Introductory material

The attitude of infancy and youth toward death as recapitulating that of the race—Suicide—The death-wish—Necrophilism—The Black Death—Depopulation by the next war—The evolutionary nisus and death as its queller—Death symbolism as pervasive as that of sex—Flirtations of youthful minds with the thought of death—Schopenhauer’s view of death—The separation of ghosts from the living among primitive races—The thanatology of the Egyptians—The journey of the soul—Ancient cults of death and resurrection in the religions about the eastern Mediterranean, based on the death of vegetation in the fall and its revival in the spring, as a background of Pauline Christianity—The fading belief in immortality and Protestantism which now at funerals speaks only of peace and rest—Osler’s five hundred deathbeds—Influential, plasmal, and personal immortality and their reciprocal relations—Moral efficacy of the doctrine of future rewards and punishments—Belief in a future life for the individual being transformed into a belief in the future of the race on earth and the advent of the superman—Does man want personal immortality—Finot’s immortality of the decomposing body and its resolution into its elements—The Durkheim school and the mana doctrine—Schleiermacher—The Schiller-James view of the brain and consciousness as repressive of the larger life of the great Autos—The views of Plato and Kant—Have God and Nature cheated and lied to us if the wish to survive is false?—Noetic and mystic immortality by partaking of the deathlessness of general ideas—Views of Howison, Royce, and others—Is there a true euthanasia or thanatophilia?—Diminution of the desire for personal immortality with culture and age.