THE UNSOLVED MYSTERY.

Lyttelton Times, Volume LXXV, Issue 9334, 10 February 1891, Page 3

THE UNSOLVED MYSTERY.

(Benjamin Taylor in the Scottish Review.) 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 not surprising that they have not been very successful in defining its negative. Men, for the most part, are interested more in finding practical answers to the question, “Is life worth living ?” than in pursuing scientific analyses of the nature of life itself. There is a much more general disposition to speculate on the nature of death. Life we know in some sort, but death is an absolutely unknown quantity. That which is mysterious is al way s more interesting than that which is patent even if uncomprehended. Life is familiar, butdeath must always remain a mystery and an unsolved problem to the living being. When Faber wrote; " Death is an unsurveyed land, an unarranged science,” he expressed what still remains the sum of our conceptions. It is true that Mr Herbert Spencer has attempted a more scientific formula. He tells us that life is " the riefinitecombination of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and successive, in correspondence with external co-exist-ences and sequences,” which, if not very intelligible to the non-scientific mind, has led to much heated disputation in philosophic circles. The heat that can be said for this definition is, that it 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 defined as life? The mystery of not-being 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 is contrary to death, death is produced from life and life from death. He also forced the long-suffering Simmias to admit that, if death is anything, it is nothing else than the separation of the soul from the body. "Is not this to die,” he asked; " for the body to bo 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 sepai’ates the soul from the body, philosophy draws off the mind from bodily things to the contemplation of abstract truths. Therefore a man who fears death can neither be a philosopher 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 undertaker, in whose countenance a queer attempt at melancholy was at odds with a smirk of satisfaction. What is death, says 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, yet held that death is not a break in existence—it is but an intermediate circumstance, a transition from one form of our finite existence to another. Job did not feel this when he spoke of " aland of darkness, as darkness itself; and of the shadow of death, without any order, and where the 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 apprehension,” and the apprehension is more general 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 enfeebled mind, than from any principle in our nature. But he is surely wrong, for it is an ineradicable principle in our nature to fear the unknown, even while we strive with it. Even the Christian’s most ardent desire to depart and be with Christ cannot wholly obliterate the feeling of dread of the dark passage, which has to be traversed before is reached the commingling of time with eternity. The Russian exile shudders as he crosses the' river Irtish by "the ferry of death,” because he knows it will divide him for ever from what he has known, while beyond it lies the awful mystery of Siberia. Siebenkas, in his fantastic philosophic fashion, contended that both men and ■ watches stop ; while they are being wound up for a new and larger day. The dark intervals of sleep and death, he believed, act as the preservatives against the light of an idea, which would otherwise grow too strong, and against the burning of nevercooled desires, and the mingling 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 into diurnal periods by midsummer nights, which at one time we call sleep—at another, death.