If for example the student turns to such a volume as Newman Smyth's
"Christian Ethics," he will find there a careful though condensed
discussion of the right and wrong of suicide. It is cool, deliberate,
philosophical. But it gives no slightest hint of the real state of the
man who is deliberating within himself whether he will commit suicide
or no; no hint of the real arguments that pass in shadow through his
mind:--the weariness of life which summons him to end all; the nameless,
indefinable dread of the mystery and darkness and night into which death
carries us, which makes him hesitate. If we would really understand the
mind of the suicide, not merely the mind of the philosopher coolly
debating suicide, we must turn to the poet.
"To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 't is a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin! Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourne
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
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