of number; do not talk to me--to me who am
to die outright--of societies and peoples! There is no reality, there
is no true duration, save that between the cradle and the grave. The
rest is mere bombast, show, delusion! They call me a master because of
some magic in my speech and thoughts; but I am a frightened child in
the presence of death!"[1]

[Footnote 1: Marie Leneru, _Les Affranchis_, Act III.,
Sc. iv.]

II

A PRIMITIVE IDEA

That is where we stand. For us, death is the one event that counts in
our life and in our universe. It is the point whereat all that escapes
our vigilance unites and conspires against our happiness. The more our
thoughts struggle to turn away from it, the closer do they press
around it. The more we dread it, the more dreadful it becomes, for it
battens but on our fears. He who seeks to forget it burdens his memory
with it; he who tries to shun it meets naught else. But, though we
think of death incessantly, we do so unconsciously, without learning
to know death. We compel our attention to turn its back upon it,
instead of going to it with uplifted head. We exhaust all our forces,
which ought to face death boldly, in distracting our will from it. We
deliver death into the dim hands of instinct and we grant it not one
hour of our intelligence. Is it surprising that the idea of death,
which should be the most perfect and the most luminous--being the most
persistent and the most inevitable--remains the flimsiest of our ideas
and the only one that is backward? How should we know the one power
which we never looked in the face? How could it profit by flashes
kindled only to help us escape it? To fathom its abysses, we wait
until the most enfeebled, the most disordered moments of our life
arrive. We do not think of death until we have no longer the strength,
I will not say, to think, but even to breathe. A man returning among
us from another century would not recognize without difficulty, in the
depths of a present-day soul, the image of his gods, of his duty, of
his love or of his universe; but the figure of death, when everything
has changed around it and when even that which composes it and
upon which it rests has vanished, he would find almost untouched,
rough-drawn as it was by our fathers, hundreds, nay, thousands of
years ago. Our intelligence, grown so bold and active, has not worked
upon this figure, has added no single touch to it. Though we may no
longer believe in the to