What is Death?

What is death? Augusta W. Fletcher, M. D., in the Other World and This explains:

Death, then, has taken nothing from the laboratory of nature; it simply takes up the elements that life has left, and arranges for another form of life. Thus, her resources are never exhausted. The equipoise is always maintained, the supply is equal to the demand, and nothing is either lost or gained in the world of material, during all the cycles of time. The wisest man in the world does not have the power of destroying a single element, but may change its form and displace the arrangement; for what is is, has been and always will be.

I hold in my hand a piece of wood; the elements constituting the wood are held in bondage and do not have the power of acting independently of each other. I cast the bit of wood into the flame and watch it being slowly consumed thereby. When this process is completed, have I destroyed the wood? As a piece of wood, yes; but the elements that constituted it, and were enslaved, are set free by the action of combustion, and they start out on a higher career than that which marked their former existence. Destroyed? No. Changed, uplifted, set free? Yes. From this example, it will be seen that, through the law of evolution, death becomes a stepping stone of life, and that throughout all the physical universe these great processes have enabled this and all other planets to arrive at their present state of development, and will be the power whereby still mightier results shall be obtained. The ordinary mind will not grasp easily, or accept readily, the law of evolution. Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall and Spencer are all personalities which the unthinking fear; whose hands have, with the wand of truth, during the present century, destroyed so many idols and temples. These men, great and wise as they are, and in whose praise too much cannot be said, have only taken one side of the subject. They have reasoned logically as far as they have gone, but have not completed the journey. They have all led up to human life; they have begun from the lowest point, have journeyed far and wide, until they reached man, and then stopped. That science that can read the story of the stars, the history of the planet upon which you stand, analyse the drop of water, aye, the very air you breathe, stands before the grave with closed eyes and sealed lips, without the ability to take one single step over its threshold into the future. But science, in the age that is to come, must cross this threshold and penetrate into the depths of the life beyond, so that the spiritual world shall be as logically understood as are the more material planets that make up the system.

Mankind today is looking toward science to solve the problem which, in earlier days, was relegated to ecclesiastical judges. Even the church, after preaching immortality for centuries, and assuming that man never dies, is endeavouring to find proof of its assertion entirely outside its own province. Science can, when it recognises the spiritual side of life, easily accomplish this great purpose for the world, by remembering that the spirit is first; that matter is only a means of its expression; that this planet, this material world, is but the instrument in the hands of the spiritual world; that every blade of grass, every singing bird, and every human being, is but an expression of the same forces, differing in degree of unfoldment, but, through the action of the law of evolution, forever creeping along the pathway of progress to the ultimate, which is but the turning point of a newer and greater destiny. In man, we find the realisation of matter and spirit. Without spirit, matter is expressionless and void; with spirit, it takes its place among the mighty realities of the world, guiding, shaping and in influencing the destiny of all things and all persons that are responsive to it.

During the younger years of life, the spirit is gaining possession of its machine; during the latter years, they work in harmony with each other, and the best work of life is accomplished between the years of twenty-five and fifty. In that time, in most cases, the spirit has become responsive to higher attractions than the earth offers, and the subsequent years, be they few or many, are passed in the effort of the spirit to gradually relieve itself from physical environments, so as to take on the higher spiritual ones, for which the experiences of life have finally fitted it, and when death comes it is simply the completion of a process which has been going on for a long time.

Encyclopaedia of Death and Life in the Spirit World