Page:Life and death (1911).djvu/370

 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