dred and fifty we
shall be glad to go, and shall not want anything but death after we die.
The apparent line of his argument is that in youth we have not the
instinct of life so strongly but that we willingly risk life. Then,
until we live to a hundred and thirty or forty or so, we have the
instinct of life so strongly that we are anxious to shun death; lastly
the instinct of death grows in us and we are eager to lay down life. I
don't see how or why this should be. As a matter of fact, children dread
death far more than men who are not yet old enough to have developed the
instinct of it. Still, it's a fascinating and suggestive book."

"But not enough so to console us for the precious hope of living again
which it takes away so pitilessly," said the woman who had followed the
talk.

"Is that such a very precious hope?" the first speaker asked.

"I know you pretend not," she said, "but I don't believe you."

"Then you think that the dying, who almost universally make a good end,
are buoyed up by that hope?"

"I don't see why they shouldn't be. I know it's the custom for
scientific people to say that the resignation of the dying is merely
part of the general sinking and so is just physical; but they can't
prove that. Else why should persons who are condemned to death be just
as much resigned to it as the sick and even more exalted?"

"Ah," the light skirmisher put in, "some of the scientific people
dispose of that point very simply. They say it's self-hypnotism."

"Well, but they can't prove that, either," she retorted. Then she went
on: "Besides, the dying are not almost universally willing to die.
Sometimes they are very unwilling: and they seem to be unwilling because
they have no hope of living again. Why wouldn't it be just as reasonable
to suppose that we could evolve the instinct of death by believing in
the life hereafter as by living here a hundred and fifty years? For the
present, it's as easy to do the one as the other."

"But not for the future," the first speaker said. "As you suggest, it
may be just as reasonable to think we can evolve the instinct of death
by faith as by longevity, but it isn't as scientific."

"What M. Metchnikoff wants is the scientific certainty--which we can
have only by beginning to live a century and a half apiece--that the
coming man will not be afraid to die." This, of course, was from the
light skirmisher.

The woman contended, "The coming man may be scientifically resi