Life and death

by A. Dastre

The reason of the discrepancies between instinct and function in man is given by the natural history of his development. We know that man has within him original sin—his long atavism. He has sprung, according to the transformists, from a simian stock. He is a cousin, the successful relation, of a type of antinomorphic monkeys, the chimpanzees. He has “arrived,” they have remained undeveloped. Probably he had a common ancestor with them, some dryopithecan of an extinct species. From that type sprang a new type already on the way to progress, the Pithecanthropus erectus. Finally, the anthropoid ancestor became one fine day the father of a scion, clearly superior to himself, a miraculously gifted being, man. Here, then, is no sign of the slow evolution and gradual progress, which is the doctrine held at present by Transformists. The Dutch botanist De Vries has shown us, in fact, that nature does leap: natura facit saltus. There would thus be crises, as it were, in the life of species. At certain critical epochs considerable differences of a specific value appear in their offspring. It is at one of these critical periods in the simian life that man has appeared as the phenomenal child of an anthropoid. He was born with a brain and an intellect superior to those of his humble parents; and on the other hand, he has inherited from them an organization which is only inadequately adapted to the new conditions of existence created by the development of his sensitiveness and his brain power. This intellect is not proportioned to his organization, which has not developed at the same rate; it protests against the discordances which adaptation has not yet had time to efface. But it will efface them in the future.

§ 4. The Instinct of Life and the Instinct of Death.

The greatest discrepancy of this kind is the knowledge of inevitable death without the instinct which makes it longed for.

There are immortal animals. Man is not of the number. He belongs, like all highly organized beings, to the class of beings which have an end. They die from accident or from disease. They perish in the struggle with other animals, or with microbes, or with external conditions. There are certainly very few, if there are any, which die a really natural death. And so it is with man. We see old men gradually declining who appear to doze gently off into the last sleep, and become extinguished without disease, like a lamp whose oil is exhausted. But this is in most cases only apparently so. Besides the fact that the old age to which they seemed to succumb is really a disease, a generalized sclerosis, autopsy always reveals some lesion more or less directly responsible for the fatal issue.

Man, like all the higher animals, is therefore subject to the law of lethality. But while animals have no idea of death and are not tormented by the sentiment of their inevitable end, man knows and understands this destiny. He has with the animals the instinct of self-preservation, the instinct of life, and at the same time the knowledge and the fear of death. This contradiction, this discordance, is one of the sources of his woes.

Whether it be an accident or the regular term of the normal cycle, death always comes too soon. It surprises the man at a time when he has not yet completed his physiological evolution; hence the aversion and the terror it inspires. “We cannot fix our eyes on the sun or on death,” said La Rochefoucauld. The old man does not regard death with less aversion than the young man. “He who is most like the dead dies with most regret.” Man knows that he is not getting his full measure.

Further, all the really natural acts are solicited by an instinct, the satisfaction of which is a need and a joy. The need of death should therefore appear at the end of life, just as the need of sleep appears at the end of the day. It would appear, no doubt, if the normal cycle of existence were fulfilled, and if the harmonious evolution were not always interrupted by accident. Death would then be welcomed and longed for. It would lose its horror. The instinct of death would replace at the wished for moment the instinct of life. Man would pass from the banquet of life with no other desire. He would die without regret, “being old and full of days,” according to the expression used in the Bible in the case of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. No doubt there are some analogies to this in the insects which only assume the perfect form for the purpose of procreation and immediately perish in their full perfection. In these animals the approach of death is blended with the intoxication of hymen. Thus we see some of them, the ephemerae, lose at that moment the instinct of life and the instinct of self-preservation. They allow themselves to be approached, taken, and seized, and make no effort at flight.

But what is this full measure of life which is imparted to us? Metchnikoff holds that the ages attributed to several persons in the Bible are very probable. Abraham lived 175 years, Ishmael 137, Joseph 110, Moses 120. Buffon believed in the existence of a ratio between the longevity of animals and the duration of their growth. He fixed it at 7:1. The animal whose development lasts two years would thus have 14 years of life. This law would give us 140 years, but the figure is too high, and Flourens has reduced the ratio to that of 5:1, which would still give us 100 years. Plato died in the act of conversation at 81; Isocrates wrote his Panathenaïcus at 94; Gorgias died in the full possession of his intellect at 107.

To reach the end of the promised longevity we must neither count on the elixir of life nor on the potable gold of the alchemists, nor on the stone of immortality which did not prevent its inventor, Paracelsus, from dying at the age of 58, nor on transfusion, nor on Graham’s celestial bed, nor on King David’s gerocomy, nor on any nostrum or remedy. Contra vim mortis non est medicamen in hortis, said the Salernian school. What Feuchtersleben said is most true, “The art of prolonging life consists in not cutting it short,” and it is a hygiene, but a brilliant hygiene, such as that of which Metchnikoff traces us the future lines, which will realize the desires of nature.

And now shall we find that physiology has solved the enigma proposed by the Sphinx, and that it has answered these poignant questions:—Whence do we come? whither do we go? what is the end of life? The end of life is, to the physiologist as well as to Herbert Spencer, the tendency towards an existence as full and as long as possible, towards a life in conformity with real nature freed from the discordancies which still remain; it is the accomplishment of the harmonious cycle of our normal evolution. This ideal human nature, without discordancies, no longer vitiated as it is at present but improved, will be the work of time and science. Realized at last it will serve as a solid basis for individual, family, and social morality. Healthy youth fit for action; prolonged, adult age, the symbol of strength; normal old age, wise in council, these would have their natural places in harmonious society. “Great actions,” said one of old, “are not achieved by exertions of strength, or speed, or agility, but rather by the prudence, the authority, and the judgment which are found in a higher degree in old age.” The old age of which Cicero here speaks is the ideal old age, regular and normal, and not the premature, deformed, incapable and egoistic old age which results from a pathological condition. At the end of this full life, the old man being full of days, will crave for the eternal sleep and will resign himself to it with joy....