why the doctors act
as though they were convinced that there is no known torture but is
preferable to those awaiting us in the unknown. They seem persuaded
that every minute gained amidst the most intolerable sufferings is
snatched from the incomparably more dreadful sufferings which the
mysteries of the hereafter reserve for men; and, of two evils to
avoid that which they know to be imaginary, they choose the real one.
Besides, in thus postponing the end of a torture, which, as good
Seneca says, is the best part of that torture, they are only yielding
to the unanimous error which daily strengthens the circle wherein it
is confined: the prolongation of the agony increasing the horror of
death; and the horror of death demanding the prolongation of the
agony.

VII

THEIR ARGUMENTS

They, on their part, say or might say that, in the present stage of
science, two or three cases excepted, there is never a certainty of
death. Not to support life to its last limits, even at the cost of
insupportable torments, were perhaps to kill. Doubtless there is not
one chance in a hundred thousand that the sufferer escape. No matter.
If that chance exist which, in the majority of cases, will give but a
few days, or, at the utmost, a few months of a life that will not
be the real life, but much rather, as the Latin said, "an extended
death," those hundred thousand torments will not have been in vain.
A single hour snatched from death outweighs a whole existence of
tortures.

Here are, face to face, two values that cannot be compared; and, if we
mean to weigh them in the same balance, we must heap the scale which
we see with all that remains to us, that is, with every imaginable
pain, for at the decisive hour this is the only weight which counts
and which is heavy enough to raise by a few degrees the other scale
that dips into what we do not see and is loaded with the thick
darkness of another world.

VIII

THAT WHICH DOES NOT BELONG
TO DEATH

Increased by so many adventitious horrors, the horror of death becomes
such that, without reasoning, we accept the doctors' reasons. And yet
there is one point on which they are beginning to yield and to agree.
They are slowly consenting, when there is no hope left, if not to
deaden, at least to lull the last agonies. Formerly, none of them
would have dared to do so; and, even to-day, many of them hesitate
and, like misers, measure out drop by drop the clemency and pe