What possible difference could it make to him if he did not know any more in 1900 than he did in 1800? Did he expect to enjoy his knowledge in 1900? If not, why worry about it? What he was really lamenting was that he did not know then and there what he might know if he lived till 1900. He knew that human knowledge was making tremendous strides, and the thought that he should not share in its advancement chilled him. It is all very human, but very childish. We may to-day dread some task or ordeal that we are to face to-morrow, because to-morrow we expect to be alive, but shall we shrink from the to-morrow of death on the same grounds? There is wisdom as well as wit in the epitaph in dialogue which a clever Greek Byzantine composed for Pyrrho: “Art thou dead, Pyrrho?” “I do not know.” If we put the same question to our own dead, if they could answer, they would say, “We do not know.” If they knew, would not that be proof that they were not dead? May we not answer Huxley that if consciousness is extinguished with life, he is not going to lie awake nights in his grave worrying about it? There is comfort in the thought that if there is no immortality, we shall not know it. Rereading that wise and delightful old Frenchman, Montaigne, I find that more than three hundred years ago he was of the same mind that I am in this matter: “Why should we fear a thing whose being lost cannot be lamented?” “To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.” An avaricious man might worry if he knew he would have no more money on the next Christmas than he had on the last, unless his physician had assured him that he could not be alive on the next Christmas. Then, if he worried, it would be on account of his heirs. But one’s heirs cannot inherit his wisdom; it dies with him. Death is such an extraordinary, such an unspeakable event that we cannot think of ourselves as non-existent. When you try to see yourself in your own coffin, or standing beside your own grave, it is still as a living man that you thus behold yourself. It is, of course, as living men and women that we are disturbed over thoughts of the grave. The future is just as secure for us all as is the past. A moment between two eternities is life; a spark that draws a brief line upon the darkness and is gone. The spark has its antecedent condition in the wood and coal and the processes of combustion from which it sprang, and it has its subsequent conditions in the invisible gases into which it has vanished, but as a point of heat and light, it exists no more. Our wise attitude toward death is, I think, to forget or ignore it entirely. We shall not know it when it overtakes us. “_Avida nunquam desinere mortalitas._” “Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither--ripeness is all.” XI. DEATH I