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 cases204 and my own 299 returns to questionnaires205 it appears that the first impression of death often comes from a sensation of coldness in touching the corpse of a relative and the reaction is a nervous start at the contrast with the warmth that the contact of cuddling and hugging was wont to bring. The child’s exquisite temperature sense feels a chill where it formerly felt heat. Then comes the immobility of face and body where it used to find prompt movements of response. There is no answering kiss, pat, or smile. In this respect sleep seems strange but its brother, death, only a little more so. Often the half-opened eyes are noticed with awe. The silence and tearfulness of friends are also impressive to the infant, who often weeps reflexly or sympathetically. Children of from two to five are very prone to fixate certain accessories of death, often remembering the corpse but nothing else of a dead member of the family. But funerals and burials are far more often and more vividly remembered. Such scenes are sometimes the earliest recollections of adults. Scrappy memory pictures of these happenings may be preserved when their meaning and their mood have entirely vanished and but for the testimony of others they would remain unable to tell what it was all about.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When the young are achieving adulthood at the most rapid rate they are often overwhelmed with a sense of insufficiency, inferiority, or incompleteness against which they have to react as best they can. Tolstoi gave us a good illustration of this from his own boyhood. His tutor flogged him and he reacted as the only way in which he could “get even” by not merely the thought of suicide but the vivid imagination, well set in scene, of himself as dead and his father dragging the horrified tutor before his beautiful corpse and accusing him of having murdered his son, while the friends around bemoaned him as so brilliant and so tragically slain. It seems strange that at that period of life when both vitality and viability are greatest and the will to live seems to have its maximal momentum the death thought is so prone to be obsessive. But death is very hard to conceive and interpretations of what it really means differ with every age, race, individual, and perhaps almost every moment of life. It is so negative, privative, and human nature, like physical nature, abhors a vacuum so much that the soul balks not only at the idea of annihilation but at every thought of the arrest of life. Recent studies of children’s suicides show that although they begin at the early dawn of school age they are augmented by all repressions of their natural interests and instincts. Only at puberty or after, when the life of the race begins to dominate that of the individual, do children begin to comprehend what death really means; and even then, as the 58 suicides of German school children per year from 1883 to 1905 show, many, if not most, are sudden and impulsive and probably the majority, at least those of pubescent girls, are largely for the sake of the effect their death will have upon those nearest them. What child has not seriously considered suicide, at least in reverie? Several partial censuses have been unable to find one.206

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

The death thought in some of our data seems to be spontaneous, that is, it may break out obsessively, not only on the slightest occasion but without any ascertainable cause. Some young people have spells of crying with wild abandon at the thought that they must die, which sometimes seems to sound out to them as if from the welkin. It is worst nights. It seems so unspeakably dreadful that they cannot steady their voice. The thought in the infant prayer, “If I should die before I wake,” etc., made one child more or less neurotic for years with horror of hell and judgment and she was wont to fancy herself found dead in the morning and used to pose for it to look her best. This, too, plays its rôle in revival hysteria. Some who have been very near death by drowning or other accident magnify this experience in memory until it may come to haunt them. Indeed, it seems characteristic of adolescence that although it may occur at later stages of life, in some quiet hour, perhaps when alone on the shore or in the forest or in a wakeful moment at night, the thought, “I must die,” seems to spring and fasten upon the soul like a beast of prey. It flashes out with great and absorbing vividness. Occasionally a voice seems to pronounce the sentence. In a few cases it is so intense that a child fancies itself in the act of dying and springs up in terror. Probably all morbid fears of death are regressive or reversionary and have childish features. One clergyman was so haunted by it that he could not conduct funerals and only after years was he able to find self-control in the conviction that he might live on till Christ’s second coming.207

