the dying. It takes more than an ordinary person to interpret it, and for reasons connected with what I have been saying men of genius usually avoid death-beds. But it is quite wrong to ascribe the sudden appearance of religion in so many people who are fatally ill, to a desire to make sure of their future state. It is extremely superficial to assume that the doctrine of hell can for the first time assume such an importance to the dying as to make them afraid to pass away "with a lie on their lips."[1]
The important point is this: Why do men who have lived throughout a lying life feel towards the end a sudden desire for truth? And why are others so horrified, although they do not believe in punishment in the next world, when they hear of a man dying with a lie on his lips or with an unrepented action? And why have both the hardness of heart until the end and the death-bed repentance appealed so forcibly to the imagination of poets? The discussion as to the "euthanasia" of atheists, which was so popular in the eighteenth century, is more than a mere historical curiosity as F. A. Lange considered it.
I adduce these considerations not merely to suggest a possibility which is hardly more than a guess. It seems to be unthinkable that it is not the case that many more people than actual geniuses have some trace of genius. The quantitative difference in natural endowment will be most marked at the moment when the endowment becomes active. And for most men this moment is the point of death. If we were not accustomed to regard men of genius as a separate class shut off from the others like the payers of income-tax, we should find less difficulty in grafting these new ideas on the old. And just as the earliest recollections of childhood which a man has are not the result of some external event breaking through the
- ↑ I venture to remind readers how often at the approach of death those who have been occupied with purely scientific matters have turned to religious problems, e.g., Newton, Gauss, Riemann, Weber.
