Chapter II: The Meaning of the Term Death

"And Life, still wreathing flowers for Death to wear."--ROSSETTI

Whatever Life may really be, it is to us an abstraction: for the word is a generalised term to signify that which is common to all animals and plants, and which is not directly operative in the inorganic world. To understand life we must study living things, to see what is common to them all. An organism is alive when it moulds matter to a characteristic form, and utilises energy for its own purposes--the purposes especially of growth and reproduction. A living organism, so far as it is alive, preserves its complicated structure from deterioration and decay.[34]

Death is the cessation of that controlling influence over matter and energy, so that thereafter the uncontrolled activity of physical and chemical forces supervene. Death is not the absence of life merely, the term signifies its departure or separation, the severance of the abstract principle from the concrete residue. The term only truly applies to that which has been living.

Death therefore may be called a dissociation, a dissolution, a separation of a controlling entity from a physicochemical organism; it may be spoken of in general and vague terms as a separation of soul and body, if the term 'soul' is reduced to its lowest denomination.

Death is not extinction. Neither the soul nor the body is extinguished or put out of existence. The body weighs just as much as before, the only properties it loses at the moment of death are potential properties. So also all we can assert concerning the vital principle is that it no longer animates that material organism: we cannot safely make further assertion regarding it, or maintain its activity or its inactivity without further information.

When we say that a body is dead we may be speaking accurately. When we say that a _person_ is dead, we are using an ambiguous term; we may be referring to his discarded body, in which case we may be speaking truly and with precision. We may be referring to his personality, his character, to what is really himself; in which case though we must admit that we are speaking popularly, the term is not quite simply applicable. He has gone, he has passed on, he has "passed through the body and gone," as Browning says in _Abt Vogler_, but he is--I venture to say--certainly not dead in the same sense as the body is dead. It is his absence which allows the body to decay, he himself need be subject to no decay nor any destructive influence. Rather he is emancipated; he is freed from the burden of the flesh, though with it he has also lost those material and terrestrial potentialities which the bodily mechanism conferred upon him; and if he can exert himself on the earth any more, it can only be with some difficulty and as it were by permission and co-operation of those still here. It appears as if sometimes and occasionally he can still stimulate into activity suitable energetic mechanism, but his accustomed machinery for manifestation has been lost: or rather it is still there for a time, but it is out of action, it is dead.

Nevertheless inasmuch as those who have lost their material body have passed through the process of dissolution or dissociative severance which we call death, it is often customary to speak of them as dead. They are no longer living, if by living we mean associated with a material body of the old kind; and in that sense we need not hesitate to speak of them collectively as 'the dead.'

We need not be afraid of the word, nor need we resent its use or hesitate to employ it, when once we and our hearers understand the sense in which it may rightly be employed. If ideas associated with the term had always been sensible and wholesome, people need have had no compunction at all about using it. But by the populace, and by Ecclesiastics also, the term has been so misused, and the ideas of people have been so confused by insistent concentration on merely physical facts, and by the necessary but over-emphasised attention to the body left behind, that it was natural for a time to employ other words, until the latent ambiguity had ceased to be troublesome. And occasionally, even now, it is well to be emphatic in this direction, in order to indicate our disagreement with the policy of harping on worms and graves and epitaphs, or on the accompanying idea of a General Resurrection, with reanimation of buried bodies. Hence in strenuous contradiction to all this superstition comes the use of such phrases as 'transition' or 'passing,' and the occasional not strictly justifiable assertion that "there is no death."

For as a matter of familiar fact death there certainly is; and to deny a fact is no assistance. No one really means to deny a fact; those who make the statement only want to divert thoughts from a side already too much emphasised, and to concentrate attention on another side. What they mean is, there is no extinction. They definitely mean to maintain that the process called death is a mere severence of soul and body, and that the soul is freed rather than injured thereby. The body alone dies and decays; but there is no extinction even for it--only a change. For the other part there can hardly be even a change--except a change of surroundings. It is unlikely that character and personality are liable to sudden revolutions or mutations. Potentially they may be different, because of different opportunities, but actually at the moment they are the same. Likening existence to a curve, the curvature has changed, but there is no other discontinuity.

Death is not a word to fear, any more than birth is. We change our state at birth, and come into the world of air and sense and myriad existence; we change our state at death and enter a region of--what? Of Ether, I think, and still more myriad existence; a region in which communion is more akin to what we here call telepathy, and where intercourse is not conducted by the accustomed indirect physical processes; but a region in which beauty and knowledge are as vivid as they are here: a region in which progress is possible, and in which "admiration, hope, and love" are even more real and dominant. It is in this sense that we can truly say, "The dead are not dead, but alive." ούδέ τεθνᾷσι θανὸντες.