A sick man will say that he feels himself dying; that he is convinced he cannot recover; but if any person, from zeal, or indiscretion, shall tell him that his end is actually at hand, his countenance instantly changes, and betrays all the marks of surprize and uneasiness. He now seems not to believe, what he had been endeavouring to impress upon others; he had only some doubt, some uneasiness, about his situation; but his hopes were far greater than his fears; and but for the gloomy assiduity, the parade of woe, which generally surrounds a death-bed, and too often embitters the last moments, he would be insensible of his approaching dissolution. By no means is death so dreadful, therefore, as we suppose it to be. It is a spectre which terrifies us at a distance, but disappears when we approach it more closely. Our conceptions of it are formed by prejudice, and dressed up by fancy. We consider it not only as a misfortune greater than any other, but as one accompanied by the most excruciating anguish. Death, it is said, must be terrible, since it is sufficient to separate the soul from the body; the pain must also be of considerable duration, since time is measured by the succession of our ideas; one minute of pain, in which these ideas succeed each other with a rapidity proportioned to the agony we suffer, must appear longer than a whole age, in which they flow in their usual gentleness and tranquillity. In such philosophy, what an abuse of reason! But for the consequences of it, hardly would it deserve to have its futility exposed. As by such arguments, however, weak minds are deceived, and the aspect of death rendered a thousand times more hideous than it possibly can be; to point out the erroneous principles may be of advantage. When the soul is originally united to our body, do we experience any extraordinary joy, which delights and transports us? Most certainly not. What reason then can we have to suppose that the separation of the soul from that body may not be effected without pain? From what cause should such pain arise? Shall we fix its residence in the soul, or in the body? Pain of the mind can only be produced by thought, and that of the body is proportioned to its strength or weakness. In the instant of death, the body must be in its weakest state, and therefore if it does experience pain, it must be in a very trifling degree. Let us now suppose a violent death; that for example, of a man whose head is carried off by a cannon-ball. Can the pain he suffers last longer than a moment? Has he, in the interval of that moment, a succession of ideas so rapid, that he can imagine the pangs he feels are equal to an hour, a day, an age? These points we shall endeavour to discuss.