How much has been said and thought and written about death! And without effect. We should make up our minds that nothing is to be added to what we already know about it. We continually strain to realize the flavour of death by heaping up a confused mass of ideas, by strange and inordinate imaginings, by deliberately forcing our thought and dealing to a point beyond control. Yet these are not means and ways by which to learn; for in our wildest dreams, in our most fearful phantasies, or strangest visions, in all that is unfamiliar, runs the thread of life. We can have no dreams or hallucinations or inventions, born of true imagination or of a fit of madness, unless life give them us--and so how can they hold an idea or sense of death? And this is why we will never, in anticipation, taste death. We cannot even distinguish and analyse for ourselves the fashion in which death will some day bear us away from life. Death is the non-existent, made not out of silence (which noise explains), nor out of darkness (which light would explain), but out of something inconceivably absolute. Sleep implies an awakening, dreams imply the powers of seeing, thinking, hearing, inertness implies the power of movement; so that nothing in our range of experience, from complete peace to utter terror, can plant in us a true sense of death, and probably no man, to the end of the world, will ever be able to explain it in terms of others' deaths or of his own. When our spirit has departed (that is, when the bond between the secret and innumerable forces whose continued contact makes our life is at last unloosed), we are only vague shapes in deliquescence. The dead keep nothing of their ancient character. What had been their life is submerged in the infinite whole, as myriads of particles of varying elements. In nature alone is the power to dispose of these dispersed and impalpable essences; so it is finally impossible that an entity such as our present should ever again come together and act after our death. We are, and we will cease to be: that much is certain; but what we will be can never be told.