Edited, with an Introduction, by William James. With Portrait. Crown 8vo, $2.00. HUMAN IMMORTALITY. Two Supposed Objec- tions to the Doctrine. i6mo, $1.00. t.
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THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY. 2 vols.
8vo. New York; Henry Holt & Co. 1890. PSYCHOLOGY. Briefer Course. i2mo. New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1892. IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? i8mo. Philadelphia: S. B. Weston, 1305 Arch St. 1896. THE WILL TO BELIEVE, AND OTHER ESSAYS IN POPULAR PHILOSOPHY. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. 1897.
HUMAN IMMORTALITY TWO SUPPOSED OBJECTIONS TO THE DOCTRINE BY WILLIAM JAMES PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY AND INGERSOLL LECTURER FOR 1898 BOSTON AND NEW YORK* HOUGHTON, MIFFLIIsT AND COMPANY 1898 15068 COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY WILLIAM JAMES ALL RIGHTS RESERVED W 5- 1898 of Co^ TWO COPIES RCCEIVED- THE INGERSOLL LECTURESHIP Extract from the will of Miss Caroline Haskell Ingersoll, who died in Keene, County of Cheshire, New Hampshire, Jan, 2b, i8gj.
First. In carrying out the wishes of my late beloved father, George Goldthwait Ingersoll, as declared by him in his last will and testament, I give and bequeath to Harvard University in Cam- bridge, Mass., where my late father was graduated, and which he always held in love and honor, the sum of Five thousand dollars ($5,000) as a fund for the establishment of a Lectureship on a plan some- what similar to that of the Dudleian lecture, that is — one lecture to be delivered each year, on any con- venient day between the last day of May and the first day of December, on this subject, "the Im- mortality of Man," said lecture not to form a part of the usual college course, nor to be delivered by any Professor or Tutor as part of his usual routine of instruction, though any such Professor or Tutor may be appointed to such service. The choice of said lecturer is not to be limited to any one religious denomination, nor to any one profession, but may be that of either clergyman or layman, the appoint- ment to take place at least six months before the delivery of said lecture. The above sum to be safely invested and three fourths of the annual in- terest thereof to be paid to the lecturer for his services and the remaining fourth to be expended in the publishment and gratuitous distribution of the lecture, a copy of which is always to be fur- nished by the lecturer for such purpose. The same lecture to be named and known as " the Ingersoll lecture on the Immortality of Man."
HUMAN IMMORTALITY T is a matter unfortunately too often seen in history to call for much remark, that when a living want of mankind has got itself officially protected and organized in an institution, one of the things which the institution most surely tends to do is to stand in the way of the natural gratification of the want itself. We see this in laws and courts of justice; we see it in ecclesiasticisms; we see it in academies of the fine arts, in the medical and other professions, and we even see it in the universities themselves.
Too often do the place-holders of such institutions frustrate the spiritual purpose to which they were appointed to minister, by the technical light which soon becomes 2 Human Immortality the only light in which they seem able to see the purpose, and the narrow way which is the only way in which they can work in its service.
I confess that I thought of this for a moment when the Corporation of our Uni- versity invited me last spring to give this Ingersoll lecture. Immortality is one of the great spiritual needs of man. The churches have constituted themselves the official guardians of the need, with the re- sult that some of them actually pretend to accord or to withhold it from the individ- ual by their conventional sacraments, — withhold it at least in the only shape in which it can be an object of desire. And now comes the Ingersoll lectureship. Its high-minded founder evidently thought that our University might serve the cause he had at heart more liberally than the churches do, because a university is a body so much less trammeled by traditions and by impossibilities in regard to choice of persons. And yet one of the first things Human Immortality j Human Immortality j which the university does is to appoint a man like him who stands before you, cer- tainly not because he is known as an en- thusiastic messenger of the future life, burning to publish the good tidings to his fellow-men, but apparently because he is a university official.
Thinking in this way, I felt at first as if I ought to decline the appointment. The whole subject of immortal life has its prime roots in personal feeling. I have to con-" fess that my own personal feeling about immortality has never been of the keenest order, and that, among the problems that give my mind solicitude, this one does not take the very foremost place. Yet there are individuals with a real passion for the matter, men and women for whom a life hereafter is a pungent craving, and the thought of it an obsession; and in whom keenness of interest has bred an insight into the relations of the subject that no one less penetrated with the mystery of it can attain. Some of these people are known 4 Human Immortality 4 Human Immortality to me. They are not official personages; they do not speak as the scribes, but as having direct authority. And surely, if anywhere a prophet clad in goatskins, and not a uniformed official, should be called to give inspiration, assurance, and instruction, it would seem to be here, on such a theme. Office, at any rate, ought not to displace spiritual calling.
