Death
WHEN William Dunbar sang, “Timor mortis perturbat me,” he but expressed the most universal of human—perhaps of animate—feelings. It is no shame to fear death; the fear appears to be a necessary condition of our existence. The shame begins when we allow that fear to influence us in the performance of our duty. But why should we fear death at all? It is hardly an explanation to say that the fear of death is implanted in living things lest the individual should be too easily slain and thereby the species become extinct. Who implanted it? And why is it so necessary that that individual should survive? Why is it necessary that the species should survive? And so on—to name only a few of the unanswerable questions that crowd upon us whenever we sit down to muse upon that problem which every living thing must some time have a chance of solving. The question of death is inextricably bound up with the interpretation of innumerable abstract nouns, such as truth, justice, good, evil, and many more, which all religions make some effort to interpret. Philosophyattempts it by the light of man’s reason; religion by a light from some extra-human source; but all alike represent the struggles of earnest men to solve the insoluble.
Nor is it possible to obtain help from the great men of the past, because not one of them knew any more about death than you do yourself. Socrates, in Plato’sPhædo, Sir Thomas Browne in theReligio Mediciand theHydriotaphia, Shakespeare inHamletandMacbethand many other plays, St. Paul in various epistles, all tried to console us for the fact that we must die; the revolt against that inevitable end of beauty and ugliness, charm and horror, love and hate, is the most persistent note in literature; and there are few men who go through life without permitting themselves to wonder, “What is going to happen to me? Why should I have to die? What will my wife and children do after me? How is it possible that the world will go on, and apparently go on just the same as now, for ages after an important thing like me is shovelled away into a hole in the ground?” I suppose you have dreamed with a start of horror a dream in which you revisit the world, and looking for your own house and children, find them going along happily and apparently prosperous, the milkman coming as usual, a woman in theform of your wife ordering meals and supervising household affairs, the tax-gatherer calling—let us hope a little less often than when you were alive—the trams running and the ferry-boats packed as usual, and the sun shining, the rain falling sometimes, Members of Parliament bawling foolishly over nothing—all these things happening as usual; but you look around to see anybody resembling that beautiful and god-like creature whom you remember as yourself, and wheresoever you look he is not there. Where is he? How can the world possibly go on without him? Is it really going on, or is it nothing more than an incredible dream? And why are you so shocked and horror-stricken by this dream? You could hardly be more shocked if you saw you wife toiling in a garret for the minimum wage, or your children running about barefoot selling newspapers. The shocking fact is not that you have left them penniless, but that you have had to leave them at all. In the morning joy cometh as usual, and you go cheerfully about your work, which simply consists of postponing the day of somebody else’s death as long as you can. For a little time perhaps you will take particular note of the facts which accompany the act of death; then you will resign yourself to the inevitable, and continue doggedly to wagean endless battle in which you must inevitably lose, assured of nothing but that some day you too will lie pallid, your jaw dropped, your chest not moving, your face horribly inert; and that somebody will come and wash your body and tie up your jaw and put pennies on your eyes and wrap you in cerements and lift you into a long box; and that large men will put the box on their shoulders and lump you into a big vehicle with black horses, and another man will ironically shout Paul’s words, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” And in the club some man will take your seat at lunch, and the others will say you were a decent sort of fellow and will not joke loudly for a whole meal-time. And ten years hence who will remember you? Your wife and children, of course—if they too have not also been carried away in long boxes; a few men who look upon you with a kindly patronage as one who has fallen in the fight and cannot compete with them now; but otherwise? Your hospital appointments have long been filled up by men who cannot, you think, do your work half so well as you used to do it; your car is long ago turned into scrap-iron; your little dog, which used to yelp so joyously when you got home tired at night and kicked him out of the way, is long deadand buried under your favourite rose-bush; your library, which was your joy for so many years, has long been sold at about one-tenth of what it cost you; and, except for the woman who was foolish enough to love and marry you and the children whom the good creature brought into the world to carry on your name, you are as though you had never been. Why should this be? And why are you so terrified at the prospect?
