356 LIFE AND DEATH. 



There are immortal animals. Man is not of the 

 number. He belongs, like all highly organized 

 beings, to the class of beings which have an end. 

 They die from accident or from disease. They 

 perish in the struggle with other animals, or with 

 microbes, or with external conditions. There are 

 certainly very few, if there are any, which die a 

 really natural death. And so it is with man. We 

 see old men gradually declining who appear to 

 doze gently off into the last sleep, and become 

 extinguished without disease, like a lamp whose oil 

 is exhausted. But this is in most cases only 

 apparently so. Besides the fact that the old age to 

 which they seemed to succumb is really a disease, 

 a generalized sclerosis, autopsy always reveals some 

 lesion more or less directly responsible for the fatal 

 issue. 



Man, like all the higher animals, is therefore 

 subject to the law of lethality. But while animals 

 have no idea of death and are not tormented by the 

 sentiment of their inevitable end, man knows and 

 understands this destiny. He has with the animals 

 the instinct of self-preservation, the instinct of life, 

 and at the same time the knowledge and the fear of 

 death. This contradiction, this discordance, is one 

 of the sources of his woes. 



Whether it be an accident or the regular term of 

 the normal cycle, death always comes too soon. It 

 surprises the man at a time when he has not yet 

 completed his physiological evolution ; hence the 

 aversion and the terror it inspires. "We cannot 

 fix our eyes on the sun or on death," said La Roche- 

 foucauld. The old man does not regard death with 

 less aversion than the young man. " He who is 



