554 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
morally idiotic. They are devoid of ethical consciousness simply because ethical pro pensities have failed to become organized in their brain. And for no other cause are animals deprived of moral consciousness. If we all happened to be thus deficient in cerebral organization, surely morality among us would be altogether non-existent.
Yet, though vital organization can be proved to be the indispensable substratum of all consciousness, and with it of all social and ethical realization, we have no slight- est clew as to how it comes so to be. The mystery of being and becoming, the supreme mystery of progressive creation, remains wholly inscrutable. We have no faculty enabling us intelligently to apprehend the creative potency through which nature is existing and undergoing its toilsome transmutations. And it is through activity of this same inscrutable potency that the progressive increments of mental, and therewith of social and ethical, development are thus creatively superadded to what perceptually appears to us as nothing but more and more complex molecular combinations of cer- tain chemical elements.
From its structural matrix our consciousness emerges full-fashioned, a microcos- mic revelation in which the gathered experience of our race and of our own inner life, together with the time- and space-scattered influences of the great outside world, have become symbolically harmonized into simultaneous presence.
In this all-revealing focus of conscious awareness, in which inner and outer expe- rience concordantly, significantly, creatively blend, there opens a glorious vista into a world of ideal aspirations, wherein those premonitions arise that betoken, as yet unful- filled ideal, a state of social and ethical perfection we most devoutly long to see realized in actual life. EDWARD MONTGOMERY, International Journal of Ethics, October, 1897.
The Fear of Death. " Man occupies, in view of death, a situation that is peculiar, for he is probably the only being that knows he has to die. The battle against death spurs an immense number of men to study and work ; and all the great intellectual and moral creations in art, religion, and science have been produced under the influence of the feelings excited by the certainty of that event. Yet the psychology of the ideas and emotions relative to death is still to be constructed."
Organic sensibility exercises a great influence over our psychical condition and sometimes indirectly determines the trend of our thoughts and the forms of our feel- ings. An image or an idea that is in opposition to the preponderant series of organic sensations with which the consciousness is occupied is nearly always vanquished. " Men whose entirely healthful and vigorous organization develops feelings of well- being and strength can form only the poorest conceptions of those conditions of feeble- ness that are in contradiction to the preponderant system of sensations." The abstract probability of dying is not an element of the fear of death. "The greater vividness of old men's conceptions of death is most likely a result of the advancing weakness of their organs and physical sensations."
Death may be made to appear pleasant through the operation of religious or political fanaticism. " Multitudes of men have exposed themselves to the most terrible dangers of death, and multitudes of others have actually suffered it, full of enthusiasm and joy, for an idea, and have given themselves up to destruction for it. Such feel- ings acquire frightful intensity when they become epidemic and are propagated through a mass of people."
" The explanation .... may be found in the laws of association. Associa- tion is capable of changing the psychological value of any object, of rendering agree- able a thing that is offensive to another or under other circumstances, or an action by which others are annoyed or to which they are indifferent ; and can give precious value to a recollection, a thought, or an image which would be repulsive to others. Such associations operate with striking force in cases where the passion of love is con- cerned. Associations connected with a place where one has lived are agreeable or disagreeable according as one has been happy or not there ; and the law may extend to objects and images of all kinds, and even to the merest trifles."
" By the same law we may account for these exceptional eliminations of the repulsive character from the thought of death. When it is associated with intense