During the past few years we have had ample experience of death, for there are few families in Australia, and I suppose in England, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Europe generally, which have not lost some beloved member; yet we are no nearer solving the mystery than we were before. We know no more about it than did Socrates or Homer. The only thing that is beginning to haunt the minds of many men is whether those gallant boys who died in the war were not better off than the men who survived. At least they know the worst, if there be anything to know; and have no longer to fear cancer and paralysis and the other diseases of later life. Many men have written in a consolatory vein about old age, but the consolants have in no way answered the dictum that if by reason of strength our years exceed threescoreand ten, yet is our strength but labour and sorrow. No doctor who has seen an old man with an enlarged prostate and a septic kidney therefrom, or with cancer of the tongue, can refrain from wishing that that man had died twenty years sooner, because however bad the fate in store for him it can hardly be worse than what he suffers here on earth. And possibly there are worse things on earth even than cancer of the tongue; possibly cancer of the bladder is the most atrocious, or right-sided hemiplegia with its aphasia and deadly depression of soul. Young men do not suffer from these things; and no one can attend a man so afflicted without wishing that the patient had died happily by a bullet in Gallipoli before his time came so to suffer. Yet as a man grows older, though the likelihood of his death becomes more and more with every passing year, his clinging to bare life, however painful and terrible that life may be, becomes more intense. The young hardly seem to fear death; that is a fear almost confined to the aged. How otherwise can we explain the extraordinary heroism shown by the boys of every army during the late war? I watched many beautiful and gallant boys, volunteers mark you, march down the streets of Sydney on their way to a quarrel which nobody understood—not even the German Kaiser whostarted it; and when my own turn came to go I patched up many thousands who had been shattered: the one impression made upon me was the utter vileness and beastliness of war, and the glorious courage of the boys in the line. Before the order went forth forbidding the use of Liston’s long splint in the advanced dressing stations, men with shattered lower limbs used to be brought in with their feet turned back to front. High-explosive shells would tear away half the front of a man’s abdomen; men would be maimed horribly for life, and life would never be the same again for them. Yet none seemed to complain. I know that our own boys simply accepted it all as the inevitable consequence of war, and from what I saw of the English and French their attitude of mind was much the same. The courage of the boys was amazing. I am very sure that if the average age of the armies had been sixty instead of under thirty, Amiens would never have been saved or Fort Douaumont recovered, nor would the Germans have fought so heroically as we must admit they did. Old men feel death approaching them, and they fear it. We all know that our old patients are far more nervous about death than the young. I remember a girl who had sarcoma of the thigh, which recurred after amputation, and I had tosend her to a home for the dying. She did not seem very much perturbed. I suppose the proper thing to say would be that she was conscious of her salvation and had nothing to fear; but the truth was that she was a young rake who had committed nearly every crime possible to the female sex, and she died as peacefully and happily as any young member of the Church I ever knew. But who is so terrified as the old woman who trips on a rough edge of the carpet and fractures her thigh-bone? How she clings to life! What terrors attend her last few weeks on earth, till merciful pneumonia comes to send her to endless sleep!
I do not remember to have noticed any of that ecstasy which we are told should attend the dying of the saved. Generally, so far as I have observed, the dying man falls asleep some hours or days before he actually dies, and does not wake again. His breathing becomes more and more feeble; his heart beats more irregularly and feebly, and finally it does not resume; there comes a moment when his face alters indescribably and his jaw drops; one touches his eyes and they do not respond; one holds a mirror to his mouth and it is not dulled; his wife, kneeling by the bedside, suddenly perceives that she is a widow, and cries inconsolably; one turnsaway sore and grieved and defeated; and that is all about it! There is no more heroism nor pain nor agony in dying than in falling asleep every night. Whether a man has been a good man or a bad does not seem to make any difference. I have seldom seen a death-agony, nor heard a death-rattle that could be distinguished from a commonplace snore. Possibly the muscles may become wanting in oxygenation for some time before actual death, and thrown into convulsive movements like the dance of the highwayman at Tyburn while he was dying of strangulation, and these convulsive movements might be looked upon as a death-agony; but I am quite sure that the patient never feels them. To do so would require that the sense of self-location would persist, but what evidence we have is that that is one of the first senses to depart. Possibly the dying man may have some sensation such as we have all gone through while falling asleep—that feeling as though we are falling, which is supposed to be a survival from the days when we were apes; possibly there may be some giddiness such as attends the going under an anæsthetic, and is doubtless to be attributed to the same loss of power of self-location; but the impression that has been forced upon me whenever I have seen anystruggling has been that the movements were quite involuntary, purposeless, and meaningless. And anything like an agony or a death-rattle is rare. Far more often the man simply falls asleep, and it may be as difficult to decide when life passes into death as it is to decide when consciousness passes into sleep.
