death is a quite amazing factor when it comes to human nature. Human nature requires that life uses death as an excuse.How to cope with the inevitability and finality of death was one of the more disturbing of the many troubling questions which prompted the writing of 'Foundations'. It also provided the motive for the proposal to establish the Society of HumanKind. The hope which that first founding book creates is that by our own efforts in and through the Society we will gain eternal life for ourselves and for every member of our species. If we are to dedicate ourselves to the achievement of that Aim we must truly believe that it will be realised. The corollary must be an equal conviction that both the dead and the yet to be born are not forever lost to us, a consequence which gives the Treatise on Morality its force.
Adherence to the Society of HumanKind and a sincere commitment to its Aim must mean that we believe the death of an individual to be no more than a transition from one state of existence to another. That assurance may provide some comfort to us when we face our own mortality but it can offer little to help us to cope with the passing of those we love. Death will still irrecoverably separate us from them. The Society will not give its support to any attempt to communicate with the dead. The risks involved for the natural progression of our history, and for the achievement of our Aim are incalculable and therefore unacceptable. We must learn to accept that once we have lost one of our companions to death, they are gone to us for the rest of our lives. The Society and our faith in it may lead us to the confident hope that we will meet them again, and in better circumstances, but we will still have to live without them, and with the pain and distress of their absence.
Much of the pain of death for the living comes from a sense of loss. It marks an end to all the possibilities both for ourselves and for the departed that might have been realised...