From our dead selves to higher things : a course of human experience and development / by Frederick James Gant.

Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: From our dead selves to higher things : a course of human experience and development / by Frederick James Gant. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    THE TWO DEATHS Bodily suffering and at last the death of the body, are commonly thought of as the most sad and terrible experiences which each human being must inevitably undergo. Yet there is a death, which, when its im- port is clearly apprehended, is more really terrible— the death of the soul. In the course of even the most painful illness, a period of freedom from pain and distress arrives, and the soul may be seen, as it were, to quit the body with easy and tranquil separation. In the last expiration, or breathing out, if not before, the conscious I—the spirit—departs, having spoken perhaps only a few minutes previously, or taken a last earthly look of smiling recognition in the presence of by standing or kneeling relatives or friends. That issue is certainly the natural mode of disjunction, say, in quite old age. It is as natural, in the present order of things, to die as to be born ; and there are physiological reasons for believing that the coming into this world of sense is 1