THE WONDERS OF LIFE 



medical studies to part with the faith of his boyhood — 

 like myself, in his twenty-first year. We were talking 

 about the great mysteries of life shortly before his death, 

 and he said to me: "I have been unable to reconcile 

 belief in the immortality of the soul and the freedom of 

 the will with my psychological experiences, and I have 

 been just as unable to discover throughout the whole 

 world a single trace of a moral order or a beneficent 

 providence. If it is true that an intelligent Deity rules 

 the world, he cannot be a God of love, but an alUpower- 

 ful demon, whose constant entertainment is an eternal 

 and merciless play of being and becoming, building up 

 and destroying." However, we do still find here and 

 there informed and intelligent physicians who adhere 

 to the three central dogmas of metaphysics — a proof of 

 the immense power of dogmatic tradition and religious 

 prejudice. 



We must class as a traditional dogma the widespread 

 belief that man is bound under all circumstances to 

 maintain and prolong life, even when it has become 

 utterly useless — a source of pain to the incurable and 

 of endless trouble to his friends. Hundreds of thousands 

 of incurables — lunatics, lepers, people with cancer, etc. 

 — are artificially kept alive in our modem communities, 

 and their sufferings are carefully prolonged, without the 

 slightest profit to themselves or the general body. We 

 have a strong proof of this in the statistics of lunacy 

 and the growth of asylums and nerve-sanatoria. In 

 Prussia alone there were 5 1 ,048 lunatics cared for in the 

 asylums (six thousand in Berlin) in 1890; more than 

 one-tenth of them were quite incurable (four thousand 

 of them suffering from paralysis). In France, in 1871, 

 there were 49,589 in the asylums (or 13.8 per thousand 

 of the population), and in 1888 there were 70,443 (or 

 18.3 per thousand) ; thus, in the course of seventeen years, 

 the absolute number of the unsound rose nearly 30 per 



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