THE SCIENCE OF HAPPINESS 



most hackneyed of all comparisons; but from its very 

 obviousness we can no more escape it than could our 

 forebears. "Death and his brother Sleep, " have sung 

 the poets of every age and in every tongue. Nay, 

 prehistoric man, before men knew they were poets or 

 philosophers, noted the likeness, and built on it the 

 structure of a philosophy of superstition, ages before 

 the word philosopher came into being; and the thinkers 

 of all succeeding eras have expanded and elaborated the 

 idea to meet the needs of their diverse systems. Nor 

 can it be said that the accumulating wisdom of the 

 ages has added much to the force of the simple primi- 

 tive comparison. But the wise men of the later time 

 differ from the savage in this they no longer fear that 

 "dreams may come" to break in on the serenity of the 

 long night of death. 



If death then be but "a sleep and a forgetting," to 

 fear it as one fears a conscious ill is the very negation 

 of reason. The normal man falls asleep some 365 

 times each year, or more than 25,000 times in the course 

 of a normal life. Each of these thousands of periods of 

 sleeping, lasting on the average seven or eight hours, 

 has been a time of virtual oblivion, during which the 

 sleeper was totally unconscious of the world-activities 

 that were moving full tilt in the opposite hemisphere to 

 that in which he chanced to lie. One-third of his entire 

 life has thus been passed in a state that, so far as con- 

 sciousness the essence of volitional being is concerned, 

 was the negation of living. What matters it if one 

 morning he fail to awaken at his accustomed hour? 



[270] 



