“You do not at present _directly_ bury the living in the same tomb with the dead like the savage did and still does; but, no doubt, you often indirectly do it. I have seen more than once, while I have been living on earth, that a bereaved widow who was completely broken down by the bereavement, care and attention she had given to her sick husband, follow him for miles in a slow funeral procession during a rain or snowstorm, and also at times when the temperature was almost unbearably high or low. It seems to me that no highly cultivated person, who has the well-being and happiness of his surviving companions at heart, can form a conception that the unconscious dead would appreciate such useless hardships from their dearest friends even if they could know. After we had learned that all our acts and sympathies should go with the living--that the dead are unconscious and that all organs and faculties, as far as we know and have reason to believe, suspend their function in death--we no longer could expend any useless efforts for the supposed whims of the dead. We do all we can for them while they live, but death ends all our physical ties. “We never wear mourning for a number of reasons. As I have said before, no person of high culture can desire his surviving friends to undergo any useless hardship and privation on his account; and mourning has a tendency of increasing the burden of grief by making the surroundings more solemn and gloomy. Our aim should be to make the surroundings of the bereaved as attractive, cheerful, and gay as possible. A living person of learning and culture would desire his friends to be as happy as possible; and a dead one, if he could know anything, would be a tyrant if he were different. “The foregoing propositions are based upon the facts that it is in the inherent nature of things that death must necessarily come to all. That no amount of fretting and resistance can surmount this natural phenomenon. That a dead person is unconscious and can not appreciate and utilize help and sympathy. That the living should forget the bereavement of the dead as soon as possible. That no cultivated person desires his friends to undergo any useless hardships on his account, for the fundamental object of all sentient beings is the enjoyment of the greatest happiness, and mourning tends to intensify and prolong the depressed feeling of grief, which detracts from the greater happiness. “In order to prevent being misunderstood, let me illustrate my meaning by an example.