Page:Freud - Reflections on war and death.djvu/56

This page has been validated.

II

OUR ATTITUDE TOWARDS DEATH

IT remains for us to consider the second factor of which I have already spoken which accounts for our feeling of strangeness in a world which used to seem so beautiful and familiar to us. I refer to the disturbance in our former attitude towards death.

Our attitude had not been a sincere one. To listen to us we were, of course, prepared to maintain that death is the necessary termination of life, that everyone of us owes nature his death and must be prepared to pay his debt, in short, that death

40