Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/396

Rh experience has in general these two sorts of characters, namely, the characters which make it a positively definable temporal and spatial fact, — so far like any other fact of experience, — and the characters which make us say, that it defeats this or that human purpose.

Thus physical death appears in our experience as an occurrence resulting from a series of physiological processes. As a natural phenomenon its very prevalence is of a deep rational interest. Meanwhile, it involves chemical and physical changes which are not essentially different from countless other changes going on in the organic world. For science it therefore has the same sort of importance that any other event in the biological realm may come to have. On this side, one can say that death is definable as an objective fact rendering relatively true, in their own fragmentary degree, our ideas about death. And this one can say in the same sense as that in which one can make this assertion about any natural fact whatever. If our theory of Being assigns to every objective fact a character as a relative fulfilment of the ideas which refer to it, death also, in so far as it fulfils ideas about death, is to just this extent no instance against our theory. Or, in case you will to know the facts about death, would your will be fulfilled if you remained ignorant of death? Or, once more, as facts now are, for us human beings, would you prefer to remain as innocent of any knowledge of death as much lower animals than ourselves may be ignorant? If you ask a question about death, is your will yet fulfilled in case experience refuses the answer? Would not many amongst us prefer to know much more than we now do as to when and how we ourselves are to die? Is