The soul of man : an investigation of the facts of physiological and experimental psychology / by Paul Carus.

Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The soul of man : an investigation of the facts of physiological and experimental psychology / by Paul Carus. 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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    tical, for each act of life is an act of death and the old hymn is true, In the midst of life by death we are surrounded. Media vita nos in morte sumus. And this idea contains even a deeper truth than was dreamed of by the poet of those lines, or by the millions of human souls of past ages, who in their anxieties and in danger of death repeated the words ot that grand hymn. Decay is the condition of activity. Thus the char- acteristic feature of death is the very nature of life. Death constantly hovers about us, and out of his hand we receive—through the decay of the forms which hoard potential energy, that vitality which warms our hearts and glows through all our being, which we ex- pend for our own necessities as well as for the weal of future humanity. The truth, that every vital act is at the same time an act of death, would f^nd a wrong application if its influence would drive us to melancholy, if it would make our lives gloomy and our souls despondent. On the contrary, it must make us brave and coura- geous, for indeed it does not show life in a terrible and death-like shape, but death himself with all his terrors appears in a milder and nobler aspect. Death, the giver of life, will bestow the richer gifts, the better we learn to appreciate their value. To both the spend- thrift who wastes, as well as to the miser who leaves his powers of life unused, the fountain of life will cease to flow. But through wise use we may do both, pre- serve and even increase its bounties. Who wishes to preserve his life loses the same ; but he who loses his life in the service of a higher and of a more lasting cause than is that of self-hood, will