toward which it gave him a correct Einstellung. The close attachment of this doctrine to the ego was incorrect, for the self is only a trope or metaphor of the race, but even this was necessary at an earlier stage of race pedagogy. The transcendentality ascribed to a self freed from the body was inevitable because that was the only symbol by which the greater life of the race could be described or comprehended. This belief stored up and conserved the psychic promise and potency that is now again flowing over by transfer to the other outcrops of the immortality instinct. It did not say what it meant but was a pragmatic masterpiece, like so many great creations of the folksoul. From the soul of the race it went straight home to that of the individual and if it overstressed individuation for a time, that, too, was at first needful. Had man not so long or so inevitably believed in the great work of saving souls for the next world, he would now be less effective in saving them from the evils of this world. Had he not so cherished the conviction of a future heaven, he would have lost much of the very energy of his soul, which now strives to transform this world into a paradise and to populate it well. Thus we have here a great field in which the laws of the transposition of psychic trends into their kinetic equivalents, with very many different forms but with persistence of identical content, are abundantly shown. Man’s instinct has always been right and only his more superficial conscious interpretations of it wrong.

Excess or defect of either of at least the first three immortalities hypertrophies or dwarfs the others. The doctrine of conscious personal survival was not only developed in unconscious conformity to this principle but has an even more important pedagogic rôle for the young than we had hitherto supposed. It is a pragmatic, artistic, and in no sense a scientific fact. It utterly fails before the criteria of reason but it has worked far better results than it could have done had these requirements been alone regarded. It should not only be inculcated in the young but has immense therapeutic value and to doubt this is only another side illustration of the fact that cultivated adults have, the world over and particularly in our country, unprecedentedly lost touch with youth. Wherever the instincts of parenthood have not degenerated, it must be clear that belief in future personal rewards and punishments is a wholesome regulative of the lives of the young at a stage when feeling and impulse are at their strongest and before reason is mature.

V. But there is a fifth form of immortality concept somewhat more apart and uncorrelated with the others because newer and which comes from the lure of the infinitesimal elements which science now finds at the basis of the universe. What Dalton called atoms are now known to be planetary systems of unimaginably minute corpuscles, one thousandth the mass of an atom of hydrogen and, if they are solely electrical, “their size must be one millionth of the linear dimensions of an atom,” or relatively as a period on the printed page is to a large theater. Their groupings constitute the chemical elements, so that matter is dynamic to a degree we cannot conceive; and if so-called inorganic matter were proven to contain germs of man and mind, this would add but little to the new marvel of it. Matter is so active and subtle that the modern conceptions of it that have come from the study of radium make us feel that in a sense it is more spiritual than we have ever conceived spirit itself to be. In this new world, which may be homogeneous with mind, there is nothing like death anywhere to be found, and there is an unbroken gradation from the corporative unity of electrons in an atom up to the aggregations of man in society--and some think further still. On this view death is not only non-existent but inconceivable. True, more complex aggregations are reduced to simpler, more transient to more permanent ones by it, but matter is not only not dead but more intensely active than mind, so that the student of the ultimate constitution of matter and the persistence of energy is in a sense studying immortality, for this is the basis from which all orders of animal nature arose and into which they will all be resolved.

Thus we are told that the new physics and chemistry are really investigating death and regeneration. Our brains have little sense of the marvelous and lawful processes that underlie all their activities. While we have deemed evolution upward, there is another sense in which it is a fall or a series of departures from a more durable and elemental state, so that the gain is not all one way and catabolism has its own attractions. If our lives affect these more permanent electrons, this is survival and our ego is only part of a larger continuum and is without end or beginning, although inconceivably changed. The disintegration of our elements is the harvest-home back to the cosmos from which we arose and may involve increase, not decrease, to the sum total of good. This unselfing or “fusing with all we flow from” is the direction in which love, whether of man, woman, animals, or nature itself, as well as subordination of self to others and the world, inclines us. Thus the conscious soul of man is swept by tides of which our poor psychology as yet knows but little. Should such a conception of the world become general, it could still use many of our religious phrases, litanies, and symbols, but they would be inundated with fresh meanings.

