CHAPTER III
DEATH AND DECAY
"All, that doth live, lives always!"—Edwin Arnold
CONSIDER now the happenings to the discarnate body. In the first place, I repeat, it is undesirable to concentrate attention on a grave. The discarnate body must be duly attended to when done with; the safety of the living is a paramount consideration; the living must retain control over what is dead. Uncontrolled natural forces are often dangerous: the only thing harmful about a flood or a fire is the absence of control. Either the operations must be supervised and intelligently directed, or they must be subjected to such disabilities that they can do no harm. But to associate continued personality with a dead body, such as is suggested by phrases like "lay him in the earth", or "here lies such an one," or to anticipate any kind of physical resuscitation, is unscientific and painful. Unfortunately the orthodox religious world at some epochs has attached superstitious importance, not to the decent disposal, but to the imagined future of the body. Painful and troublesome to humanity those rites have been. The tombs of Egypt are witness to the harassing need felt by the living to provide their loved ones with symbols or tokens of all that they might require in a future state of existence,—as if material things were needed by them any more, or as if we could provide them if they were.[35] The simple truth is always so much saner and happier than the imaginings of men; or, as Dr. Schuster said in his Presidential address to the British Association at Manchester, 1915,—"The real world is far more beautiful than any of our dreams."
What is the simple truth? It can be regarded from two points of view, the prosaic and the poetic.
Prosaically we can say that the process of decay, if regarded scientifically, is not in itself necessarily repugnant. It may be as interesting as fermentation or any other chemical or biological process. Putrefaction, like poison, is hostile to higher living organisms, and hence a self-protecting feeling of disgust has arisen round it, in the course of evolution. An emotional feeling arises in the mind of anyone who has to combat any process or operation of nature,—like the violent emotions excited in an extreme teetotaller by the word 'drink': a result of the evil its profanation has done; for the verb itself is surely quite harmless. Presumably a criminal associates disagreeable anticipations with the simple word 'hanging.' The idea of a rank weed is repulsive to a gardener, but not to a botanist; the idea of disease is repellent to a prospective patient, not to a doctor or bacteriologist; the idea of dirt is objectionable to a housewife, but it is only matter out of place; the word 'poison' conveys nothing objectionable to a chemist. Everything removed from the emotional arena, and transplanted into the intellectual, becomes interesting and tractable and worthy of study. Living organisms of every kind are good in themselves, though when out of place and beyond control they may be harmful. A tiger is an object of dread to an Indian village: to a hunting party he may be keenly attractive. In any case he is a lithe and beautiful and splendid creature. Microscopic organisms may have troublesome and destructive effects, but in themselves they can be studied with interest and avidity. All living creatures have their assuredly useful function, only it may be a function on which we naturally shrink from dwelling when in an emotional mood. Everything of this kind is an affair of mood; and, properly regarded, nothing in nature is common or unclean. That a flying albatross is a beautiful object every one can cordially admit, but that the crawling surface of a stagnant sea can be regarded with friendly eyes seems an absurdity; yet there is nothing absurd in it. It is surely the bare truth concerning all living creatures of every grade, that "the Lord God made them all"; and it was of creeping water-snakes that the stricken Mariner at length, when he had learnt the lesson, ejaculated:—
"O happy living things!
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware."