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Untitled Article
and the progress of death . We regret that our limits will not allow us to give more than a portion of it .
* As the organic life is the first born , it is the last to die ; while the animal life , as it is the latest born , and the lant to attain its full development , so it is the earliest to decline , and the first to perish . * * * * 4 Death , when perfectly natural , is the last event of a long series of changes . Now , in this series of changes , the first appreciable event
is a change in the animal life , and in the noblest portion of that life . The highest faculties of the mind are the first that fail in power ; and those that fail in succession , fail in the order of their nobleness . The progress of decay is the inverse of the progress of development ; the retrogression is the inverse of the progression ; the highest point to which life attains is that at which death commences ; and the noblest creature , in returning to the state of non-existence , retraces every step of every stage by which it reached the summit of its existence .
* By the successive diminution of the intellectual powers ; by the gradual obliteration of the senses ; by the growing loss of the power of motion ; by the progressive diminution and ultimate extinction of the animal life , man , from the state of maturity , passes a second time through the stage of childhood , back to that of infancy , —lapses again into the state even of the very embryo . What the foetus was , the man of extreme old age is ; when he began-to exist , he possessed only vegetative life , and , before he is ripe for the tomb , he returns to the condition of the plant . 4
And even this vegetative life , this merely organic existence , cannot be maintained for ever . The waste of the organs , feeble as their action is , is not duly repaired ; consequently , every function is performed with daily-increasing feebleness , until at length it is so feeble , that it can no longer resist the physical agents that surround and act upon it ; these physical agents readily extinguish the faint spark of life that remains , and now the working of the machinery ceases , and the cessation of action is death .
And then , the processes of life being at an end , the particles of matter that composed the body are no longer held in union by the tie that bound them : that union is , therefore , instantly subverted ; the physical and chemical agencies of matter immediately come into play , decomposition commences , recombination follows , and thus , in a short time , no trace remains of the organized being ; the particles of matter of which it was composed are resolved into their primitive elements , and these elements , set at liberty , enter into new combinations , and form constituent parts of new beings ; and these new beings , in their
turn , perish , and from their death springs life , and this circle is perpetual . 1 Such is the history of life and death—a history which , in regard to a being like man , would be melancholy if it were the whole ; but it Is not the whole : for , that close observation of nature which has taught us these curious and interesting facts relative to our physical and mental constitution , has likewise put us in possession of other facts , which render the knowledge pf the truth the spurce of our hap *
Untitled Article
58 Dr Southxoood Smith on the
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1833, page 58, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2606/page/58/
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