To others the thought of their own death centers in the idea of their body. They see themselves in thought pale, rigid, insentient, and follow the fate of their corpse in every detail at least up to interment or cremation, and some cannot resist a rather strong imaginative experience as to how their living sentient body would feel the rigidity, the cold, the treatment to which it is subjected, the gazing of friends, a custom which some interdict.
A third group focus on the cessation of activities which begins in the dimming of the senses and the weakening of motor or other powers, and here, too, we find two attitudes: that of compulsive but regretful renunciation, and the other of longing as for rest. In this sense death begins with the first abatement of powers, and as we have time slowly to adjust to progressive enfeeblement we do so more and more readily.
[218] See especially J. H. Leuba, The Belief in God and Immortality, 1916, 340 pp.
[219] The Philosophy of Long Life, Tr. from the French by Harry Roberts, 1903, 305 pp.
[220] See [Chapter VI].
[221] The Limits of Evolution and Other Essays, New York, 1901.
[222] The Conception of Immortality. Also The World and the Individual.
[223] The Evolution of Immortality.
[224] The Study of Life and Death.
[225] Death and Afterward.