Nor have I ever heard any genuine last words such as we read in books. I doubt if they ever occur. At the actual time of death the man’s body is far too busy with its dying for his mind to formulate any ideas. The nearest approach to a “last word” that I ever remember was when a very old and brilliant man, who, after a lifetime spent in the service of Australia, lay dying, full of years and honour, from suppression of urine that followed some weeks after an operation on his prostate. It was early in the war, and Austria, with her usual folly, was acting egregiously. The nurse was trying to rouse the old man by reading to him the war news. He suddenly sat up, and a flash of intelligence came over his face. “Pah—Austria with her idiot Archdukes—that was what Bismarck said, wasn’t it?” Then he fell back, and went to sleep; nor could the visits of his family and the injections of saline solution into his veins rouse him again from his torpor. He lay unconscious for nearly a week.That is the only instance of the “ruling passion strong in death” that I remember. He had always hated Bismarck and despised the Austrians, and for one brief moment hatred and contempt awakened his clouded brain. And Napoleon said, “Tête d’armée.”
There is no need, so far as we can tell, to fear the actual dying. Death is no more to be feared than his twin-brother Sleep, as the very ancient Greeks of Homer surmised; it iswhat comes afterthat many people fear. “To sleep—perchance to dream” nightmares? Well, I do not know what other people feel when they dream, but for myself I am fortunate enough to know, even in the midst of the most horrible nightmare, that it is all a dream; and I dare say that this is a privilege common to many people. The blessed sleep that comes to tired man in the early morning, with which cometh joy, is well worth going through nightmare to attain; and I think I am not speaking wildly in claiming that most men pass the happiest portions of their lives in that early morning sleep. One of the horrors of neurasthenia is that early morning sleep is often denied to the patient.
But the idea of hell is to many persons a real terror, not to be overmastered by reason. God has not made man in His own image; man hasmade God in his. As Grant Allen used to say: “The Englishman’s idea of God is an Englishman twelve feet high”; and the old Jews, who were a very savage and ruthless people, created Jehovah in their own image. To such a God eternal punishment for a point of belief was quite the natural thing, and nineteen centuries of belief in the teaching of a loving and forgiving Christ have not abolished that frightful idea. It is one of the disservices of the Mediæval Church to mankind that it popularized and enforced the idea of hell, and that idea has been diligently perpetuated by some narrow-minded sects to this very day. But to a modern man, who, with all his faults, is a kindly and forgiving creature, hell is unthinkable, and he cannot bring himself to believe that it was actually part of the teaching of Christ. If the New Testament says so, then, thinks the average modern man, it must be in an interpolation by some mediæval ecclesiastic whose zeal outran his mercy; and an average modern man is not seriously swayed by any idea of everlasting flames. He may even quaintly wonder, if he has studied the known facts of the universe, where either hell or heaven is to be found, considering that they are supposed to have lasted for ever and to be fated to last as long. In time to come the souls, saved and lost, must be ofinfinite number, if they are not so already; and an infinite number would fill all available space and spill over for an infinite distance, leaving no room for flames, or brimstone, or harps, or golden cities. Perhaps it may not be beyond Almighty Power to solve this difficulty, but it is a very real one to the average thoughtful man. When we begin to realize infinity, to realize that every one of the millions of known suns must each last for millions of years, after which the whole process must begin again, endure as long, and so onad infinitum, the thing becomes simply inconceivable; the mind staggers, and takes refuge in agnosticism, which is not cured by the scoffing of clergymen whom one suspects of not viewing things from a modern standpoint. Jowett once answered a young man whom he evidently looked upon as a “puppy” by thundering at him: “Young man, you call yourself an agnostic; let me tell you thatagnosticis a Greek word the Latin of which isignoramus!” Jowett evidently did not in the least understand that young man’s difficulties, nor the difficulties of any man whose training has been scientific—that is, directed towards the ascertaining what is demonstrably true. Scoffing and insolence like that only react upon the scoffer’s head, and rather breed contempt than comfort. Nor is the problem of God Himselfany more easy of solution, unless we are prepared to see Him everywhere, in every minute cell and tiny bacterium. If we confess to such a belief we are immediately crushed with the cry of “mere Pantheism,” or even “Spinozism,” as though these epithets, meant to be contemptuous, led us any further on our way. You cannot solve these dreadful problems by a sneer, and Voltaire, the prince of scoffers, would have had even more influence on thought than he had if he had contented himself with a less aggressive and polemic attitude towards the Church.