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

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

Indeed, it is probably a normal instinct of compensation that often leads young people to visit morgues and perhaps dissecting rooms, to develop a certain immunity from such obsessive tendencies as the above.208 Great earthquakes, disastrous floods, and, above all, war and pestilence compel us to face the death thought at close quarters for a season and there are always those who revel in describing it in its most gruesome details, although there is a tacit consensus of the press to suppress the most horrible of them. Soldiers have to be hardened to inflict it in its most direct and personal way, as, for example, by the bayonet, as well as to keep cool when they are first under fire and to carry on and not turn and flee in panic when their comrades are torn to pieces about them. Such experiences, while they often mature the unripe and give a new poise to character, also tend to make human life seem cheaper, so that it is not strange that wars are followed by crime waves and especially by marked increase in assaults. For disguise it as we may, war is at root licensed murder and its heroes are they who have killed the most of those who have been declared enemies. Indeed, it is self-evident that the normal man who can deliberately stake his life in a fight in which he knows that he must either kill or be killed does so because he realizes that there is something that he values more than he does his life, and to have had one such experience marks an epoch of the utmost moral import. Perhaps it is not too much to say that only those who have made this supreme sacrifice in spirit are finished and complete men.

When death holds high carnival and whole populations are depleted, long periods of readjustment follow and human nature breaks out in strange ways. Defoe’s very realistic though fictive story of the Great Plague showed this. J. W. Thompson209 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. Irwin210 has cleverly hit off some of the possibilities of the awful holocaust that death would probably celebrate if such a conflict ever came to pass. Instead of liquid flame we have now Lewisite gas, which is invisible, sinks, and would search out every dugout and cellar, while it also attacks the skin and almost always kills, having a spread fifty-five times greater than that of any other poison gas. He quotes an expert as saying that a dozen Lewisite air-bombs of the greatest size and under favorable atmospheric conditions would practically eliminate the population of Berlin and we even have hints of a gas beyond this. Gas will very likely be the chief weapon of the future war. Moreover, the bombing airplane has a range, of course, far beyond any gun. Bombs grew in size during the war from that of a grapefruit to eight feet in length, with half a ton of explosives and gas-generating chemicals, costing some $3,000 each and the planes carrying these will be directed by wireless, so that the airplane is thus the supergun. Hitherto warfare has been directed against soldiers, but in the future it will be against whole peoples and this generation may see a great metropolis suddenly made into a necropolis. Formal declaration of war, too, will become as obsolete as a Fauntleroy courtesy. Killing will be not by hand but by machinery; not in retail but by wholesale. War will be not between individual nations or small groups of them but will embrace the entire world, even the East, so that there will be no neutrals. Tanks will be used as super-dreadnoughts and poison gases will perhaps paralyze the soil for years, as indeed they have done to some extent in eastern France. Thus if war in the future becomes one hundred per cent efficient in the use of the resources at present at its command and those that it is only the part of common sense to anticipate, the depopulation caused will be incalculable and the world may experience again all the phenomena that Europe did after the Black Death, and perhaps more.

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

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

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

W. Stekel says that not only has death played a great rôle in poetry, folklore, myth, religion, and art, but it is a more or less disguised theme of many dreams, especially those of neurotics.211 He urges that not only the death fear but the death wish, masked in very diverse symbolic forms, is extremely common in the dreams of psychopaths. He ascribes a thanatic meaning to very many factors that analytic Freudians have usually interpreted as having only a sexual significance and holds that the same mechanisms apply to both. He would have all psychoanalysts look for the death thought, which he believes hardly less common and quite as disguised and illusive as sex, not only in dreams but in the illusions of the insane. To our bestial unconscious self, which in these experiences escapes the censor, the ego is supreme and finds its ultimate goal only in the destruction of others; and if it does not kill those in our way, it pictures their death or finds some way for their removal. This, indeed, is involved in the realization of very many of our secret hopes. A woman loves a man whom she cannot see and so she dreams that her child dies, for she knows that he would attend the funeral and there see and also pity her. A man has more or less unconsciously ceased to love his wife but suppresses the realization of the fact from his waking consciousness and so dreams of her as talking with his grandfather, long since dead. Another man in a like state of mind dreamed that his wife suddenly and mysteriously vanished.

