THE DISTRUST OF LIFE Come Sleep, O Sleep! the certain knot of peace, The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe: The poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release, Th’ indifferent judge between the high and low. SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. If there is no cause to fear death, even when one views life as purely physical, there is still less cause to fear it when one holds the second possible view of what life is—the view that life is the Unseen Consciousness and is within one’s self. These are two opposing views; it is only when we try to combine them that we find ourselves filled with fears. When we reason about our bodily life, thinking of ourselves as animals, and apply the conclusions to our lives as men, we find confusion, uncertainty, and fear: for our minds reach conclusions that our hearts tell us cannot be true. What man fears is not death—_as an animal_ he does not know or see death. As long as a man is mainly animal he suffers only as an animal. The deer that flees before the dogs is not afraid of death, for it is not possible that it could conceive of death: that is possible only to the reflecting and comparing mind. He fears the suffering that must follow from an attack from creatures of superior strength and fierce appetites. So man fears that his animal existence, which he does know,—with all its changes,—may be painfully cut off. As a rational being, man knows that death is only a natural and never-ending change. He knows that life is only that which he recognizes as humanness in himself when he meditates upon it. He says to himself, “I feel my life, not as I have been or as I shall be, but I feel it thus: that I am, that I never began anywhere, that I shall never end anywhere.” According to this view, death does not exist. His animal view of life, as the changes in his body, differs so much from the spiritual view of life as Unseen Consciousness, that he cannot reconcile them. They lead to “warring in his members,” a conflict between the limitations of the mind and the intuitions of the soul. This causes fear. There is, of course, a merely physical shrinking from death, the result of race inheritance. In the early days of our race, before man had learned to control the forces of material life, those men or races of men that did not love life, feared death and avoided it, made less effort, and took less care of their lives, and, accordingly, soon ceased to exist. Only the hardy survived. The fear of death helped to preserve the race.