Hell is a concrete attempt at Divine punishment. Punishment for what? For disobeying the commandments of God? How are we to know what God really commanded? And how are we to weigh the relative effects of temptation and powers of resistance upon any given man? How are we to say that an action which in one man may be desperately wicked may not be positively virtuous in another? It is a commonplace that virtue changes with latitude, and that we find “the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.” Why should we condemn some poor maiden of Clapham to burn for ever for a crime which she may not recognize as a crime, whereas we applaud a damsel of Martaban for doing precisely the same thing? And what is sin? Is there any real evidence asto what the commandments of God really are? Modern psychology seems to hold that virtue and vice are simply phases of the herd-complex of normal man, and have been evolved by the herd during countless generations as the best method of perpetuating the human species. No individual man made his own herd-complex, by which he is so enormously swayed; no individual man made his own sex-complex, or his ego-complex, or anything that is his. How can he be held responsible for his actions by a God Who made him the subject of such frightful temptations and gave him such feeble powers of resistance? Edward Fitzgerald—who, be it remembered, knew no more about these things than you or I—summed up the whole matter in “Man’s forgiveness give—and take,” and probably this simple line has given more comfort to thoughtful men than all Jowett’s bluster. Fitzgerald has at least voiced the instinctive rebellion which every man must feel when he considers the facts of human nature, even if he has given us otherwise no more guidance than a call to a poor kind of Epicureanism which lays stress on a book of verse underneath a bough, and thou beside me singing in a wilderness. If our musings lead us to Epicureanism, at least let it be the Epicureanism of Epicurus, and not the sensual pleasure-seeking of Omar. True,Epicureanism laid stress on the superiority of mental over physical happiness; it were better to worship at the shrine of Beethoven than of Venus, and better to take your pleasure in the library than in the wine-shop. But nobler than Epicurus was Zeno, the Stoic, whose influence on both the ancient and the modern worlds has been so profound. If we are to take philosophy as our guide, Stoicism, which inculcates duty and self-restraint, and is supported by the great names of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, is probably our best leading light. Theoretically it should produce noble characters; practically it has produced the noblest, if theMeditationsof Marcus Aurelius were really written by him and not by some monk in the Middle Ages. If we follow the teaching of Stoicism we shall, when we come to die, at least have the consolation that we have done our duty; and if we realize the full meaning of “duty” in the modern world to include duty done kindly and generously as well as faithfully, we shall be living as nearly to the ideals laid down by Christ as is possible to human nature, and we shall assuredly have nothing to fear.
Anæsthesia gives some faint hint as to the possibility of a future life. It is believed that chloroform and ether abolish consciousness by causing a slight change in the molecular constitutionof nervous matter, as for instance dissolving the fatty substances or lipoids. If so minute a change in the chemistry of nervous matter has the power of totally abolishing consciousness, how can the mind possibly survive the much greater change which occurs in nervous matter after corruption has set in? Nor has there ever been any proof that there can be consciousness without living nervous matter. One turns to the spiritualistic evidence offered by Myers, Conan Doyle, Oliver Lodge, and other observers, but after carefully studying their reports one feels inclined to agree with Huxley that spiritualism has merely added a new terror to death, for, according to the spiritualists, death appears to transform men into idiots who on earth were known to be able and clever, and the marvel is not the miracles which they report, but that clever men should be found to believe them.
An even more remarkable marvel than the marvel of Lodge and Conan Doyle was the marvel of John Henry Newman, who, a supremely able man, living at the time of Darwin, Huxley, and the vast biological advancement of the Victorian era, was yet able in middle life to embrace the far from rationalistic doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. That he was tempted to do so by the opportunity which his action gavehim of becoming a prince of the Church is too ridiculous an assumption to stand for a moment. The manbelievedthese things, and believed them with greatness, nobility, and earnestness; when he ’verted he was forty-four years of age, and it was not for about thirty years that he was created a cardinal. The only explanation that can be given is that we have not yet fathomed the depths of the human mind; there is a certain type of mind which appears to see things by what it calls intuition and is not open to reason on the basis of evidence or probability.
Probably what most men fear is not death but the pain and illness which generally precede death; and apart from that very natural dread there is the dread of leaving things which are dear to every one. After all, life is sweet to most of us; it is pleasant to feel the warm sun and see the blue sky and watch the shadows race over far hills; an occasional concert, a week-end spent at golf, or at working diligently in the garden; congenial employment, or a worthy book to read, all help to make life worth living, and the mind becomes sad at the thought of leaving these things and the home which they epitomize. I remember once in a troopship, a few days out from an Australian port, when the men had all got over their sea-sickness and were beginning to realize that theyreally were started on their Great Adventure, that I went down into their quarters at night, and found a big young countryman who had enlisted in the Artillery, sobbing bitterly. It was a long time before kindly consolation and a dose of bromide sent him off to sleep. In the morning he came to see me and tried to apologize for his unmanliness. “I’m not afraid of dyin’, sir,” he explained. “I want to stoush some of them Germans first, though. It’s leaving all me life in Australia if I ’appen to stop a lump of lead, sir—that’s what’s worryin’ me.” Life in Australia meant riding on horseback when he was not following at the plough’s tail. It was the only life he knew, and he loved it. But I was fully convinced that he no more feared actual death than he feared a mosquito, and when he left the ship at Suez, and joined lustily in the singing of “Australia will be there”—who so jovial as he? He got through the fighting on Gallipoli, only to be destroyed on the Somme; his horse, if it had not already been sent to Palestine, had to submit to another rider; his acres to produce for another ploughman.
