The Indiana State sentinel. [volume] (Indianapolis) 1868-1895, 1891-01-14
DEATH.
The Unsolved Mystery That Puzzles Phi
lOsophers.

OGA III
The Unsolved Mystery That Puzzles Phi
losophers.
scottish Revisw.l
Philosophers have concerned themselves
much with attempts to define death, but,
as they have not been able to agree first
how TO define life, it is lot surprisingthat
they have not been very successful in de-
filming its negative. Men, for the most
part, are interested more in finding prac-
teal answers to the question, lis life
worth ~liying?" than in pursuing scien-
tiic analysis of the nature of life itself.
There Is a much more general DISPOSE
ton to speculate on the nature of
death. Life we know in some sort,
but death is an absolutely unknown guam
tity. That which is mysterious is always
more interesting than that which is pat
ent, even If uncomprehended. Life is
familiar, but death must always remain a
mystery and an unsolved problem to the
living being. When Faber wrote, Death
is an unsurveyed land, an unarranged sci
ence," he expressed what still remains
the sum of our conceptions. 1t is true
Mr.. Herbert Spencer has attempted a
more scientific formula. He tells us that
life is The definite combination of heter-
Ogeneous changes, both simultaneous
and successive, in correspondence with
external cO-existences and sequences''-
which. il not Very ineligible to the non
scientific mind, has led to much heated
disputation in philosophic circles. The
best that can be said for this definition is,
that 1t is at least as near the mark as any
other. But does it bring us any nearer
to a knowledge of what death is, to
be told that it is simply a want Of that
Correspondence" of relations which is de-
fined as life2 The mystery of noticing
still remains greater than the mystery of
being. When Socrates suggested that
pleasure is a state of not-pain, the mind
can more readily grasp the significance
than in a thesis which declares that death
is not life. But Socrates, as we know,
argued that while life iscOntrary TO death,
death is produced from life and life from
death. He also forced the long-suhering
Simmias TO admit that, if death is any
thing, it is nothing else than the separa-
ton of the soul from the body. as not
this TO die he asked, ''for the body to be
apart by itself separated from the soul,
and for the soul to subsist apart by itself
separated from the body?" Philosophy
he affirmed to be in itself nothing
else than a preparation for, and
meditation on, death, asserting
that death and philosophy have this in
common, that while death separates the
soul from the BODY, philosophy draws off
the mind from bodily things to the con
temptation of abstract truths. Therefore,
a man who fears death can neither be a
phi Osopher nor a true lover of wisdom.
This Is all very fine, but somehow the
~philosophic admiration OF death seems to
suggest the face of Mr.. Mould, the undor-
takcr, in whose cO-untenance a queer at
tempt at melancholy was at odds with a
smirk of satisfaction. "What is DEATH"
saws Seneca, but a ceasing to be
what we were before? ' "And where
all life dies" says Milton, death
lives" Which may all be accepted
without in the least enlightening us about
"the strange, mysterious power seen
every day. yet never understood but by
the uncOmmunicative dead" Humboldt
owned that he had never known the
feeling of an anxious longing for death,
vet held that death is not a break in exist
ence-it is but an intermediate circum-
stance, a transition from one form of our
finite existence to another. Job did not
feel this when be spoke OF "a land of dark
ness, as darkness itself. and of the shadow
OF death, without any order and where
light is as darkness" But it is difficult to
think otherwise in regarding the form of a
dead child, where is, as Leigh Hunt SAYS,
death in its sublimest and purest image.
THE sense of death is most in apprehen-
sion" and the apprehension is more gem
eral than Southey would have it, for he
declared as the result OF his observation
that the fear of death is not common
Where it exists, he said, it proceeds rather
from a diseased and enfeeb.ed mind thar
from any principle in our nature. But he
is surely wrong, for it is an ineradicable
principle in our nature to fear the I'M
known, even while we strive with
it. Even the Christians most ardent
desire to depart and be with
the feeling of dread of the dark passage
reached the commingling of time with
eternity. The Russian xile shudders
as he crosses the river Irish by "the ferry
of DEATH" because he knows it will divide
him forever from what he has known,
while beyond it lies the awful mystery of
Siberia. Siebenkas, in his fantastic phil
osophic fashion, contended that both men
and watches stop while they are being
wound up for a new aud larger day. The
dark interval OF sleep and death, he be-
lieved, acts as the preservative againstthe
light of an idea, which would otherwise
grow too strong, and against the burning
OF never-cooled desires, and the m%inghng
and commingling of thoughts. just as
planetary systems are kept asunder by
wide wastes. "The eternal day, which
would else blind our spirits, is divided in
to diurnal periods by midsummer nights,
which at n time we call sleep-at an
other, death"