Jean Finot’s book is marvelously learned, his view is unique, and his style fascinating. It rapidly passed through fourteen editions and was translated into many languages. He has almost nothing to say of the soul, so that his volume might be entitled The Immortality of the Body, or Death, the Great Illusion. He is bitter against theologians for having made death such an all-dominating fear fetish in the world. Tolstoi feared death all his life and writes, “Nothing is worse than death, and when we consider that it is the inevitable end of all which lives, we must also recognize that nothing is worse than life.” We are told that the dread of it poisoned the life of Daudet and that Zola trembled before the thought, “which obsessed him and caused him nightmares and insomnia.” Renan says, “We may sacrifice all to truth and good, which are the ends of life, and when we have done say, ‘Following the call of this interior siren we have reached the turn where the rewards should lie. Oh, dreadful consoler, there is none!’ The philosophy which promised us the secret of death stammers excuses.” Finot says, “A study of the evolution of death in the literature of the past and to-day would become almost a history of literature itself.” “The meditations of the fathers of the church and the monks of the Middle Ages would shine particularly in this concert of vociferations against death (‘If the slightest wound made on one finger can cause so great a pain, what a horrible torture must be death, which is the corruption or dissolution of the entire body’). We can look fixedly neither at the sun nor at death.” Mme. de Sévigné says, “I am swallowed up in the thoughts of death and find it so terrible that I hate life more because it leads there.” It is no great consolation to say with Renan, “We shall live by the trace which each of us leaves upon the bosom of the infinite.” “All that lives is simply preparing for death.” Belief in the perdurability of the soul is an alternative or placation, a mirage. Only Confucianism and Taoism, if they had remained faithful to the teachings of their creators, would close to their initiates all possibilities of an after life; but they did not remain faithful. Even Luther at the beginning of his campaign against Rome classed the dogma of immortality of the soul as amongst “the monstrous fables which are part of the Roman dung heap,” although he later became reconciled to it.

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.

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, 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.

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 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 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 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

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.

Scientific American, March 25, 1905.

See Pop. Sci. Mo., July, 1902.

“Age and Eminence,” Pop. Sci. Mo., vol. 66, 1904–05, p. 538.

The Age of Mental Virility, The Century Co., 1908.

“What the World Might Have Missed,” Century, 1908, p. 113, et seq.

“The Age Limit,” Living Age, 1914, p. 214.

“The Old Folks and the War,” Living Age, 1918.

The Psychology of Senescence, Master’s Thesis, Clark University, Worcester, Mass., 1912.

P. Birukoff, Leo Tolstoy, His Life and Work. London, 1906; A. Maude, The Life of Tolstoy, London, 1908.

W. Wundt, Gustav Theodor Fechner, Leipzig, 1901; K. Lasswitz, Gustav Theodor Fechner, Stuttgart, 1896; G. S. Hall, Founders of Modern Psychology, New York, 1907.

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.

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.

See Karl Abraham’s work of this title (Leipzig, 1911), based on Seravia’s biography.

J. Sadger, Aus dem Liebeslebens Nicolaus Lenaus, Leipzig, 1909, 96 p. See also his biography by B. E. Castle.

J. Sadger in Grenzfragen des Nerven und Seelenlebens, 1910, pp. 5–63.

G. Vorberg, Guy de Maupassant’s Krankheit, 1908, 27 p.

Otto Kaus, Schriften des Vereins freie psychoanalytische Forschung, No. 2, 1912, 81 p.

P. J. Moebius, Ueber Scheffel’s Krankheit, 1907, p. 40.

E. T. Cook, Life of John Ruskin, London, 1911, vol. ii, p. 19.

Frau Foerster-Nietzsche, The Life of Nietzsche.

“On Growing Old,” Atlan., 1915, p. 803.

“Concerning Age,” Sci. Amer. Sup., Nov. 15, 1919.

