1376 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



quent — perhaps oftener with women than with men? Would it not 

 be well if some psychologically-minded physician would study such 

 cases, and with photographs? Here plainly is the justification of 

 "lying in state"; that all may see the face they know and mourn, 

 thus often at its best, and sometimes beyond that altogether. May 

 not such ennobling and beautifying help us to understand the 

 ancient endeavours to preserve the body by embalmment; and to 

 prefer burial, in the west; yet also, when viewed differently, the 

 preference for burning, so widely practised in the past, still in the 

 East, and now anew in the West as well. Indeed, ma}- not this 

 change, so often to or beyond the best we have seen and known in 

 life, be one of the factors in developing, diffusing, and strengthening 

 the conception of immortality, and at its best, with "forgiveness of 

 sins", and hence beatitude? — since such dead faces seem trans- 

 figured by the soul, and at its very best, at length realised. 



What of simpler physiological explanation? That death is not so 

 certain as it may seem, is the reason of leaving certification to the 

 physician; and he, too, may sometimes err. That those apparently 

 drowned, and past ordinary methods of resuscitation, may be recalled 

 by Schafer's improved method, is now also common knowledge; 

 and the fact that a man's beard may go on growing for some hours 

 after manifest demise must have been noticed from time imme- 

 morial. What we note as "the moment of death" is that of the fall 

 of "the tripod of life" — heart, lungs, and conscious brain — but the 

 other organs and tissues yield more slowly. So surely does not the 

 sub-conscious life depart more slowly too? Indeed, when it is thus 

 relieved of central control, and left to itself, must not the body, 

 even more than in ordinary sleep, have thus brief time for its sole 

 influence, and with such partial growths as well. The muscles of 

 facial expression are now for the first time fully released from their 

 control by conscious life, with its cares, its ordinary habits and 

 their expression; so now, for first as well as last time, since sleep of 

 infancy, the face is fully "sculptured from within"; and this often 

 to essential character-revelation at its best, however heretofore 

 repressed, yet latent, and, as we see, potential; or at most seldom 

 and briefly revealed— as to a single companion at highest moments 

 of love — ^but now soothed to serenity, deepened even to ecstasy? 

 Indeed, is not this last beauty-sleep a final and consoling revelation 

 that "the kingdom of heaven is within you" ? Or, in modern phrase, 

 a final — ^yet rationally to be considered- evidence of "the super- 

 man", latent in each and all? If so, is it not possible to seek out the 

 ways and means, both old and new, of such arousal, before too late? 



RELATIVITY?— In these times thinking people, each more or 

 less imbued with the ideas supplied by the secondary and 

 higher education still for the most part prevalent, and by the 