The last illness is, of course, sometimes very unpleasant, especially if cancer or angina pectoris enter into the picture, but I have often marvelled at the endurance of men who should, accordingto all one’s preconceived ideas, be broken up with distress. Not uncommonly a man refuses to believe that he is really so seriously ill as other people think, and there is always the hope eternal in every breast that he will get better. Quite commonly he looks hopefully in the glass every morning as he shaves for signs of coming improvement; there are few men who really believe that sentence of early death has been passed upon them.
The illness which causes the most misery is an illness complicated with neurasthenia, and probably the neurasthenic tastes the bitterest misery of which mankind is capable, unless we admit melancholia into the grisly competition. But I often think that the long sleepless early morning hours of neurasthenia, when the patient lies listening for the chimes, worrying over his physical condition and harassed with dread of the future, are the most terrible possible to man. Nor are they in any way improved by the knowledge that sometimes neurasthenia does not indicate any real physical disease.
But it is difficult to find any really rational cause for the desire to live longer, unless Sir Thomas Browne is right in thinking that the long habit of living indisposeth us for dying. After all, what does it really matter whether wedie to-morrow or live twenty more years? In another century it will be all the same; at most we but postpone dissolution. Death has to come sooner or later; and whatever we believe of our life beyond the grave is not likely to make any difference. We were not consulted as to whether we were to be born, nor as to the parts and capabilities which were to be allotted to us, and it is exceedingly unlikely that our wishes will be taken into consideration as regards our eternal disposition. We can do no more when we come to die than take our involuntary leap into the dark like innumerable living creatures before us, and, conscious of having done our duty to the best that lay in us, hope for the best.
Twentieth-century biological science appears to result in a kind of vague pantheism, coupled with a generous hedonism. Scientific men appear to find their pleasure, not like the old Greeks, sought by each man for himself, but rather in “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” It is difficult for a modern man to feel entirely happy while he knows of the vast amount of incurable misery that exists in the world. The idea of Heaven is simply an idea that the atrocious injustice and unhappiness of life in this world must be balanced by equally great happiness inthe life to come; but is there any evidence to favour such a belief? Is there any evidence throughout Nature that the spirit of justice is anything but a dream of man himself which is never to be fulfilled? We do not like to speak of “death,” but prefer rather to avoid the hated term by some journalistic periphrasis, such as “solved the great enigma.” But is there any enigma? Or are we going to solve it? Is it not more likely that our protoplasm is destined to become dissolved into its primordial electrons, and ultimately to be lost in the general ocean of ether, and that when we die we shall solve no enigma, because there is no enigma to solve?
To sum up, death probably does not hurt nearly so much as the ordinary sufferings which are the lot of everybody in living; the act of death is probably no more terrible than our nightly falling asleep; and probably the condition of everlasting rest is what Fate has in store for us, and we can face it bravely without flinching when our time comes. But whether we flinch or not will not matter; we have to die all the same, and we shall be less likely to flinch if we can feel that we have tried to do our duty. And what are we to say of a man who has seen his duty, and urgently longed to perform it, but has failedbecause God has not given him sufficient strength? “Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor,” as old Cicero said of himself. If there is any enigma at all, it lies in the frustrated longings and bitter disappointment of that man.
Probably the best shield throughout life against the atrocious evils and injustices which every man has to suffer is a kind of humorous fatalism which holds that other people have suffered as much as ourselves; that such suffering is a necessary concomitant of life upon this world; and that nothing much matters so long as we do our duty in the sphere to which Fate has called us. A kindly irony which enables us to laugh at the world and sympathize with its troubles is a very powerful aid in the battle; and if a doctor does his part in alleviating pain and postponing death—if he does his best for rich and poor, and always listens to the cry of the afflicted,—and if he endeavours to leave his wife and children in a position better than he himself began, I do not see what more can be expected of him either in this world or the next. And probably Huxley was not far wrong when he said: “I have no faith, very little hope, and as much charity as I can afford.” It is amazing that there are some people in the world to-day who look upon a man who professes these merciful sentiments as a miscreant doomed toeternal flames because he will not profess to believe in their own particular form of religion. They think they have answered him when they proclaim that his creed is sterile.