is logically impossible that we should, since to do so would
be to acquire an experience of death such that we should be conscious of
being unconscious, sensible of being insensible, aware of being unaware.
We should be required to be and not to be at the same instant, in view
of which Lucretius both logically and wisely advises us to remember that
when death is, we are not; and when we are, death is not.

Experience and feeling are, however, neither logical nor wise, and to
these death is far from the mere non-being which the poet would have us
think it. To these it has a positive reality which makes the fear of it
a genuine cause of conduct in individuals and in groups, with a basis in
knowledge such as is realized in the diminishing of consciousness under
anaesthetic, in dreams of certain types, and most generally in the
nascent imitation of the _rigor mortis_ which makes looking upon the
dead such a horror to most of us. Even then, however, something is
lacking toward the complete realization of death, and children and
primitive peoples never realize it at all. Its full meaning comes out as
_an unsatisfied hunger in the living_ rather than as a condition of the
dead, who, alive, would have satisfied this hunger. And the realization
of this meaning requires sophistication, requires a lengthy corporate
memory and the disillusions which civilization engenders. Primitive
peoples ask for no proof of immortality because they have no notion of
mortality; civilized thinking has largely concerned itself about the
proof of immortality because its assurance of life has been shaken by
the realization of death through the gnawing of desire which only the
dead could still. The _proof_ which in the history of thought is offered
again and again, be it noted, is not of the reality of life, but of the
unreality and inefficacy of death. Immortality is like eternity, a
negative term; it is _im_mortality. The experienced fact is mortality;
and the fear of it is only an inversion of the desire which it
frustrates, just as frustrated love becomes hatred. The doctrine of
immortality, hence, springs from the fear of death, not from the love of
life, and immortality is a value-form, not an existence. Now, although
fear of death and love of life are in constant play in character and
conduct, neither constitutes the original, innocent urge of life within
us. "Will to live," "will to power," "struggle for existence," and other
Germanic hypostase