286 



DISCOVERY 



possible results, and if death came into consideration 

 at all, it was usually thought of as an escape from 

 a situation that was almost physically unbearable. 

 This attitude is well described in the following passage 

 from The Diary of a Dead Officer, by the late Arthur 

 Graeme West. The passage was written immediately 

 after a heavy bombardment, and the sensations 

 recorded are typical of those of many others in like 

 circumstances. " After we had been shelled for 

 about two and a half hours on end my nerves were 

 shaky and I could have cried for fright as each shell 

 drew near, and longed for nothing so much as to rush 

 down a deep cellar. It was merely consideration of 

 the simple fact that a shell, if it did hit me, would 

 either wound or kill me — both of which were good 

 inasmuch as they would put a pause to this existence — 

 that kept me up to my standard of unconcern. And 

 the more I experience it, the more fear seems a thing 

 quite apart from possible consequences. I feel afraid 

 at this moment. I write in a trench that was once 

 German, and shells keep dropping near the dug-out. 

 There is a shivery fear that one may fall into it or 

 blow it in. Yet what do I fear ? I mind being killed 

 because I am fond of the other life, but I know that 

 I should not miss it in annihilation. It is not that I 

 fear." 



This reaction to a situation threatening death 

 becomes more comprehensible when we remember 

 that fear is a self-protective emotion giving us alertness 

 to beware of danger and wings to escape from it. 

 The animal reacts to danger without, it may be sup- 

 posed, being aware of the possibilities of harm involved, 

 and man appears to react to danger in a similar way, 

 as we have seen in the case quoted above. For 

 although man is aware, and often acutely aware, of 

 his danger, yet the intensity of the fear experienced 

 does not appear to be always quite proportionate to 

 the extent to which his life is threatened ; for example, 

 people were more fearful of air-raids than of the 

 influenza epidemic, although the latter was by far 

 the more deadly of the two. In this instance the air- 

 raids were a prepotent cause of fear because, presu- 

 mably, they evoked the emotion through its most 

 primitive channel of stimulation, that of threatened 

 violence ; it is useful for an animal to feel frightened 

 at violence, but to experience fear from a feeling of 

 illness would serve no purpose. 



Against all the foregoing it may be said that it is a 

 truism that we are afraid of death, and to gainsay it 

 is mere sophistry and playing upon words ; but the 

 above considerations seem to lead to the conclusion 

 that we have focused upon the idea of death, or, 

 more strictly, upon the idea of dying, a general pro- 

 tective emotion of fear that does not properly belong 

 to it, and that we have, in imagination, endowed death 



witli a tearfulness that reality does not substantiate. 

 And it seems not impossible that by looking at death 

 from this angle we may divest it of some of the terror 

 that, at least in words, we attribute to it. Indeed, 

 if we allow ourselves to examine this idea of terror, 

 it seems to have an archaic, almost superstitious, 

 quality, and to be incompatible with the calmness 

 with which ordinary men and women, of no particular 

 courage or stoicism, may be observed to meet it. 



This introduces the idea already suggested, that, 

 when we speak of the fear of death, we are commonly 

 thinking of the idea of dying, and here it must be 

 borne in mind that, although death may be an undis- 

 covered territorj-, yet we may claim to know some- 

 thing about dying. For we have on record the experi- 

 ences of manypeople who, from drowning, asphyxiation, 

 or other causes have sunk into a state of unconscious- 

 ness that, had it lasted but a little longer, would have 

 passed the limit of recoverability and ended in death. 

 These experiences show a remarkable agreement in 

 the absence of fear and even of discomfort : in many 

 cases there is a feeling of lightness and freedom, 

 sometimes of travelling with great speed, sometimes 

 of complete tranquillity that is almost pleasurable. 

 We may quote in this connection the last words of 

 \\'iUiam Hunter, the great anatomist : " If I had 

 strength enough to hold a pen I would write down how 

 easy and pleasant a thing it is to die." 



In a similar way the certain expectation of death 

 seems to contain little of the terror with which our 

 imagination tends to endow it. Dostoevski, the 

 Russian novelist, standing on the scaffold awaiting 

 execution, and with no idea that he might be 

 reprieved, calmly calculated exactly how many 

 minutes he had to live and seemed to be pre- 

 occupied with an almost purely intellectual interest in 

 the great amount of " living " that could be done in a 

 short space of time. A man who marvellously escaped 

 after falling off a tall building seemed to have felt 

 little during his descent except a mild wonder at the 

 length of time he was taking to reach the ground. 



There is no reason to suppose that these experiences 

 are exceptional except in that they were recorded, 

 and we are entitled to assume that they represent the 

 normal sensations that accompany the final vanishing 

 of consciousness and the typical attitude in the 

 expectation of death. 



The fact that our conception of dying is derived from 

 our observation of the process of death in others, 

 rather than from the necessarily rare data that we 

 have spoken of above, probably accounts for some ideas 

 that are commonly held, but are certainly incorrect, 

 notably for the idea expressed in the phrase " the 

 agony of death." The word " agony " seems to have 

 come into the language from the New Testament 



