on no veritable foundation of science, but on a
visionary foundation of emotion. It has wrought upon flitting,
sensible phenomena rather than upon abiding substrata of facts.
For example, a tender Greek bard personified the life of a tree as
a Hamadryad, the moving trunk and limbs her undulating form and
beckoning arms, the drooping boughs her hair, the rustling foliage
her voice. A modern poet, endowed with the same strength of
sympathy, but acquainted with vegetable chemistry, might personify
sap as a pale, liquid maiden, ascending through the roots and
veins to meet air, a blue boy robed in golden warmth, descending
through the leaves, with a whisper, to her embrace. So the
personifications of death in literature, thus far, give us no
penetrative glance into what it really is, help us to no acute
definition of it, but poetically fasten on some feature, or
accident, or emotion, associated with it.

There are in popular usage various metaphors to express what is
meant by death. The principal ones are, extinction of the vital
spark, departing, expiring, cutting the thread of life, giving up
the ghost, falling asleep. These figurative modes of speech spring
from extremely imperfect correspondences. Indeed, the unlikenesses
are more important and more numerous than the likenesses. They are
simply artifices to indicate what is so deeply obscure and
intangible. They do not lay the secret bare, nor furnish us any
aid in reaching to the true essence of the question. Moreover,
several of them, when sharply examined, involve a fatal error. For
example, upon the admitted supposition that in every case of dying
the soul departs from the body, still, this separation of the soul
from the body is not what constitutes death. Death is the state of
the body when the soul has left it. An act is distinct from its
effects. We must, therefore, turn from the literary inquiry to the
metaphysical and scientific method, to gain any satisfactory idea
and definition of death.

A German writer of extraordinary acumen and audacity has said,
"Only before death, but not in death, is death death. Death is so
unreal a being that he only is when he is not, and is not when he
is."1 This paradoxical and puzzling as it may appear is
susceptible of quite lucid interpretation and defence. For death
is, in its naked significance, the state of not being. Of course,
then, it has no existence save in the conceptions of the living.
We compare a dead

1 Feu