EUTHANASIA. From The Spectator. physicians do take it upon themselves to shorten the lives of their patients by administering narcotics which, while immediately relieving pain, have ultimately the effect of hastening death. We are disposed, while not pretending to any special knowledge on the subject, to traverse the fact, to doubt whether pain is not, in the long run, and it is this that the physician has to consider more destructive of life than antidotes of pain. And further, though this should be proved not to be the case, we are not in the least bound to all the logical consequences of medical practice. The physician, working as he does under the condition of a knowledge necessarily limited, has the simple duty before him of doing the best that he can for the present. If he sees that the only office left for his art to perform is to alleviate pain, to that office he addresses himself with all his energy and skill. Even supposing that he does in carrying out this object diminish by two or three the number of days which his patient has to live, he is but resorting to one of the compromises, so to speak, of which our life is so full. There are innumerable cases which may possibly and even probably happen to any of us, in which we do, are justified in doing, are even compelled to do, something which has the ultimate effect of shortening our lives. A journalist, to take an instance close at hand, may have to overtask his brain by writing an article on some pressing subject that occurs at the last moment, on which, not to claim credit for any higher motive, he must write if he would not seriously injure his paper. The man who does this in all probability shortens his life, yet no one would blame him for doing it, no one would wish to push him into what may seem and may really be the logical consequences of his act. In fact, he does, as all of us ought to do, his duty in the present, and lets the future take care of itself. IN a recently published volume, the author of an essay entitled Euthanasia maintains with considerable ingenuity the thesis that it is lawful and even expedient to put an end to the life which is manifestly doomed to the sufferings of incurable disease. It is a thesis which has been often defended, and sometimes carried into frequent practice, as, for instance, in Rome under the Empire, before Christian ethics had asserted their supremacy, and when an unparalleled luxury had made men impatient of pain without destroying the old Roman fortitude and contempt of death. The arguments that may be urged in its favour are only too obvious and forcible. It is impossible to exaggerate, or even to describe, the horror, as it seems, the useless and purposeless horror, of suffering, which art has it in its power to terminate in a moment by a painless stroke. The long agony of cancer, with its tortures that overcome even the most manly fortitude in the sufferer, and all those shocking accompaniments which occasionally tax the devotion of relatives and friends; the unutterably painful symptoms, often observed in the last stage of dropsy, when the patient begins to look with hatred and suspicion upon those whom, while he was yet himself, he has most loved and trusted; such scenes have a rhetoric which is only too powerful. Not a few of those who read these words will have known sick men who have begged with a heartrending earnestness to be rescued from inevitably impending pain; to some the thought that it would be as well to listen to such prayers will have suggested itself, however speedily they may have dismissed it as disloyal to duty and faith. Press us closely with these considerations, and we confess to a terrible perplexity; but it is the same perplexity which we feel when we look at the whole subject of pain, and at other difficulties of life, at evil, at the perpetual, unanswerable problem of death. There is, it seems to us, but one clue to guide us out of these labyrinths, and that is the belief in a Divine Order, of which we see, and must be content to see, only a portion infinitesimally small. Meanwhile, there is one argument used by the author of Euthanasia with which, as possessing at first sight a certain cogency, we may deal at once. He says that, as a matter of fact, It is not difficult to find, without quitting the platform of expediency and the public safety, strong reasons for declining to accept the proposal of Euthanasia. It is not without good cause that both the medical profession and the laity would stand aghast at the thought that it should be "the recognized duty of the medical attendant, whenever so desired by the patient, to put the sufferer to a quick and painless death," so great would be the danger that such a practice would be abused, so terrible would be the suspicions of possible abuse that it would be certain to evoke. "All needful precautions" might be adopted, means might be "taken strife had been introduced? The fact is that there is but one safe rule in this matter, and that is to prolong life to the utmost of our power. There may be cases in which to follow it seems to inflict useless suffering on the individual, but the dangers and difficulties which attend any departure from it are so great that the public safety demands its strict enforcement. to establish, beyond the possibility of can imagine them self-sacrificing enough doubt or question, that the remedy was to submit, and that without a murmur, applied at the express wish of the pa- for a murmur would be too cruel to the tient;" still you could not but be impos- sufferer, to the fatal resolution which deing on patient, on physician, and on friends stroys their prospects. But let the case a responsibility that would be absolutely be reversed. If he dies at once, his wealth intolerable. A sick man, his temper irri- is theirs: if his life is prolonged, it goes to tated, his will enfeebled by suffering, is others. It is needless to dwell on the incalled upon to make in a matter confess-tolerable perplexities which would