But this inherited shrinking from death is not what tortures man. What causes the uneasiness is rather that superstitious fear of death, which is really fear of a life after the throes of death. We have made this present life so unreasonable and so inconsistent with our own nature that we feel as if any life after death must be just as incomprehensible and inconsistent as this one, so we fear it. We fail to see that all life goes on developing and improving, and so we think our future life may be much worse than what we have now; then, like Hamlet, we ask is it really “better to endure the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of?” Because we hold these two views of life, the animal’s view and the spirit’s view, we seem to hear two voices crying in our hearts when we consider things: the voice of the Body and the voice of the Soul. The Body says, “I shall cease to be, I shall die, all that I set my life in shall die.” The Soul cries, “I am, I cannot die, I ought not to die,” and, as if from still deeper depths, comes an appalling whisper, “Yet I am dying.” (Tolstoy.) It is because of this contradiction that terror seizes the mind when we think of the death of the flesh. Man has so long assumed that his fleshly life is the same as himself that he cannot easily rid himself of the idea. Yet, if a man lose a hand or an arm or a leg by accident, he does not think that part of his consciousness or self is gone. He knows that a part of his body—through which himself is made manifest to other men—is gone, but he does not for a moment think that he, the human being, is any less. And he is not. It is true that the automatic processes of his mind refuse for some time to accept the loss of the members of his body, he misses that way of expressing his will. But that is not so strange as it may at first seem. All voluntary motion arises from desire, and is sent out from the directing mind by means of the nerves to the part of the body fitted to perform that motion. We are not conscious of sending an order to any nerve center when we wish to put one foot before the other in walking or to use our fingers in writing.