CHAPTER VII. 



MAN. THE INSTINCT OF LIFE AND THE INSTINCT 

 OF DEATH. 



Xhe miseries of humanity: i. Disease; 2. Old age. — Old age 

 considered as a chronic disease. — Its occasional cause. — 3. 

 The disharmonies of human nature; 4. The instinct of life 

 and the instinct of death. 



Man's unhappy plight is the constant theme of 

 philosophies and religions. Without referring to its 

 moral basis, it has a physical basis due to four 

 causes — the physical imperfection or disharmony of 

 nature, disease, old age, and death — or rather of 

 three, for what we call old age is perhaps a simple 

 disease. These are the great sorrows of man, the 

 sources of all his woes. Disease attacks him, old age 

 awaits him, and death must tear him from all the 

 ties which he has formed. All his pleasures are 

 poisoned by the certain knowledge that they last 

 but for a moment, that they are as precarious as his 

 health, his youth, and his life itself. 



§ Disease. 



Disease, frequent, constant, and inevitable as it is, 

 is, however, nothing but a fact outside the natural 

 order. Its character is clearly accidental, and it 

 interrupts the normal cycle of evolution. Medical 



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