The fear of death could never be a powerful factor in life; existence would be next to impossible if it were. It would rob the organism of its daring, its tenacity, and ultimately divest life itself of value. Against that danger we have an efficient guard in the operation of natural selection. In the animal world there is no fear of death, there is, in fact, no reason to assume that there exists even a consciousness of death. And with man, when reflection and knowledge give birth to that consciousness, there arises a strong other regarding instinct which effectively prevents it assuming a too positive or a too dangerous form. Fear of death is, in brief, part of the jargon of priestcraft. The priest has taught it the people because it was to his interest to do so. And the jargon retains a certain currency because it is only the minority that rise above the parrot-like capacity to repeat current phrases, or who ever make an attempt to analyse their meaning and challenge their veracity. The positive fear of death is largely an acquired mental attitude. In its origin it is largely motived by religion. Generally speaking there is no very great fear of death among savages, and among the pagans of old Greece and Rome there was none of that abject fear of death that became so common with the establishment of Christianity. To the pagan, death was a natural fact, sad enough, but not of necessity terrible. Of the Greek sculptures representing death Professor Mahaffy says: "They are simple pictures of the grief of parting, of the recollection of pleasant days of love and friendship, of the gloom of an unknown future. But there is no exaggeration in the picture." Throughout Roman literature also there runs the conception of death as the necessary complement of life. Pliny puts this clearly in the following: "Unto all, the state of being after the last day is the same as it was before the first day of life; neither is there any more variation of it in either body or soul after death than there was before death." Among the uneducated there does appear to have been some fear of death, and one may assume that with some of even of the educated this was not altogether absent. It may also be assumed that it was to this type of mind that Christianity made its first appeal, and upon which it rested its nightmare-like conception of death and the after-life. On this matter the modern mind can well appreciate the attitude of Lucretius, who saw the great danger in front of the race and sought to guard men against it by pointing out the artificiality of the fear of death and the cleansing effect of genuine knowledge. So shalt thou feed on Death who feeds on men, And Death once dead there's no more dying then.