230 HUMANISM xm 



If we look closely, is it so certain that it fully represents 

 the actual sentiments and accords with the actions of 

 men ? Is the assumption either of a universal conscious 

 ness of death or of a universal desire for immortality 

 really so irrefragable ? Certainly the evidence in its 

 favour is far scantier and more ambiguous than we were 

 inclined to suppose, and there are ugly facts which seem 

 to put a different complexion on the matter. The 

 ordinary conduct of men affords but little support for 

 the notion that their life is a constant meditation upon 

 death, tempered by the joyful anticipation of immortality. 

 A visitor from Mars, dispassionately inquiring into human 

 conduct and motive, might find it hard to detect more 

 foreknowledge of death in men than in animals. From 

 the palace to the hovel, from the laboratory to the 

 oratory, he would find men everywhere pursuing ends of 

 the earth, earthly, living for the present, or if circumstances 

 forced them to take thought for the morrow, concerning 

 themselves only with their immediate future in this 

 world ; while of the other-worldliness, so often preached 

 and preached against in the literature, he would hardly 

 find a trace. To find it a dominating, or even an 

 important, influence in human psychology he would have 

 to seek it, not in the churches or the universities, and still 

 less amid the bustle of active life, but in the asylums in 

 which are secluded the unhappy victims of religious 

 mania or melancholy, in whom an insane logic has 

 overpowered the healthy indifference to death and its 

 consequences, which characterises the make-up of the 

 normal mind. And this impression would be enhanced 

 rather than erased if our Martian critic at last succeeded 

 in observing the tremendous shock which the ordinary 

 man receives when he for the first time truly realises that 

 his days are numbered. For such effects would seem to 

 testify to the success with which the thought of death has 

 until then been kept out of consciousness. 



Of course the fact that men habitually live in the 

 present, hating to think of the future, and detesting any 

 thing that reminds them of death, has not, in another 



