Kirk, Hyland Clare

The Possibility of Not Dying

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE DESIRE FOR LIFE.?ITS CAUSE AND EFFECTS. Living Forever?Objections?Myths and Legends--Poetry and Argument? Suffering, Sorrow, and Ennui?Sour Grapes?The Desire Varies as Life Varies?No Feeling or Faculty Free from it?A Parallelogram of Forces? The Heavens Believed in?Stoicism?Religious Founders?The Instinct of Immortality?The Logical Sequence?Mind and Braia?Unknown Possibilities. IS it desirable to live? If present time and immediate -- existence only are regarded, nearly all persons answer this question affirrnatively. But if the question be framed so as to include the infinite prolongation of natural life, or put in the form?is it desirable to live forever ? we shall find that manyhave seen fit to reply in the negative. Volumes of imaginative fancies, of poetry, and argument could be compiled tending to show the folly of such a desire, and the misery which would necessarily result to man from an existence unceasingly and eternally prolonged. The student of classical literature is familiar with the myth of Tithpnus, a mortal whom Jupiter endowed with immortality. Old age grew upon him and he became, A white-haired shadow roaming like a dream The ever silent spaces of the East, only glad to have Jove take back his gift and permit him to die. In a certain lake in Munster, Ireland, it is said there were two islands: into the first death could never enter, but age and sickness and the weariness of life and the paroxysms of fearful suffering were all known there, and they did their work till the inhabitants, tired of their immortality, learned to look upon the opposite island as upon a haven of repose; they launched their barks upon its gloomy waters, they touched its shores, and were at rest.' The ceaseless dangers and calamities encountere...