Life and Death

The soul is immortal; death is the separation of soul from body, and philosophy is preparation for that release.

Life is the activity of self-nutrition and growth; the soul is the form of the living body, not a separable substance.

Death is nothing to us; the soul is mortal, composed of atoms that scatter at death.

Death is natural and necessary; the wise man accepts it as part of the rational order of the cosmos.

Death entered the world through sin; the body dies, but the soul faces judgment and the hope of resurrection.

The soul as the form of the body naturally survives death; the resurrection of the body completes what philosophy can only partially explain.

To philosophize is to learn to die; but nature itself, not philosophy, teaches us how to face death when it comes.

The body is a machine; life is a mechanical process, and only the rational soul distinguishes man from automata.

Consciousness accompanies life at every level; the evolutionary continuity of living things does not reduce mind to mechanism.

A death drive operates alongside the life drive; the organism's deepest tendency is to return to the inorganic state from which it arose.