arise. edly of supreme importance an irrevocable | If the feuds which spring from the succesdecision. The Roman followers of the sion to property are now so fierce, what practice commonly avoided, indeed, this would they be when this new element of aggravation of its terror. When, for instance the poet Silius Italicus, "worn out by the weariness of an incurable disease," resolved, in accordance with a common custom at the time, "to put an end to his life by abstaining from food," he had it in his power, had his resolution failed him, to recall his act. But imagine the horror of the situation, if by some accident and such an accident would not surely be impossible the sufferer should not lose And the weightier considerations menconsciousness at once, and finding his tioned before remain. "The above recourage fail, as the courage of suicides marks," observes the author of Euthanasia, often does fail, at the felt approach of towards the conclusion of his essay, "leave death, were vainly to beg for the life untouched all questions of recompense which it would be then impossible to re- and adjustment hereafter." The subject store! Then there is the physician. It cannot, we feel, be discussed without may be said that you degrade from a touching these questions. The old belief healer to an executioner. That point, that "a man may not quit his post except however, need not be pressed; but it is at the bidding of his commander " may certain that you call upon him to renounce be a "commonplace," as our speculative the noblest aspiration of his art, which philosopher of Birmingham tells us it is, at least proposes to itself the ideal of a but it seems to us the expression of a power which no disease shall resist. When is he to say, "This malady is incurable"? We have spoken of cancer as confessedly the most hopeless, as it is the most painful of diseases; yet medical science has never abandoned the hope of finding a remedy even for cancer. Such a remedy may yet be discovered, and discovered, it is possible to conceive, at such a time as to save some life of inestimable value to the world, which would have been lost had men agreed to accept the proposal of Euthanasia. And then look at the case of the friends, at the complications, to take but one instance, which would arise out of such a practice as connected with the succession to property. There is the case, and such cases are not impossible or even uncommon, where the prolongation of a sick man's life means affluence or poverty to those about him. If he lives, say, for a month, he, and they as his heirs, becomes entitled to vast wealth. Yet we noble and far-seeing wisdom. Those who tell us "there is no such commander, your belief that he is waging a battle with evil, and that he will win the victory in the end, is a delusion," have terribly cogent arguments at hand. What can we say, for instance, when they point to some fine intellect ruined, just as it is in the height of its promise, by some miserable accident, changed, for the rest of life, into a mere brutal, or worse than brutal, instinct, when they ask, “What do you think of this soldier at his post? Need we care at all whether he leaves it or no?" We only know that every day, in actual war, waste as purposeless is going on, and yet that in the end skill and courage, and, as we hope, justice do prevail; we only believe that as it is amidst all the confusions of human purposes and actions, so it is also in the Divine Order which overrules them all. From The Spectator. man though of these too in their proper place Professor De Morgan was never unmindON Thursday last, at Kensal Green, was ful, spending the greatest care on teaching buried a man of very rare intellectual the art of rapid and accurate computation, power and force of character, one of no less than on the true science of numthose who mould the mind and more or ber. His exposition of the theory of limits less profoundly strike the imagination of from the very earliest stage in which it almost all submitted to their influence. entered into algebraical conceptions was so The late Professor De Morgan was an masterly and exhaustive, that it haunted original and very learned mathematician, his pupils in the logical tangle of their but merely as a mathematician he may later lives, and helped many a have had equals, and for anything the through the puzzle of Dr. Mansel's conunpresent writer knows to the contrary, drum-making as to "the Infinite" in his even superiors, among the English mathe- "Limits of Religious Thought." Indeed, maticians of his day. He was not the Professor De Morgan really managed to Senior Wrangler of his year, not we be- make his pupils realize that they knew lieve, higher than fourth wrangler; but nothing at all about either zero or infinity, that speaks little as to his real rank as except as short phrases for what is remathematician, for it is usually the neat- spectively smaller or larger than any est and swiftest, not the most powerful assignable quantity, however small or minds which carry off the highest honours large; and that to treat either zero or in competitive examinations. And Pro- infinity as magnitudes, even to the extent fessor De Morgan's mind was hardly either of supposing that all zeros are equal, and neat or swift. The grasp and clearness all infinities equal, is a delusion utterly and force of his intellect were far more fatal to the science of mathematical inferremarkable than either its dexterity or ences. No pupil of Professor De Morgan's rapidity. The late Sir William Hamilton who ever fairly grasped the logical proof Edinburgh, who had a sharp controversy cesses of his Double Algebra or Differenwith him on logical matters and hardly tial and Integral Calculus, and still less, understood his opponent, once described perhaps, who had followed him through him as "profound in mathematics, curious his searching and often humorous analysis in logic, and wholly deficient in architect- of the metaphysical basis of the “Theory