Treatise on Parents and Children
by Bernard Shaw
- Pages
- about 144
- Category
- Philosophy
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 2.6 h at 250 wpm
From the opening
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machine that will last ten years, because it will probably be superseded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.
A short sample. Read the whole book
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