A Treatise on Parents and Children

Childhood is a stage in the process of that continual remanufacture of / the Life Stuff by which the human race is perpetuated. The Life Force / either will not or cannot achieve immortality except in very low / organisms: indeed it is by no means ascertained that even the amoeba is / immortal. Human beings visibly wear out, though they last longer than / their friends the dogs. Turtles, parrots, and elephants are believed to / be capable of outliving the memory of the oldest human inhabitant. But / the fact that new ones are born conclusively proves that they are not / immortal. Do away with death and you do away with the need for birth: in / fact if you went on breeding, you would finally have to kill old people / to make room for young ones.

Now death is not necessarily a failure of energy on the part of the Life / Force. People with no imagination try to make things which will last for / ever, and even want to live for ever themselves. But the intelligently / imaginative man knows very well that it is waste of labor to make a / machine that will last ten years, because it will probably be superseded / in half that time by an improved machine answering the same purpose. / He also knows that if some devil were to convince us that our dream / of personal immortality is no dream but a hard fact, such a shriek of / despair would go up from the human race as no other conceivable horror / could provoke. With all our perverse nonsense as to John Smith living / for a thousand million eons and for ever after, we die voluntarily, / knowing that it is time for us to be scrapped, to be remanufactured, to / come back, as Wordsworth divined, trailing ever brightening clouds of / glory. We must all be born again, and yet again and again. We should / like to live a little longer just as we should like 50 pounds: that is, / we should take it if we could get it for nothing; but that sort of idle / liking is not will. It is amazing -- considering the way we talk -- how / little a man will do to get 50 pounds: all the 50-pound notes I have / ever known of have been more easily earned than a laborious sixpence; / but the difficulty of inducing a man to make any serious effort to / obtain 50 pounds is nothing to the difficulty of inducing him to make a / serious effort to keep alive. The moment he sees death approach, he gets / into bed and sends for a doctor. He knows very well at the back of / his conscience that he is rather a poor job and had better be / remanufactured.