“The Moral and Religious Psychology of Late Senescence,” Biblical World, 1918, p. 75.

The Dangerous Age, London, 1912.

See W. L. Comfort’s Midstream for the same crisis in men (1914).

The Salvaging of Civilization: The Probable Future of Mankind, New York, 1921. 199 p.

The Old World in the New, 1914, p. 27.

The Longevity of Birds.

On the Comparative Longevity of Man and Animals, 1870.

Men of the Old Stone Age, New York, 1915, p. 40.

See my “What We Owe to the Tree-life of Our Ape-like Ancestors,” Ped. Sem., 23:94–116, 1916.

Adolescence, Ch. XIII, “Savage Pubic Initiations,” etc.

Primitive Folk, p. 42.

The American Indian, p. 177.

Among the Eskimos of Labrador, p. 111.

“Old Age and Death,” Am. Jour. Psychol., October, 1896.

With a Prehistoric People: The Akikuyu of British East Africa, p. 157.

Savage Man in Central Africa, p. 176.

The Life of a South-African Tribe, p. 131.

“Physiological and Medical Observations on the Indians of Southwest United States and Mexico,” Bureau Amer. Ethnol., Bull. 34.

Das Weib in der Natur- und Völkerkunde, Chap. 74.

On Centenarians and the Duration of the Human Race, 1899.

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.

“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.”

Oriental Studies, Boston, 1894.

Das Lebensalter in der Jüdischen Literatur, 1875.

M. D. Conway, The Wandering Jew, 1881, and T. Kappstein, Ahesver in der Weltpoesie, 1906.

Greek Life and Thought, London, 1896.

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.

Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece from Homer to Menander, p. 34.

The Greek Genius and Its Meaning to Us, 1912.

Republic, 329.

Talks with Athenian Youth, tr. anon., New York, 1893, 178 p.

Aristotle on Youth and Old Age, Life and Death and Respiration, tr. by Ogle, London, 1897, 135 p.

Book II, Chap. 13.

Ibid., Book I, Chap. 5.

See Black’s Law Dictionary, 2d ed., 1910.

Cicero, Cato Major or Old Age, tr. by Benjamin Franklin.

“Woman as Witch” in his Chances of Death, 1897, vol. 2, pp. 1–50.

History of Witchcraft in England, 1557–1718, p. 114.

Notes on Witchcraft, Amer. Antiquarian Society.

The New Stone Age in Northern Europe. New York, Scribner, 1921.

“Old Age and Death.” Amer. Jour. Psychol., Oct., 1896, vol. 8, pp. 67–122.

Die Hygiene des Lebensalters.

“Four Types of Protestants: A Comparative Study in the Psychology of Religion,” Jour. of Relig. Psychol., Nov., 1908, vol. 3, pp. 165–209.

The Vedanta Philosophy, London, 1914, p. 16 et seq.

R. H. Lowie, Primitive Society, 1920.

Altersklassen und Männerbünde, 1902.

Atlantic Monthly, 1915, p. 385.

See Le Bon: The World in Revolt, 1921.

The Art of Living Long, tr. 1914, 207 p.

History of Life and Death.

Spectator, Oct. 17, 1711.

The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Gulliver’s Travels, Chap. X.

After Noontide, Boston, 1883, 168 p.

Old People, Boston, 1909, 236 p.

Three-score and Ten. Dedicated to Chauncey Depew.

The Secret of Long Life, London, 1871, 146 p.

Masters of Old Age, Milwaukee, 1915, 280 p.

“When Is Man Immortal?” Technical World, March, 1914.

“A Physical Marvel at Seventy-three,” Amer. Mag., Dec., 1917.

Old Age: Its Cause and Preservation, The story of an old body and face made young, New York, 1912, 309 p.

“Young at Seventy,” Am. Rev. of Revs., vol. 57, p. 415.

The Secret of a Much Longer Life and More Pleasure in Living It, 1906.

