All these causes of decay act continually upon our material existence, and contribute to its dissolution. Nature, however, approaches to this much-dreaded period by slow and imperceptible degrees. Day after day is life consuming, and every hour is some one or other of our faculties, or vital principles, perishing before the rest. Death, therefore, is only the last shade in the picture; and it is probable that man suffers a greater change in passing from youth to age, than from age into the grave. In the instant of the formation of the foetus life is as yet nothing, or next to nothing. It extends and acquires consistence and force as the body increases, and as soon as the latter begins to decrease the former decreases also, till its final extinction. As our life begins by degrees, so by degrees it is terminated.
Why, then, be afraid of death, if our lives have been such as not to make us apprehend the consequences of futurity? Why be afraid of that moment which is preceded by an infinity of others of the same kind? Death is as natural as life, and both happen to us in the same manner, without our having the smallest sense or perception of them. If we enquire of those whose office it is to attend the sick and the dying, we shall find, that, except in a very few acute cases, attended with convulsions, people expire quietly, and without the smallest indication of pain. Even when dreadful agonies seem so attend the afflicted, the spectators are rather terrified than the patients tormented; who, having recovered, after the most violent convulsions, possess not the smallest idea of what had passed, or even what they had suffered.
The greatest number of mankind die, therefore, without feeling the fatal stroke; and of the few who retain their senses to the last, there is hardly one, perhaps, who does not entertain the hope of recovery. Nature, for the happiness of man, has rendered this principle more powerful than reason. A person dying of a disorder which he already knows to be incurable, by repeated instances in others, and is now assured that it is so by the tears of his friends, and by the countenance or departure of the physician, is still buoyed up with the idea of getting over it; the opinion of others he considers as a groundless alarm; the hour of dissolution comes; and while every thing else is, as it were dead, hope is still alive and vigorous.