I 



THE SELF- EVIDENCE OF DEATH. 393 



peals to some of our deepest feelings at times when 

 our powers to resist the impression are weakest. 



He would indeed be a strangely constituted man 

 who did not in the presence of his beloved dead feel 

 the unanswerable impressiveness of death, the utter 

 and irretrievable severance which its agency effected. 

 And no argument or consolation can get over the 

 fact that whether or not the dead continue to 

 exist, they are lost to the survivors, and that the 

 ties which bound them to their earthly environment 

 are broken. For whatever . mysteries the future 

 may hold in store, no future meeting, no recognition 

 even, can resume the thread or restore the sweet- 

 ness of the human relations death has severed, or 

 assure us that under conditions wholly different 

 the charm of human relationships will be renewed. 



Though, therefore, we must thus renounce what- 

 ever hopes we may have based on Impure and im- 

 perfect relations rather than upon the highest and 

 purest of spiritual sympathies, we must yet resist 

 the Impression of this spurious self-evidence of the 

 finality of death, and reassert against the impulses 

 of agonized feeling that the apparent need not be 

 the real. And thus we may come to realize that 

 our view of death is necessarily imperfect and one- 

 sided. For we contemplate it only from the point 

 of view of the survivors, never from that of the 

 dying. We have not the least idea of what death 

 means to those that die. To 7cs It is a catastrophic 

 change, whereby a complex of phenomenal appear- 

 ances, which we call the body of the dead, ceases to 

 suggest to us the presence of the ulterior existence 

 which we called his spirit. But this does not prove, 

 nor even tend to prove, that the spirit of the dead 

 has ceased to exist. It merely shows that he has 