onic power," a description in which the of Probabilities," ever yet failed to find only element of real truth was aimed at the substance of his lectures recurring that somewhat awkward arrangement of constantly and most usefully to mind in his materials by which Professor De Mor- the course of the intellectual controversies gan not unfrequently disguised from the of later years. Mr. De Morgan was no world the massiveness, the precision, and mere teacher of mathematics. His classes the depth of his own powers. Great were training-schools in intellectual selfarchitectonic power he unquestionably knowledge, logical discipline, and the had, though not artistic power as a mathe- theory of evidence, such as mathematical matical architect, for the truth is, that classes very rarely were before; indeed he buttressed the structures of his mathe- comparatively few even of those who have matical arches so strongly that the effect had the advantage of his books and his was sometimes clumsy, though the bridge training have succeeded in reaching anyonce raised was never shaken in the mind thing like the same standard of robust of his pupils. There was a touch of un- logical efficiency since. For giving clearwieldiness about his presentation of intel-ness, subtlety, and strength to the reasonlectual problems, especially in his books, ing faculties, no discipline like that of and this unwieldiness of manner rendered Professor De Morgan's classes has ever them less popular than works containing been surpassed in any University. Of less than half their learning and much less Mr. De Morgan's absolute eminence as a than half their thinking power. The pub- mathematician, of the additions he has lication of his " Arithmetic," a book which made to mathematical knowledge, — the has not unnaturally been much more use- present writer is not competent to speak. ful to masters than to scholars, began a Of course, he stood very high. We susnew era in the history of elementary arith- pect, however, that his greatness would be metical teaching in England, - devoting, estimated by the highest English matheas all his books did, far more space and maticians to consist more in his contribulabour to the logical processes by which tions to the philosophy of mathematics, the various rules are demonstrated than than in the successful manipulation of its to the more technical parts of the subject, instruments of calculation. In other search. words, we suspect that he would be ad- broadly ludicrous which gave him so judged to have done more in clearing up strong an appreciation of the humour of and testing the logical methods of mathe- Dickens. The humourous turns of his matical reasoning, than in applying its thought, the great gambols of his masmachinery to new departments of re- sive mind,- were often so abrupt as to betray that Mr. De Morgan's humour was the product of lonely mental operations, for it had none of that easy, gradual shading off into common conversation which marks the humour of social life. The following, which occurs in one of his notes on 66 But great as Professor De Morgan was as a mathematician and a logician, his "Formal Logic," in spite of Sir William Hamilton's attack, holds its ground as a great addition to logical science, the originality of his character was at least as the paradox of the celebrated "symparemarkable as the originality of his intel- thetic" powder, falsely, he thinks, attriblect. He was a man almost quaintly uted to Sir Kenelm Digby,- the powder attached to all his professional habits, so supposed to cure by being put on the punctual and so uniform in his doings sword which inflicted the wound, instead that his return from his college classes of on the wound, is a fair specimen of served as the best of time-pieces to ob- the humour of this Budget":- "The servant students. Often, like Dr. Johnson, sympathetic powder was that which cured he might be seen in a brown study ticking by anointing the weapon with its salve off every five or six railings with con- instead of the wound. I have long been scientious punctuality, never missing the convinced that it was efficacious. The right multiple, as he passed along the directions were to keep the wound clean railed enclosure of University College. He was so early at his work of correcting the students' exercises before his nine o'clock class that, according to popular rumour, no man had ever yet succeeded in reaching the College at an hour when the Professor's chair was empty, and it was sometimes wildly asserted that he came overnight. The tradition, how far true we do not know, was that he disliked the vacation, and felt lost without his usual duties. Certainly he never willingly gave a holiday, and we cannot remember that for many years together his health ever compelled him to give one. and cool, and to take care of diet, rubbing the salve on the knife or sword. If we remember the dreadful notions upon drugs which prevailed, both as to quantity and quality, we shall readily see that any way of not dressing the wound would have been useful. If the physicians had taken the hint, had been careful of diet, &c., and had poured the little barrels of medicine down the throat of a practicable doll, they would have had their magical cures as well as the surgeons. Matters are much improved now; the quantity of medicine given, even by orthodox physicians, would have been called infinitesimal by their professional Yet in spite of this deep instinct of ancestors. Accordingly, the College of habit, in Professor De Morgan, as in Dr. Physicians has a right to abandon its motJohnson, originality of character was as to, which is Ars longa, vita brevis,' meannotable as his attachment to definite ing Practice is long, so life is short.'" Or grooves of action. He was incapable of take this, as indicating the kind of sagacbeing anything but himself, and he had ity for which his life-long study of mathnot a self which society could modify. ematical measure had made Mr. De MorHis