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POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
and, as it might seem, unrelenting action, she cannot except 
even men in their prime from death, she destroys so mightily 
that the sense of death is forbidden. 
THE PHYSICAL DEATH BY MAN. 
The spirit bestowed on man, freewill combined with the power 
to know and to do, to invent, and to imitate nature, places him 
sometimes in a position to avoid, without presumption, the true 
accidents of nature. The diversion of the lightning flash so that 
it shall not injure is a case, among a thousand, in proof of this 
fact. But this same spirit — this freewill, this super-essential 
force which acts through matter, and may be wrestled with and 
conquered by ordinary physical force, and yet defies inter- 
pretation — has power also to be destructive, which power 
it exerts, though with diminishing intensity as it advances to- 
wards perfection of knowledge, with the effect of producing far 
more misery than nature ; nay, with the effect of thwarting na- 
ture in designs which, if carried out, would lead to the happines, 
and the good of all. Thus, the totality of death at this moment 
is so lifted out of the order of nature by the spirit of freewill, 
that the world practically is a chamber of suicides. By want, 
by luxur}^, by pleasure, by care, by strife, by sloth, by labour, 
by iodolence, by courage, by cowardice, by lust, by unnatural 
chastity, by ambition, by debasement, by generosity, by avarice, 
by pride, by servility, by love, by hate, and by all the hundred 
opposed and opposing passions in their excess, we die ; I mean 
we kill. To these causes of death we add and mass up physical 
evils which, except in the case of fighting armies, destroy even 
more than the passions ; evils which pass from the individual 
to the multitude, and in shape of vile pestilences sweep away, as 
by selection, the strongest, the faintest, the youngest of the race. 
Y"et it happens in this totality of death, in this suicidal de- 
struction, that death as an act is again not, on the whole, cruel 
or painful. In all the pestilences, and they include a large 
proportion of the fatal causes, the brain of the stricken usually 
loses its function long before dissolution, and to the sufferer the 
la.st act is a restless sleep. In these forms of disease, when there 
occurs that strange return to consciousness of which I spoke at 
the opening of tliis paper, there is no pain. Those who fore- 
bode tlieir deaths are not wretched, and others, the greater part 
have imparted to them the hope of life, so that they converse 
?is if nothing were amiss, and express that except for a sense of 
weakness they were well. In cases again of violent death from 
Imman causes, from great forces after the order of nature, from 
crush in collision of railway, crush in battle, the life this mo- 
ment all action the next all rest, is extincruished without the 
