Page:Life and death (1911).djvu/359

 CHAPTER VII.

MAN. THE INSTINCT OF LIFE AND THE INSTINCT OF DEATH.

The miseries of humanity: 1. Disease; 2. Old age.—Old age considered as a chronic disease.—Its occasional cause.—3. The disharmonies of human nature; 4. The instinct of life and the instinct of death.

Man's unhappy plight is the constant theme of philosophies and religions. Without referring to its moral basis, it has a physical basis due to four causes—the physical imperfection or disharmony of nature, disease, old age, and death—or rather of three, for what we call old age is perhaps a simple disease. These are the great sorrows of man, the sources of all his woes. Disease attacks him, old age awaits him, and death must tear him from all the ties which he has formed. All his pleasures are poisoned by the certain knowledge that they last but for a moment, that they are as precarious as his health, his youth, and his life itself.

§

Disease, frequent, constant, and inevitable as it is, is, however, nothing but a fact outside the natural order. Its character is clearly accidental, and it interrupts the normal cycle of evolution. Medical