“Why I am Well at Eighty,” Ladies Home J., April, 1919.

“How I Came to Be Doing More Work at Seventy-Seven than at Forty-Seven,” Ibid.

“Viewpoint of a Sexagenarian Contributor,” Unpartizan Rev., July, 1920.

James M. Ludlow, Along the Friendly Way, Reminiscences and Impressions, New York, 1919, 362 p.

“Confessions of a Septuagenarian Contributor,” Unpartizan Rev., July, 1920.

Old Age.

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, Chap. VII, and also in Over the Teacups, p. 26, et seq.

Old Age and Immortality, 1893.

“Eighty Years and After,” Harper’s, 1919, p. 21.

“De Senectute,” Atlantic, 1913, p. 163.

“I Refuse to Grow Old,” Amer. Mag., Sept., 1919.

“The Passing of Old Age,” Independent, Jan., 1914.

“At Seventy-Three and Beyond,” Atlan., 1914, p. 123.

The Pursuit of Happiness, 1893.

The Individual: A Study of Life and Death, 1910, especially Chap. 13, “The Period of Old Age.”

The Fixed Period, New York, 1881.

The Man in the Street, 1907, 405 p.

Richard le Gallienne, “Not Growing Old,” Harper’s, 1921.

“Young and Old,” Nineteenth Century, June, 1920.

Worry and Old Age, 1909, Chap. 14.

London, 1908.

Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch, New York, 1921, 400 p.

See my Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology, New York, 1917, Chap. XI, p. 694, et seq.

See the end of the last chapter.

Ibid.

By permission of, and special arrangement with, Doubleday, Page & Co.

By permission of, and special arrangement with, Houghton Mifflin Co.

From Webb’s New Dictionary of Statistics, 1911, p. 471.

A Discussion of Age Statistics, Rept. 13, Bull. Bur. Census, 1904.

Life Insurance, N. Y., 1915.

World Almanac, 1921, p. 438.

Report of a Special Inquiry Relative to Aged and Dependent Persons in Massachusetts, 1915.

The Elements of Vital Statistics, Lond., 1909, 326 pp.

“Death Rate and Expectation of Life,” Science, vol. 43, 1916.

Table of Mortality Statistics.

“The Influence of Vital Statistics on Longevity.” Address at the sixth annual meeting of the Association of American Life Insurance Presidents, Dec., 1912.

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.

“Who Shall Inherit Long Life?” Nat. Geog. Mag., June, 1919.

Social Adjustment, New York, 1911.

“Report on National Vitality,” Bulletin of the Committee of One Hundred on National Health, July, 1909, No. 30.

How to Live, New York, 1915, Section 7.

“The Extension of Human Life,” Sci. Am. Sup., May 4, 1916.

Social Insurance, New York, 1913, Chap. 12, “The Old Man’s Problem in Modern Industry.”

“The Biology of Death,” Sci. Mo., March-Sept, 1921, incl.

Old Age Pensions: Their actual working results in the United Kingdom, London, 1915, 196 pp.

Edith Sellers, “From the Old Age Pensioners’ Standpoint,” Nineteenth Century, Jan., 1920.

Report of the Massachusetts Commission on Old Age Pensions, Annuities and Insurance, Jan., 1910, 409 pp.

“Canadian Government Annuities,” Polit. Sci. Quar., 1915, p. 425 et seq.

Old Age Poverty in Greenwich Village, 1915, 105 pp.

Joseph Swain, “State Pension Systems for Public School Teachers,” Bureau of Education Bull., 1916.

“Report on Teachers’ Pensions,” N. E. A. Proc., 1919, vol. 57, p. 145 et seq.

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.

“Problem of Poverty and Pensions in Old Age,” Amer. J. Soc., vol. xiv, 1908–9, p. 282 et seq.

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.

Old Age Dependency in the United States, New York, 1912, 361 pp. a masterly book.

The Survey, vol. 31, 1914–15, p. 483.

Clinical Lectures on Senile and Chronic Diseases, Lond., 1881,