Our minds are made in that way. They are fashioned in the school of cause and effect. Nothing can get out of the universe because there is no out to the universe. Can that which has no ending have a beginning? Can that which has no circumference have a center? Can we think of anything so hot that it could not be hotter? Or so small that it could not be smaller? Or so big that it could not be bigger? No, because our minds have been schooled in this comparative method. Our sense shows us a world of degrees. We can think of absolute darkness, but not of absolute light. In the Mammoth Cave you may realize absolute darkness; but even on the sun itself would you experience absolute light? We seem to be able to find an end to the negative, but not to the positive. We can think of a body as at absolute rest, but can we conceive of it going so fast that it could not go faster? Death is our consciousness of a peculiar change in matter, just as life is our consciousness of the opposite change--one destructive, the other constructive. The constituents of the body remain unchanged, but a peculiar activity set up among the particles, by what, we know not, is instituted in life and ceases in death. An organism is made up of organs, all working together, but each subordinated to the whole. The whole, this concerted action, may cease, and the individual dies, as we say, and yet the minute subdivisions, the cells, may be alive. Certain ferments in the body may go on for some time after the life of the man has gone out. And living cells may go on multiplying endlessly without producing an organized being. II “It is all right,” said Walt Whitman to me as I was leaving his death-bed and hearing his voice for the last time--“It is all right.” Of course it was all right, and it will be all right when each and all of us fall into the last eternal sleep. Else it would not be. Our being here is all right, is it not? “Friendly and faithful,” says Whitman, “are the arms that have helped me,” and friendly and faithful must be the arms that bear us away. If it was good to come, it will be good to go--good in the large, cosmic sense, good in that it is in keeping with the spirit of the All. Not the good of our brief personal successes and triumphs, but good as evolution is good, as the processes of growth and decay are good. If life is good, death must be equally good, as each waits upon the other. From what point of view can we say that death is not all right? Certainly not from the point of view of this universe. Archimedes could have moved the world had he had some other world upon which to place his lever, and we must have some other universe to plant our feet upon to condemn death. As I have already said, we look upon death as an evil because we look upon it from the happy fields of life, and see ourselves as alive in our graves and lamenting that we are shut off from all the light and love and movement of the world. Does our prenatal state seem an evil?