intellectual life was lonely, though his gan remarkable,—the reconstruction of affections were deep and his regard for common maxims so as to come much old friends extremely tenacious. To those nearer to the true drift at which their popwho were not of his own standing in life, ular form only vaguely pointed. He was to his pupils, he was always benignant, commenting on the common assertion that but on extra-mathematical subjects a little "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing," constrained. There was something sud- which he denied, but substituted for it, den about his humour, which,-like every-"A person with small knowledge is in thing about him, his learning, his sagacity, danger of trying to make his little do the his common-sense, was huge, but some- work of more; but a person without any times puzzling to those who did not know is in danger of making his no knowledge his ways. His "Budget of Paradoxes," do the work of some," of which he propublished in 1863-5, and again in 1866 in the duced many most amusing instances from Athenæum, was curiously characteristic of his personal knowledge of paradoxmongers. his wonderful antiquarian learning, his Yet even to these,- for quacks many, pergreat sagacity, his shrewdness of reflec- haps most, of them were,- Mr. De Morgan tion on human ways, and that turn for the was scrupulously fair. His moral weights and measures were as accurate as his in- quaint sagacity, and of a grotesque hutellectual. He bore witness, evidently mour. with pleasure, in describing the intellectual Perhaps even in consequence of his powcrazes with which men were afflicted who erful grasp of the principles of exact had no knowledge or little knowledge on measure and of the difficulties in applying the subjects on which they professed to those principles, Mr. De Morgan was never be discoverers, that they were not mer- one of those incredulous mathematicians cenary; "they are very earnest people, who depreciate the force of evidence which and their purpose is bonâ fide in the dis- they cannot accurately weigh. He was semination of their paradoxes. A great fond of asking how any one who really many, the mass, indeed, are illiterate, and believes that every little particle in the a great many waste their means and are earth is tugging away at every little parin, or approaching, penury. But I must ticle in fixed stars so distant from the say that never in any one instance has the earth that their light takes thousands of quadrature of the circle, or the like, been years to travel here, and vice versa, can made a pretext for begging, even to be suppose anything whatever not in contraasked to purchase a book is of rare occur- diction with the world's best-sifted knowlrence." Few who knew Professor De edge to be really incredible. And he was Morgan would have called him exactly an sometimes charged, not very justly we imaginative man; and perhaps his imagin- believe, with being even credulous, because ative gifts were principally of that kind he gave a certain amount of extremely which are useful to realize vigorously to reserved and very carefully limited crescore deep on the mind-the precise in- dence to certain abnormal phenomena, tellectual conditions of any case under which, whether true or false, he believed consideration; but this sort of imagination he had tested carefully and with the prohe had in a high degree, and that, too, not unfrequently in matters half intellectual, half moral. In his note on that grim religious paradox of Pascal's addressed to the wisdom of being a believer lest, if God exist, you should be punished for not believing, while if the sceptics are right and Christians wrong, there will be no punishment for having believed falsely,- or as Pascal expressed it, "not to wager that God exists, is in fact to wager that he does not exist," Mr. De Morgan translated the notion at the bottom of this argument that you are bound to hedge carefully as On all matters of faith, Professor De to your spiritual prospects, into language Morgan was quaintly reticent, acting on of quite Dantesque force of imagination what seems to us the rather too elaborate as well as mathematical precision: and somewhat old-world conception that "Leaving Pascal's argument," he says, "to as professions of faith conduce unfairly to make its way with a person who, being a worldly success, he would rather be acsceptic, is yet positive that the issue is sal- counted a sceptic falsely and lose by it, vation or perdition, if a God there be, than be known as a Christian and gain by for the case as put by Pascal requires this, it. Everyone knows how strong a line he -I shall merely observe that a person took when he believed, as we believed, who elects to believe in God, as the best that University College had deviated from chance of gain, is not one who, according its professed principle of not taking into to Pascal's creed, or any other worth account religious creed and position at all, naming, will really secure that gain. I in refusing to elect to the Professorship wonder whether Pascal's curious imagination ever presented to him in sleep his convert, in the future state, shaken out of a red-hot dice-box upon a red-hot hazardtable, as perhaps he might have been, if Dante had been the later of the two." A judicious selection from Professor De Morgan's Budget of Paradoxes" would be a very characteristic memorial of him, as well as a book full of curious learning, of fessional acuteness of a mind always on the alert against both fraud and illusion. He may, no doubt, have missed some necessary intellectual safeguard in testing these phenomena, and have given the cautiously limited credence he did give, erroneously. But no one can read his own account of the guarantees against deception which he either really took or fully believed that he had taken, without being struck by the curious subtlety and sagacity with which he had endeavoured to provide against deception. of Mental and Moral Philosophy one of on |