Luck or Cunning? - Samuel Butler - Bog

In brief, there is nothing in life of which there are not germs, and, so to speak, harmonics in death, and nothing in death of which germs and harmonics may not be found in life. Each emphasizes what the other passes over most lightly--each carries to its extreme conceivable development that which in the other is only sketched in by a faint suggestion--but neither has any feature rigorously special to itself. Granted that death is a greater new departure in an organism's life, than any since that congeries of births and deaths to which the name embryonic stages is commonly given, still it is a new departure of the same essential character as any other-- that is to say, though there be much new there is much, not to say more, old along with it. We shrink from it as from any other change to the unknown, and also perhaps from an instinctive sense that the fear of death is a sine qua non for physical and moral progress, but the fear is like all else in life, a substantial thing which, if its foundations be dug about, is found to rest on a superstitious basis.