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

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

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

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

Schopenhauer, who had a very morbid fear of death till near the close of his life, when it seemed to quite abate, developed views about it that have had immense influence throughout the world, especially in Germany. He believed his views to be modern expressions of ancient Hindu philosophy and also that all systems of philosophy are primarily either comforts for or antidotes to death.212 The power behind creative evolution he calls the will-to-live, which is blind and unreasonable. “It is not the knowing part of our ego that fears death, but the fuga mortis proceeds entirely and alone from the blind will with which everything is filled.” Only the will as it exhibits itself in the body is destroyed by death. We should no more dread the time when we shall not be than we regret the time before birth when we were not. The infinite time before us is no more dreadful than the infinite time that preceded us. As of sleep, we may say: Where we are, death is not; and where death is, we are not. “If one knocked on the graves and asked the dead whether they wished to rise again, they would all shake their heads.” We were enticed into life by the hope of more favorable conditions of existence and death is disappointment and return to the womb of nature, who is all the while entirely indifferent to both our birth and death. Only small minds fear it. It is to the species what sleep is to the individual. All that exists is worthy only of being destroyed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was on this basis that Christianity, especially as interpreted by Paul, arose.213 The culminating event in its story took place in the few days between the burial of Jesus and the Pentecostal outburst. Never in history, if it be history, and never in the subject story of Mansoul, if this be the stage on which it was all accomplished, has there been such an au rebours from the nadir of depression of the disciples, because the type-man of their race, who had grown to their minds to be a fully diplomated God-man, was completely dead—and that in shame and ignominy—and his corpse sealed up to moulder and rot in a rock. Then came first the timid and then the plenary conviction that He had conquered death and even hell, risen from the dead, walked and conversed with friends in an attenuated body and had visibly ascended to Heaven and God. Once fully convinced that this was all veritably true, witnessed and attested by every sense and proof, the great incubus of ages was thrown off and Death, the supreme terror, was abolished. This brought an ecstasy or intoxication of joy called the gift of the Holy Spirit, which possessed the lives of believers. The ecstatic disciples shouted in weird unknown tongues until onlookers thought them “full of new wine” (Acts 2:13, 15), gazed all day into Heaven, henceforth the home of souls, and had to be exhorted to cease their raving jubilations and go to work. In this exhilarating new joy and freedom they, and later their successors, met the nine persecutions, during which martyrdom became a passion and tender youths and maidens could hardly be restrained from throwing themselves to the wild beasts in the arena as the supreme crown and testimony to their faith.

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

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

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

It is they who are more liable to be arrested in the trough of the wave and to become discouraged or even melancholic and when they meet the ills and hardships of life to flee from reality and seek some refuge from its stern demands, because life in them has not conquered death. They have not learned the great law of taking their pleasure and pain in the things they ought and in a measure proportionate to each. Indeed, modern psychotherapy is, for the most part, a new application of this old mode of rescue for such souls in distress. Maeder214 has well and wisely found all its processes typified in Dante’s descent into hell at the nethermost center of the earth where Satan himself was; and his emergence a slow ascent up the purgatorial mount to the infinite joys of paradise, first under the guidance of a human sage and then led by Beatrice, a type of the supreme self-directing oracle within. Dante, as everyone knows, called his poem a comedy because it had a happy ending, but every modern novel and drama is constructed according to the same formula that Christianity made current.

And who would read a story or see a play in which at the end the hero or heroine did not achieve all they desired? And, again, why do we love to experience all the desperate miseries to which our favorites in story and on the stage are subjected before the happy dénouement begins to show but that we are dead sure that in the end both the villain and the virtuous will get their deserts. Indeed, at least one German “pithiatric” psychiatrist prescribes a drastic experience of the story of the Cross as a therapeutic method in certain cases. All this, of course, has no reference to the question whether the story is all fact or all fancy. The psychologist only studies its effects and its inner mechanisms, which, save for those who have grown scrupulous under the influence of modern controversy, are no more relevant than is the historicity of Hamlet, Lear, or Portia to the audience in a theater. In the patristic and in the Middle Ages, and even now, children and neurotics have suffered almost to the point of stigmatization at any realistic description or at the Ober-Ammergau dramatization of the items of the crucifixion and feel with all the vicariousness that sympathy can yield the thorns, bitter cup, nails, spear, etc., as we have elsewhere shown in detail.215

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

Sir William Osler216 says: