278 
POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
liave for life ; tliat is to sa}^, all they have that could be re- 
gained by living ; but beyond this there is not much actual 
aud natural terror of death in man. For advancement to- 
wards perfection every individual man instinctively obeys the 
primary will of nature, and advances towards the object with no 
fear of death in his view. Thus there is little antecedent pain 
or mental suffering respecting the act of death ; so little, that all 
the systematised use that is made of the terror to render it a 
moral subjugator has proved harmless ; so little, that when we 
see in any man an undue fear of death — a fear which makes him 
brood over the grand event, and talk of it to all he meets, and 
shrink from it by anticipation, and take refuge from it behind 
straws — we treat him as an exception of an extreme kind to the 
rest of the world ; politely dub him a hypochondriac, and in- 
variably feel that his friends, who are his best keepers, repre- 
sent him better than he represents himself. 
At the worst, in the natural growth of mind, the period of 
existence in which the dread of death is developed intensely is 
a period embracing in the majority of persons the mere third of 
the term of existence. In the 3^oung the appreciation of the 
nature of the event is an act of learning from what is occurring 
around, and is an act not acquired quickly ; so that, happil}q 
. the very young, in articulo mortis, have, as a rule, no more 
dread of death than of sleep. In the adolescent there is 
such rapid aggregation of force — call it life — that they think of 
death to the last as to them impossible. In the old, the dread 
which may have marked a transitional stage from prime 
strength to first weakness, the terror is allayed by lesser care 
for that which is, and by that curious mental process so per- 
sistent that it seems to proceed from beyond us, of bending the 
mind to the inevitable so gradually and so slowly that the 
progress towards the final result becomes endurable and even 
happy. 
THE PHYSICAL DEATH BY NATURE. . 
If, by the strict ordinance of nature, death is not intended to 
be cruel or painful to tlie mind, so, by the same ordinance, 
it certainl}' is not intended to be cruel or physically painful 
to the body. The natural rule, the exceptions to which I will 
sj)cak of in due time, is here clear enough ; and it runs, as 
plainly as it can l)e written, that the natural man should know 
no more concerning his own death than his own birth. Born 
without the consciousness of suffering, and yet subjected at the 
time to what in after life would be extreme suffering, he will 
die, if the perfect law be fulfilled in him, oblivious, in like 
manner, of all pain, mental or physical. At his entrance into 