And yet, in spite of these reflections, which I could not avoid making, I am here to-night, all uninspired and official as I am. I am sure that prophets clad in goatskins, or, to speak less figuratively, lay- men inspired with emotional messages on the subject, will often enough be invited by our Corporation to give the Ingersoll lecture hereafter. Meanwhile, all negative and deadening as the remarks of a mere professional psychologist like myself may be in comparison with the vital lessons they will give, I am sure, upon mature reflec- tion, that those who have the responsibility of administering the Ingersoll foundation Human Immortality 5 Human Immortality 5 are in duty bound to let the most various kinds of official personages take their turn as well. The subject is really an enor- mous subject. At the back of Mr. Alger's ' Critical History of the Doctrine of a Fu- ture Life/ there is a bibliography of more than five thousand titles of books in which it is treated. Our Corporation cannot think only of the single lecture: it must think of the whole series of lectures in futuro. Single lectures, however emotionally in- spired and inspiring they may be, will not be enough. The lectures must remedy each other, so that out of the series there shall emerge a collective literature worthy of the importance of the theme. This unquestionably was what the founder had in mind. He wished the subject to be turned over in all possible aspects, so that at last results might ponderate har- moniously in the true direction. Seen in this long perspective, the Ingersoll foun- dation calls for nothing so much as for minute division of labor. Orators must 6 Human Immortality 6 Human Immortality take their turn, and prophets; but narrow specialists as well. Theologians of every creed, metaphysicians, anthropologists, and psychologists must alternate with biologists and physicists and psychical researchers, — even with mathematicians. If any one of them presents a grain of truth, seen from his point of view, that will remain and accrete with truths brought by the others, his will have been a good appointment.
In the hour that lies before us, then, I shall seek to justify my appointment by offering what seem to me two such grains of truth, two points well fitted, if I am not mistaken, to combine with anything that other lecturers may bring.
These points are both of them in the nature of replies to objections, to difficul- ties which our modern culture finds in the old notion of a life hereafter, — difficulties that I am sure rob the notion of much of its old power to draw belief, in the scien- tifically cultivated circles to which this audience belong.
Human Immortality y Human Immortality y The first of these difficulties is relative to the absolute dependence of our spiritual / life, as we know it here, upon the brain. One hears not only physiologists, but num- bers of laymen who read the popular sci- ence books and magazines, saying all about us, How can we believe in life hereafter when Science has once for all attained to proving, beyond possibility of escape, that our inner life is a function of that fa- mous material, the so-called 'gray mat- ter ' of our cerebral convolutions? How can the function possibly persist after its organ has undergone decay?
Thus physiological psychology is what is supposed to bar the way to the old faith. And it is now as a physiological psychologist that I ask you to look at the question with me a little more closely.
It is indeed true that physiological sci- ence has come to the conclusion cited; and we must confess that in so doing she has only carried out a little farther the common belief of mankind. Every one 8 Human Immortality knows that arrests of brain development occasion imbecility, that blows on the head abolish memory or consciousness, and that brain-stimulants and poisons change the quality of our ideas. The anatomists, physiologists, and pathologists have only shown this generally admitted fact of a dependence to be detailed and minute. What the laboratories and hospitals have lately been teaching us is not only that thought in general is one of the brain's functions, but that the various special forms of thinking are functions of special portions of the brain. When we are think- ing of things seen, it is our occipital convo- lutions that are active; when of things heard, it is a certain portion of our tem- poral lobes; when of things to be spoken, it is one of our frontal convolutions. Pro- fessor Flechsig of Leipzig (who perhaps more than any one may claim to have made the subject his own) considers that in other special convolutions those pro- cesses of association go on, which permit Human Immortality g Human Immortality g the more abstract processes of thought, to take place. I could easily show you these regions if I had here a picture of the brain.1 Moreover, the diminished or exag- gerated associations of what this author calls the KorperfUhlsphdre with the other regions, accounts, according to him, for the complexion of our emotional life, and eventually decides whether one shall be a callous brute or criminal, an unbalanced sentimentalist, or a character accessible to feeling, and yet well poised. Such special opinions may have to be corrected; yet so firmly established do the main positions worked out by the anatomists, physiolo- gists, and pathologists of the brain appear, that the youth of our medical schools are everywhere taught unhesitatingly to be- lieve them. The assurance that observa- tion will go on to establish them ever more and more minutely is the inspirer of all contemporary research. And almost any of our young psychologists will tell you that only a few belated scholastics, or posio Human Immortality sibly some crack-brained theosophist or psychical researcher, can be found hold- ing back, and still talking as if mental phenomena might exist as independent variables in the world.
For the purposes of my argument, now, I wish to adopt this general doctrine as if it were established absolutely, with no possibility of restriction. During this hour I wish you also to accept it as a postulate, whether you think it incontrovertibly es- tablished or not; so I beg you to agree with me to-day in subscribing to the great psycho-physiological formula: Thought is a function of the brain.
The question is, then, Does this doctrine logically compel us to disbelieve in immor- tality? Ought it to force every truly con- sistent thinker to sacrifice his hopes of an hereafter to what he takes to be his duty of accepting all the consequences of a sci- entific truth?
