The sharpness of death removed from those who die, the poignancy of grief would be almost equally removed from those who survive, were natural Euthanasia the prevailing fact. Our sensibilities are governed by the observance of natural law and the breach of it. It is only when nature is vehemently interrupted that we either wonder or weep. Thus the old Greeks, fathers of true mirth, who looked upon prolonged grief as an offence, and attached the word madness to melancholy,—even they were so far imbued with sorrow when the child or the youth died, that they bore the lifeless body to the pyre in the break of the morning, lest the sun should behold so sad a sight as the young dead; while we, who court rather than seek to dismiss melancholy, who find poetry and piety in melancholic reverie, and who indulge too often in what, after a time, becomes the luxury of woe, experience a gradation of suffering as we witness the work of death. For the loss of the child and the youth we mourn in the perfect purity of sorrow; for the loss of the man in his activity we feel grief mingled with selfish regret that so much that was useful has ceased to be. In the loss of the aged, in their days of second childishness and mere oblivion, we sympathize for something that has passed away, and for a moment recall events saddening to the memory; but how soon this consoling thought succeeds and conquers—that the race of the life that has gone was run, and that for its own sake the dispensation of its removal was most merciful and most wise.
To the rule of natural death there are a few exceptions. Unswerving in her great purpose for the universal good, Nature has imposed on the world of life her storms, earthquakes, lightnings, and all those sublime manifestations of her supreme power which, in the infant days of the universe, cowed the boldest and implanted in the human heart fears and superstitions which in hereditary progression have passed down even to the present generations. Thus she has exposed us all to accidents of premature death, but, with infinite wisdom, and as if to tell us that her design is to provide for these inevitable calamities, she has given a preponderance of number at birth to those of her children who by reason of masculine strength and courage shall have most frequently to face her elements of destruction. Further, she has provided that death by her, by accidental collision with herself shall, from its very quickness, be freed of pain. For pain is a product of time. To experience pain the impression producing it must be transmitted from the injured part of the living body to the conscious centre, must be received at the conscious centre, and must be recognized by the mind as a reception; the last act in truth being the conscious act. In the great majority of deaths from natural accidents there is not sufficient time for the accomplishment of these progressive steps by which the consciousness is reached. The unconsciousness of existence is the first and last fact inflicted upon the stricken organism: the destruction is so mighty, that the sense of it is not revealed.
The duration of time intended by Nature to extend between the birth of the individual and his natural Euthanasia is undetermined, except in an approximate degree. From the first, the steady, stealthy attraction of the earth is ever telling upon the living body. Some force liberated from the body during life enables it, by self-controlled resistance, to overcome its own weight. For a given part of its cycle the force produced is so efficient, that the body grows as well as moves by its agency against weight; but this special stage is limited to an extreme, say, of thirty years. There is then another period, limited probably also to thirty years, during which the living structure in its full development maintains its resistance to its weight. Finally, there comes a time when this resistance begins to fail, so that the earth, which never for a moment loses her grasp, commences and continues to prevail, and after a struggle, extended from twenty to thirty years, conquers, bringing the exhausted organism which has daily approached nearer and nearer to her dead self, into her dead bosom.
Why the excess of power developed during growth or ascent of life should be limited as to time; why the power that maintains the developed body on the level plain should be limited as to time; why the power should decline so that the earth should be allowed to prevail and bring descent of life, are problems as yet unsolved. We call the force that resists the earth Vital. We say it resists death; we speak of it as stronger in the young than in the old; but we know nothing more of it really, from a physical point of view, than that while it exists it opposes terrestrial weight sufficiently to enable the body to move with freedom on the surface of the earth.
These facts we accept as ultimate facts. To say that the animal is at birth endowed with some reserve force, something over and above what it obtains from food and air, would seem a reasonable conclusion; but we have no proofs that it is true, save that the young resist better than the old. We must therefore rest content with our knowledge in its simple form, gathering from it the lesson that death, a part of the scheme of life, is ordained upon a natural term of life, is beneficially planned, “is rounded with a sleep.”
[Then follow chapters on disease, leading up to rules for health.]
RULES FOR HEALTH
I
The first step towards the reduction of disease is, beginning at the beginning, to provide for the health of the unborn. The error, commonly entertained, that marriageable men and women have nothing to consider except wealth, station, or social relationships, demands correction. The offspring of marriage, the most precious of all fortunes, deserves surely as much forethought as is bestowed on the offspring of the lower animals. If the intermarriage of disease were considered in the same light as the intermarriage of poverty, the hereditary transmission of disease, the basis of so much misery in the world, would be at an end in three or at most four generations.