Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/106

96 holding out aught as higher or more enduring than the fountain of human love and the fulfillment of human duties, are sufficient to bear the weight of both life and death. Here was a man who utterly dismissed from his thoughts, as being unprofitable, or worse, all speculations on a future or unseen world; a man to whom life was holy and precious, a thing not to be despised, but to be used with joyfulness; a soul full of life and light, ever longing for activity, ever counting what was achieved as not worthy to be reckoned in comparison of what was left to do. And this is the witness of his ending, that as never man loved life more, so never man feared death less. He fulfilled well and truly that great saying of Spinoza, often in his mind and on his lips, Homo liber de nulla re minus quam de morte cogitat."

There is surely a clear straining after startling announcements in the very manner of this passage. Why does Mr. Pollock fall into the manner of our translators of Scripture, with his "unholpen of," and the unmeaning adjective which, from his point of view, he chooses for Professor Clifford's view of life, namely, "holy," unless he wants to emphasize, by the use of such affectations, the antithesis between his meaning and the meaning of the book of which his turns of phrase remind us? And, however true it may be, as it doubtless was, that Professor Clifford met death with the courage and calmness that befit a man in meeting the inevitable, it is clearly nothing but an exaggeration, and an attempt to strain beyond the truth, to endeavor to make us believe that, if, as we are told. Professor Clifford was a man of warm affections, he did not fear death any the more, believing it, as he did, to be the extinction of love, than he would have done if he had thought it but the entrance on a life of deeper and truer love. What Spinoza says is well said for a man of action and for a man of thought, but very ill said, indeed, for a man of loving nature. Thought and action are so full of the present that they do not live in the future. True affection can not but shiver at the thought of extinction, and with Professor Clifford, too, doubtless it was so, as it would be with any one else. It does not follow that, because a man is brave and reticent, he does not suffer from the pang he conceals. If it could be shown that in relation to his personal affections he really feared death less than those who do not regard it as the end of either life or love, all we can say is that the only proper inference would be that he feared it less, because to him it signified less, because he loved less. And that is not at all the inference we should draw from the facts of his life. We suspect that Mr. Pollock is only imitating his friend in straining after a startling saying, without considering that what is intellectually startling is not, on that account, the more, but the less likely to be true.

This tendency to strain after intellectual excitements and surprises, which has flowed from so many quarters upon the present generation, is a very natural accompaniment of an age of discovery and of