The illness which causes the most misery is an illness complicated with neurasthenia, and probably the neurasthenic tastes the bitterest misery of which mankind is capable, unless we admit melancholia into the grisly competition. But I often think that the long sleepless early morning hours of neurasthenia, when the patient lies listening for the chimes, worrying over his physical condition and harassed with dread of the future, are the most terrible possible to man. Nor are they in any way improved by the knowledge that sometimes neurasthenia does not indicate any real physical disease. But it is difficult to find any really rational cause for the desire to live longer, unless Sir Thomas Browne is right in thinking that the long habit of living indisposeth us for dying. After all, what does it really matter whether we die to-morrow or live twenty more years? In another century it will be all the same; at most we but postpone dissolution. Death has to come sooner or later; and whatever we believe of our life beyond the grave is not likely to make any difference. We were not consulted as to whether we were to be born, nor as to the parts and capabilities which were to be allotted to us, and it is exceedingly unlikely that our wishes will be taken into consideration as regards our eternal disposition. We can do no more when we come to die than take our involuntary leap into the dark like innumerable living creatures before us, and, conscious of having done our duty to the best that lay in us, hope for the best. Twentieth-century biological science appears to result in a kind of vague pantheism, coupled with a generous hedonism. Scientific men appear to find their pleasure, not like the old Greeks, sought by each man for himself, but rather in “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” It is difficult for a modern man to feel entirely happy while he knows of the vast amount of incurable misery that exists in the world. The idea of Heaven is simply an idea that the atrocious injustice and unhappiness of life in this world must be balanced by equally great happiness in the life to come; but is there any evidence to favour such a belief? Is there any evidence throughout Nature that the spirit of justice is anything but a dream of man himself which is never to be fulfilled? We do not like to speak of “death,” but prefer rather to avoid the hated term by some journalistic periphrasis, such as “solved the great enigma.” But is there any enigma? Or are we going to solve it? Is it not more likely that our protoplasm is destined to become dissolved into its primordial electrons, and ultimately to be lost in the general ocean of ether, and that when we die we shall solve no enigma, because there is no enigma to solve?