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قراءة كتاب Life Everlasting

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‏اللغة: English
Life Everlasting

Life Everlasting

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
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presence, the approach of which is greeted with smiles and out-stretched arms, while its departure is bemoaned with cries and tears, we see that as to the essentials of the situation the dawning intelligence is entirely right, although its specific interpretation is quite wrong. Mamma has not really dwindled and vanished like the penny in a conjurer's palm, but has only flitted from the field of vision.

To come back now to our primeval savage, when he sees in a dream his deceased comrade and mistakes the vision for a reality, his error is not concerned with the most fundamental part of the matter. The all-important fact is that this dreaming savage has somehow acquired a mental attitude toward death which is totally different from that of all other animals, and is therefore peculiarly human. Throughout the half-dozen invertebrate branches or sub-kingdoms, where intelligence is manifested only in its lower forms of reflex action and instinct, we find no evidence that any creature has come to know of death. There is a sense, no doubt, in which we may say that the love of life is universal. As a rule, all animals shun danger, and natural selection maintains this rule by the pitiless slaughter of all delinquents, of all in whom the needful inherited tendencies are too weak. But in the lower animal grades and in the vegetal world the courting of life and the shrinking from death go on without conscious intelligence, as the blades of grass in a meadow or the clustering leaves upon a tree compete with one another for the maximum of exposure to sunshine until perhaps stout boughs and stems are warped or twisted in the struggle. Among invertebrates, even when we get so high as lobsters and cuttlefish, the consciousness attendant upon the seizing of prey and the escape from enemies probably does not extend beyond the facts within the immediate sphere of vision. Even among those ants that have marshalled hosts and grand tactics there is doubtless no such thing as meditation of death. Passing to the vertebrates, it is not until we reach the warm-blooded birds and mammals that we find what we are seeking. Among sundry birds and mammals we see indications of a dawning recognition of the presence of death. An early manifestation is the sense of bereavement when the maternal instinct is rudely disturbed, as in the cow mourning for her calf. This feeling goes a little way, but not a great way, beyond the sense of physical discomfort, and is soon relieved by milking. Much more intense and abiding is the feeling of bereavement among birds that mate for life, and among the higher apes, and it reaches its culmination in the dog whose intelligence and affections have been so profoundly modified through his immensely long comradeship with man. Nowhere in literature do we strike upon a deeper note of pathos than in Scott's immortal lines on the dog who starved while watching his young master's lifeless body, alone upon a Highland moor:—

"How long didst thou think that his silence was slumber?
When the wind stirred his garment, how oft didst thou start!"

Yet even this devoted creature could have carried his thoughts but little way toward the point reached by our dreaming savage with his incipient ghost-world. More power of abstraction and generalization was needed. While the sight of the killing of a fellow-creature may arouse violent terror in the higher mammals below man, there is nothing to indicate that the sight of the dead body awakens in the dumb spectator any general conceptions in which his own ultimate doom is included. The only feeling aroused seems to vary between utter indifference and faint curiosity. Professor Shaler makes a statement of cardinal importance in this connection when he says: "If we should seek some one mark which, in the intellectual advance from the brutes to man, might denote the passage to the human side, we might well find it in the moment when it dawned on the nascent man that death was a mystery which he had in his turn to meet."[1]

It is therefore interesting to note that the first approaches, albeit remote ones, toward a realizing sense of death occur among those animals in which the beginnings of family life have been made, and the habitual exercise of altruistic emotions helps to widen the intelligence and facilitate the appropriation to one's self of the experiences of one's comrades and mates. Such is the case with permanently mated birds and with the higher apes, while the case of the dog, exceptional as it is through his acquired dependence upon man, has similar implications. Now I have elsewhere proved and repeatedly illustrated that the leading peculiarity which distinguished man's apelike progenitors from all other creatures was the progressive increase in the duration of infancy, which was a direct consequence of expanding intelligence, and was moreover the immediate cause of the genesis of the human family and of human society. It appears now that the realizing sense of death, such as we find it in untutored men of primitive habits of thought, has originated in the selfsame circumstances which have wrought the mighty change from gregariousness to sociality, from the general level of mammalian existence to the unique level of humanity. I have elsewhere called attention to the profoundly interesting fact that the notion of an Unseen World beyond that in which we lead our daily lives is coeval with the earliest beginnings of Humanity upon our planet. We may now observe that it adds greatly to the interest and to the significance of this fact, when we find that the very circumstances which tended to single out our progenitors, and raise them from the average mammalian level into Manhood, tended also to make them realize the problem of death and meet it with a solution. The grouping of facts now begins to make it appear that this primeval solution was but the natural outcome of the whole cosmic process that had gone before; that when nascent Humanity first eluded the burden of the problem by rising above it, this was but part and parcel of the unprecedented cosmic operation through which man's Humanity was developed and declared. The long and cumulative play of cause and effect which wrought the lengthening of the period of helpless babyhood and the correlative maternal care, and which thus differentiated the non-human horde of primates into a group of human clans, was attended by a strong development of the sympathetic feelings as it vastly increased the mutual dependence among individuals. During the same period the gradual acquirement of articulate speech was accompanied by a great increase in the powers of abstraction and generalization. These new capacities were applied to the interpretation of death, just as they were applied to all other things; and thus, in the very process of becoming human, our progenitors arose to the consciousness of death as something with which humanity has always and everywhere to reckon. From the earliest and most rudimentary stages of the process, however, the conception of death was not of an event which puts an end to human individuality, but of an event which human individuality survives. If we look at the circumstances of the genesis of mankind purely from the

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