THE PHYSIOLOGY OF DEATH. 285 



of deceased persons. During the whole existence of these establish- 

 ments, not one of the bodies transported into those asylums has been 

 known to return to life, as the authentic declarations of the attendant 

 doctors agree. The usefulness of such mortuary houses is still more 

 questionable in our time, when we have a positive and certain means 

 of recognizing real death. Those police regulations that forbid autop- 

 sies and interments until the full term of delay for twenty-four hours, 

 measured from the declaration of death, still remain prudent pre- 

 cautions, but they do not lessen at all the certainty of that evidence 

 furnished by the stopping of the heart. When the heart has definitely 

 ceased to beat, then resurrection is no longer possible, and the life 

 which deserts it is preparing to enter upon a new cycle. 



Hamlet, in his famous soliloquy, speaks of "that undiscovered 

 country from whose bourn no traveller returns," and mournfully asks, 

 what must be the dreams of the man to whom death has opened the 

 portals of those gloomy regions. We can give no clearer answer, in 

 the name of physiology, than Shakespeare's prince gives. Physiology 

 is dumb as to the destiny of the soul after death ; of that it teaches, 

 and it can teach us, nothing. It is plain, and it would be childish to 

 deny it, that any psychical or sentient manifestation, and any concrete 

 representation of the personality, are impossible after death. The dis- 

 solution of the organism annihilates surely, and of necessity, the func- 

 tions of sensation, motion, and will, which are inseparable from a cer- 

 tain combination of material conditions, We can feel, move, and will, 

 only so far as we have organs for reception, transmission, and execu- 

 tion. These assurances of science are above discussion, and should be 

 accepted without reserve. Do they tell us any thing of the destiny of 

 the psychical principles themselves ? Again we say, No, and for the 

 very simple reason that science does not attain to those principles ; 

 but metaphysics, which does attain to them, authorizes us, nay, further, 

 compels us to believe that they are immortal. They are immortal, as 

 the principles of motion, the principles of perception, all the active 

 unities of the world, are immortal. What is the general characteristic 

 of those unities ? It is that of being simple, which means being inde- 

 structible, which means being in harmonious mutual connection, after 

 such a manner that each one of them perceives the infinite order of the 

 other. If this connection did not exist, there would be no world. 

 What is the characteristic of the psychical unities more especially ? It 

 is that of having, besides the consciousness of such perception, the 

 feeling also of the relations that bind the whole together, and those 

 faculties, more or less developed, which that consciousness and that 

 perception imply. But why should these unities be any more perish- 

 able than the others ? Why, if all these forces, all these activities, are 

 eternal, should those alone not possess eternity which have this high 

 privilege, that of knowing the infinite relations which the others sus- 

 tain without knowing that they do so ? 



