Biologists have completely reversed the theory that death is an enemy. It has long ago taken its place in the system of teleology, among “the things that are for us.” Death has, beyond question, and has had, “a natural utility.” It has played an important _rôle_ in raising life from the low unicellular type to the rich complex forms of higher organisms, from “the amœba that never dies of old age” to the new dynasty of beings that have greater range and scope, but which nevertheless do die. Edwin Arnold in his striking essay on _Death_ says: “The lowest living thing, the Protamœba, has obviously never died! It is a formless film of protoplasm, which multiplies by simple division; and the specimen under any microscope derives, and must derive, in unbroken existence from the amœba which moved and fed forty æons ago. The slime of our nearest puddle lived before the Alps were made!” Methuselah was a mere child in a perambulator compared to an amœba.
In cases where the continued process of cell-division produced a lowered and weakened type of amœba a rudimentary form of union of cells took place, which resulted in raising the entire level of life and eventually carried the biological order up to wholly new possibilities. So that the threatened approach of death was met with an increase of life. “It is more probable that death is a consequence of life,” says the famous biologist, Edward Cope, “rather than that the living is a product of the non-living.”[2]
But in any case the testimony of biology can give us little help. Even if death has had a function in the process of evolution, as seems likely, that in no way eases the situation when the staggering blow falls into our precious circle and removes from it an intimate personal life that was indispensable to us. It is poor, cold comfort to be told that death has assisted through the long æons in the slow process of heightening the entire scale of life, if there is nothing more to say regarding the future of this dear one whose frail bark has now gone to wreck. We must somehow rise above the level of brute facts and discover some spiritual significance which death has revealed, before we can arrive at any source of comfort. We are all agreed with Shakespeare’s Claudio that “’tis too horrible” to think of death as a sheer terminus: