Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/250

236

AN occupies in view of death a situation that is peculiar, for he is probably the only being that knows he has to die. The battle against death spurs an immense number of men to study and work; and all the great intellectual and moral creations in art, religion, and science have been produced under the influence of the feelings excited by the certainty of that event. Yet the psychology of the ideas and emotions relative to death is still to be constructed.

Man is not normally preoccupied with the thought of death. While he is in full vigor of health and strength he is not afraid of it and takes little heed of it. The idea that he will have to die some day rarely enters his mind, and when it does present itself it is so vague and relates to an event so uncertain as to the time when it will occur that no distress is produced by it. This inertia of the thought of death in the strong man follows from the important agency exercised by organic sensations in determining the psychical condition. We know that not only exterior phenomena acting on the sensorial organs that are directed to the outer world produce sensations in us, but changes of condition originating in the organism itself are also accompanied by sensations. The parts of the body that are by their situation withdrawn from the direct influence of external agents possess a special sensitiveness through which we perceive their changes of condition. One of these sensations, for example, is the feeling of fullness after dinner, the sign of an abundance of food in the stomach. The same stomach, empty, gives the painful feeling of hunger. In the field of organic sensibility sharply defined sensations are given only under abnormal conditions resulting from pathological disturbances. In a normal state they are very weak, and escape observation all the more easily because they differ but little in quality and intensity. But, being very numerous and continual, these sensations exercise a great influence over our psychical condition and sometimes indirectly determine the trend of our thoughts and the forms of our feelings. Thus, for example, the vivacity of mental images and ideas often depends on special conditions of organic sensibility. When an image or an idea is in opposition to the preponderant series of organic sensations with which the consciousness is occupied, a conflict takes place in which the image and the idea are nearly always vanquished. It is, for instance, very hard to form a lively conception of the pangs of hunger after having eaten a good meal; for the organic sensations of fullness proceeding