Nepenthe.

Waikato Times, Volume 103, Issue 17385, 23 April 1928, Page 15

Nepenthe.

Brace the beginning of time, in the days M yet unexplored by the searching finders ff history all living things have institfetrveljr regarded death as the ultimate catastrophe which can befall them. No exemption has been found to this rule and the lowest of animals will fight desperately to postpone their inevitable end. Not all the far famed fatalism of the Oriental, nor the celestial teachings of the many ehnrches suffice to give mankind a sense of resignation when Destiny clutches at his threads of fate. The hackneyed threats •f hell and damnation are in part respon- , aiblo for this but the feir of extinction is present in the heart of the untutored savage who has never heard the impassioned rhetoric of the frenzied evangellist. In the case of animaLs this mortal dread may well be due to an inherent belief in tho connection between death and pain as to them death was usually an unpleasant process fraught with agony but in the case of the human being the question assumes a deeper significance. No shallow doctrines of ritualistic religion will solve the riddle and the devine must give way to the psychogist, the parson to the analfat of the mind. Towards Pleasure. A large number of people in the world to-day who are fundamentally incapable of thinking for themselves are fond of uttering with portentous gravity the worn out and frequently incorrect platitudes of others. Such a remark is “Self-preserva-i tkm is the first law of Nature.” Nature has only one law and its effects self-preser-vation only indirectly. Briefly summed up this law is that every living thing will progress in so far as it is able towards what it thinks is pleasure and away from what it thinks is pain. The possibility of any man or animal being unselfish is incompatible witli this law because man and beast are inherently incapable of attempting, all things considered, to do anvthing that they consider will fail to give them pleasure. There is a world wide club who take as their motto : Service before,Self’ but not one of the members pi this club has ever performed an un- ’ ißelfish action nor is likely to do so. Ho may, however, be a person who obtains his pleasure from a service for others, but that he should do so to his own disadvantage is an impossibility. In so far as it expresses the meaning Intended in os perfect a manner as is possible in our singularly imperfect language this particular motto is doubtless serving its purpose. One frequently hears a man say “I’ll do it but I don t really want to.” What he means is that, while for some particular reason he does not 1 want to perform some particular action, a combination of circumstances and reason make it desirable from his point of view to do so. The Fear of Death.. The human being’s fear of death is in all probability a misplaced part of the movement towards pleasure and away from pain. Before tho advent of doctors and the disappearance of mortal combat as a means for settling personal differences, death was apt to be regarded as a much to be dreaded performance. Unfortunately mankind has a grave tendency to associate ideas and actions and has completely failed to differentiate between death and dying. Modern civilised man fears death because his heritage from a thousand ancestors is a lifelong fear of dying under painful circumstances. Even to-dny death is feared where dying is the object of apprehension. Death at the worst can be but a middle state between pain and pleasure. . , The question of death has occupied the minds of the greatest philosophers since mankind first discovered the power to think and th© problem will doubtless still be under discussion when the world ceases to exist. Unfortunately no one has yet died and returned to life to recount his experiences. Priests and Agnostics both have ingenious theories to suggest but the question which Shakespeare had to i acknowledge too difficult to solve is not likely to be answered for many a year to come. Thero is, however, one point upon which there can be no doubt namely that death involves com-

The Association in the Human Mind of the Ideas of Death and Dying has Led Mankind to Dread the Coming of its Greatest Pleasure. ifiiininiiiiiiiinitiiiiiiiiißl

plete oblivion for tho body. _ Yet this oblivion is avoided by all living things to the limit of their powers.

Negation of Pain,

It is extremely doubtful if life holds any actual pleasures and it is certain that tho majority of sensations humanity enjoys are mere absence of pain, ior example eating is not a ploasure but the negation of the pain of hunger. Similarly neither heat nor 90W in themselves are pleasures but as the negation of each other arc much sought after sensations. Sleep which can bo described os temporary death, is the greatest boon mankind possesses and there is obviously no positive pleasure connected with it, but, as the complete absen.se of all feeling, 'it is the nearest approach to Paradise to which the mortals can obtain. What mankind refens to as pleasure must therefore be complete or partial absence of feeling or sensation, and sensation must invariably be pain. Feeling is pain and pleasure which is absence of pain must therefore be absence of feeling.

The entire'energies of all living things are devoted to moving towards pleasure or negation and away from pain or feeling yet at the same time death is almost invariably shunned. Following out this hypothesis to its logical conclusion it would appear that death is the greatest of pleasures and, as the entire absence of all pain, should be much sought after. Unfortunately man is constitutionally unable to differentiate between the pleasure of death and the possible agony of dying. Generations of death-fearing ancestors have so his outlook that in this matter, as in many others, he is incapable of viewing the subject in its true perspective. The modern world regards Hie suicide either ns n criminal or as being a person of unsound mind and he is invariably labelled as a coward. No man can do other than follow the dictates of his own desires and the suicide who bikes his life is no more a coward than is the man who treasures his life until destiny wrests it from his grasp. As to his mind” it is more than probable that he is more sane than are his condemnors. Tangled Threads. There is only one possible exception to the statement' that all pleasures are the absence of pain and that is the enjoyment derived from sex. Man a.nd woman aro essentially the complement of each other and are of necessity incomplete by themselves. In the perfect marriage one of the variety described os being “made in Heaven”—it would appear that some being, which has at some time in the distant past, been divided, has again been united. The imperfect and faulty marriages would be accounted for by (ho fact that the two contracting parties aro not parts of the same original being but are parts of two different ones and therefore not complements or each other. The perfect marriage implies the fusion of two bodies into one with their consequent utter oblivion and the release of both minds or spirits into the Infinite where feeling and the dimensions are non-exis-tent where complete knowledge is attained and yet is hut ignorance and where existence is. relative to nothing but itself. The greater a man’s knowledge the more clearly he realises the extent of his own ignorance and in the matter of death where the statement of facts is impossible it does not require the cleverest of men to see that to dogmatise is an absurdity. From the ocean of knowledge man is only able to amass but a thimbleful. Never theless out of the seas of unattained knowledge certain facts and presumptions stand forth that all who care may read. The assumption that death, as the. negation of all; pain, is the greatest of pleasures but then death is not strictly speaking a natural recurrence in the cycle of life. Until living things devised into sexes death did not occur but it is certain that life or death and sex are too tangled up to be unravelled in the world’s present lack of knowledge. The two threads, however, lie side by side and some day in the far distant future tho riddle may be solved.