That the end of life is death may be called a truism, since the various kinds of immortality that might perhaps supervene would none of them abolish death, but at best would weave life and death together into the texture of a more comprehensive destiny.  The end of one life might be the beginning of another, if the Creator had composed his great work like a dramatic poet, assigning successive lines to different characters.  Death would then be merely the cue at the end of each speech, summoning the next personage to break in and keep the ball rolling.  Or perhaps, as some suppose, all the characters are assumed in turn by a single supernatural Spirit, who amid his endless improvisations is imagining himself living for the moment in this particular solar and social system.  Death in such a universal monologue would be but a change of scene or of metre, while in the scramble of a real comedy it would be a change of actors.  In either case every voice would be silenced sooner or later, and death would end each particular life, in spite of all possible sequels.

The relapse of created things into nothing is no violent fatality, but something naturally quite smooth and proper.  This has been set forth recently, in a novel way, by a philosopher from whom we hardly expected such a lesson, namely Professor Sigmund Freud.  He has now broadened his conception of sexual craving or libido into a general principle of attraction or concretion in matter, like the Eros of the ancient poets Hesiod and Empedocles.  The windows of that stuffy clinic have been thrown open; that smell of acrid disinfectants, those hysterical shrieks, have escaped into the cold night.  The troubles of the sick soul, we are given to understand, as well as their cure, after all flow from the stars.

I am glad that Freud has resisted the tendency to represent this principle of Love as the only principle in nature.  Unity somehow exercises an evil spell over metaphysicians.  It is admitted that in real life it is not well for One to be alone, and I think pure unity is no less barren and graceless in metaphysics.  You must have plurality to start with, or trinity, or at least duality, if you wish to get anywhere, even if you wish to get effectively into the bosom of the One, abandoning your separate existence.  Freud, like Empedocles, has prudently introduced a prior principle for Love to play with; not Strife, however (which is only an incident in Love), but Inertia, or the tendency towards peace and death.  Let us suppose that matter was originally dead, and perfectly content to be so, and that it still relapses, when it can, into its old equilibrium.  But the homogeneous (as Spencer would say) when it is finite is unstable:  and matter, presumably not being co-extensive with space, necessarily forms aggregates which have an inside and an outside.  The parts of such bodies are accordingly differently exposed to external influences and differently related to one another.  This inequality, even in what seems most quiescent, is big with changes, destined to produce in time a wonderful complexity.  It is the source of all uneasiness, of life, and of love.