PERHAPS no belief is more firmly grounded in the minds of men than that death is inevitable and unescapable. If a consensus of opinion were taken as to whether or not death can be escaped from by any one under any possible circumstances, the verdict of the great majority would be that it cannot. If the individuals who expressed this belief were asked to give a reason for their conviction, the answer would in most instances probably be that such had been the fate of mankind in the past, and to their sense it is, therefore, the common heritage of rich and poor, high and low, the just and the unjust, of man and every living thing,—a universal fate.
It is apparent, upon consideration, that this belief in the inevitableness of death is based upon the fact of the great number of times it recurs. When a phenomenon occurs repeatedly and nothing seems to be able to interdict it, the tendency of human reason is to regard it as an invariable, and conclude that it applies to all mankind. The recurrence of phenomena gives ground for the belief in the "uniformity of nature," and this forms a basis of reasoning for various systems of thought. The mere fact of a myriad of recurring instances is not always sufficient, however, to establish a safe basis of reasoning, though there are cases where a single instance bases a universal proposition. This difference in the nature of phenomena is recognized by logicians, and is discussed at some length by John Stuart Mill in his "System of Logic," beginning with page 226. In illustrating the fallacy in some cases of reasoning from a myriad of instances, Mr. Mill says: "Not all the instances which have been observed since the beginning of the world, in support of the general proposition that all crows are black, would be deemed a sufficient presumption of the proof of the proposition, to outweigh the testimony of one unexceptionable witness who should affirm that he had caught and examined a crow and found it to be gray."
Numerous similar instances can be cited. For centuries men believed that the Pillars of Hercules were the western gateway of the world, since to them there was no evidence to the contrary, because, forsooth, no one had disproved the belief by pushing boldly westward, as did Columbus later, and by so doing immensely expanded the horizon of man's mind. The single voyage of Columbus refuted all previous geographical teachings, and caused every map in the world to be revised. Copernicus, by showing that the sun is the center of the solar system, instead of the earth, entirely revolutionized the thoughts of men regarding the solar system, brought order out of chaos, although all the so-called evidence previously known to astronomy gave credence to the old belief. In like manner we recognize at once that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, and the truth of this proposition is as clearly established when once demonstrated as when proved a thousand times, and is a truth equally applicable under all circumstances.
