"That's what God does to us," he cried triumphantly. "When we die, He takes us apart and puts us into babies, and we live again." Thereafter he would discuss death as fearlessly as he spoke of dinner, and all his fears vanished. Here was a typical rationalization of fear, one that has helped to shape religion, philosophies, ways of living. And the widespread belief in immortality is a compensation and a rationalization of the fear of death. If some men rationalize in this fashion, others take directly opposite means. "Eat, drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die." The popularity of Omar Khayyam rests upon the aptness of his statement of this side of the case of Man vs. Death, and many a man who never heard of him has recklessly plunged into dissipation on the theory, "a short life and a merry one." This is more truly a pessimism than is the ascetic philosophy. "Well, then, I must die," says another. "Oh, that I might achieve before death comes!" So men, appalled by the brief tenure of life and the haphazard way death strikes, work hard, spurred on by the wish to leave a great work behind them. This work becomes a Self, left behind, and here the fear of death is compensated for by a little longer life in the form of achievement. Many a father and mother, looking at their children, feel this as part of their compensation for parenthood. "I shall die and leave some one behind me," means, "I shall die and yet I shall, in another form, live." Part of the incentive to parenthood, in a time which knows how to prevent parenthood and which shirks it as disagreeable, is the fear of death, of personal annihilation. For there is in death a blow to one's pride, an indignity in this annihilation,--Nothingness. There is a still larger reaction to the fear of death. I have stated that the feeling of likeness is part of the feeling of brotherhood and in death is one of the three great likenesses of man. We are born of the labor of our mothers, our days are full of strife and trouble and we die. Men's minds have lingered on these facts. "Man that is born of a woman, is of few days, and full of trouble." Job did not add to this that he dies, but elsewhere it appears as the bond for mankind. Reacting to this, the reflective minds of the race have felt that here was the unity of man, here the basis of a brotherhood. True, the Fatherhood of God was given as a logical reason, but always in every appeal there is the note, "Do we not all die? Why hate one another then?" So to the fear of death, as with every other fear, man has reacted basely and nobly. Man is the only animal that foresees death and he is the only one to elaborate ethics and religion. There is more than an accidental connection between these two facts.