Life Everlasting
Life Everlasting
Book Excerpt
included. The only feeling aroused seems to vary between utter indifference and faint curiosity. Professor Shaler makes a statement of cardinal importance in this connection when he says: "If we should seek some one mark which, in the intellectual advance from the brutes to man, might denote the passage to the human side, we might well find it in the moment when it dawned on the nascent man that death was a mystery which he had in his turn to meet."[1]
[1] Shaler, The Individual, p. 194.
It is therefore interesting to note that the first approaches, albeit remote ones, toward a realizing sense of death occur among those animals in which the beginnings of family life have been made, and the habitual exercise of altruistic emotions helps to widen the intelligence and facilitate the appropriation to one's self of the experiences of one's comrades and mates. Such is the case with permanently mated birds and with the higher apes, while the case of the dog, exceptional as it is through his ac
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