Most persons imbued with what one may call the puritanism of science would feel Human Immortality u themselves bound to answer this question with a yes. If any medically or psycho- logically bred young scientists feel other- wise, it is probably in consequence of that incoherency of mind of which the majority of mankind happily enjoy the privilege. At one hour scientists, at another they are Christians or common men, with the will to live burning hot in their breasts; and, hold- ing thus the two ends of the chain, they are careless of the intermediate connection. But the more radical and uncompromising disciple of science makes the sacrifice, and, sorrowfully or not, according to his tem- perament, submits to giving up his hopes of heaven.2 This, then, is the objection to immortal- ity; and the next thing in order for me is to try to make plain to you why I be- lieve that it Jias in strict logic no deter- rent power. I must show you that the fatal consequence is not coercive, as is com- monly imagined; and that, even though our soul's life (as here below it is revealed to 12 Human Immortality us) may be in literal strictness the function of a brain that perishes, yet it is not at all impossible, but on the contrary quite pos- sible, that the life may still continue when the brain itself is dead.
The supposed impossibility of its contin- uing comes from too superficial a look at the admitted fact of functional dependence. The moment we inquire more closely into the notion of functional dependence, and ask ourselves, for example, how many kinds of functional dependence there may be, we immediately perceive that there is one kind at least that does not exclude a life here- after at all. The fatal conclusion of the physiologist flows from his assuming off- hand another kind of functional depend- ence, and treating it as the only imagina- ble kind.3 When the physiologist who thinks that his science cuts off all hope of immortality pronounces the phrase, " Thought is a function of the brain/' he thinks of the matter just as he thinks when he says, Human Immortality 13 "Steam is a function of the tea-kettle," " Light is a function of the electric cir- cuit," " Power is a function of the moving waterfall.,, In these latter cases the sev- eral material objects have the function of inwardly creating or engendering their effects, and their function must be called productive function. Just so, he thinks, it must be with the brain. Engendering con- sciousness in its interior, much as it engen- ders cholesterin and creatin and carbonic acid, its relation to our soul's life must also be called productive function. Of course, if such production be the function, then when the organ perishes, since the produc- tion can no longer continue, the soul must surely die. Such a conclusion as this is indeed inevitable from that particular con- ception of the facts.4 But in the world of physical nature pro- ductive function of this sort is not the only kind of function with which we are familiar. We have also releasing or per- missive function; and we have transmis- sive function.
14 Human Immortality The trigger of a crossbow has a releas- ing function: it removes the obstacle that holds the string, and lets the bow fly back to its natural shape. So when the hammer falls upon a detonating compound. By knocking out the inner molecular obstruc- tions, it lets the constituent gases resume their normal bulk, and so permits the ex- plosion to take place.
In the case of a colored glass, a prism, or a refracting lens, we have transmissive function. The energy of light, no mat- ter how produced, is by the glass sifted and limited in color, and by the lens or prism determined to a certain path and shape. Similarly, the keys of an organ have only a transmissive function. They open successively the various pipes and let the wind in the air-chest escape in various ways. The voices of the various pipes are constituted by the columns of air trembling as they emerge. But the air is not engen- dered in the organ. The organ proper, as distinguished from its air-chest, is only an Human Immortality 15 apparatus for letting portions of it loose upon the world in these peculiarly limited shapes.
My thesis now is this: that, when we think of the law that thought is a function of the brain, we are not required to think of productive function only; we are entitled also to consider permissive or transmissive function. And this the ordinary psycho- physiologist leaves out of his account.
Suppose, for example, that the whole uni- verse of material things — the furniture of earth and choir of heaven — should turn out to be a mere surface-veil of pheno- mena, hiding and keeping back the world of genuine realities. Such a supposition is foreign neither to common sense nor to philosophy. Common sense believes in realities behind the veil even too supersti- tiously; and idealistic philosophy declares the whole world of natural experience, as we get it, to be but a time-mask, shatter- ing or refracting the one infinite Thought which is the sole reality into those millions 1 6 Human Immortality of finite streams of consciousness known to us as our private selves.
" Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, Stains the white radiance of eternity."
Suppose, now, that this were really so, and suppose, moreover, that the dome, opaque enough at all times to the full su- per-solar blaze, could at certain times and places grow less so, and let certain beams pierce through into this sublunary world. These beams would be so many finite rays, so to speak, of consciousness, and they would vary in quantity and quality as the opacity varied in degree. Only at particular times and places would it seem that, as a matter of fact, the veil of nature can grow thin and rupturable enough for such effects to occur. But in those places gleams, however finite and unsatisfying, of the absolute life of the universe, are from time to time vouchsafed. Glows of feeling, glimpses of insight, and streams of knowledge and perception float into our finite world.
Admit now that our brains are such thin Human Immortality 17 and half - transparent places in the veil. What will happen? Why, as the white radiance comes through the dome, with all sorts of staining and distortion imprinted on it by the glass, or as the air now comes through my glottis determined and limited in its force and quality of its vibrations by the peculiarities of those vocal chords which form its gate of egress and shape it into my personal voice, even so the genuine matter of reality, the life of souls as it is in its fullness, will break through our sev- eral brains into this world in all sorts of restricted forms, and with all the imperfec- tions and queernesses that characterize our finite individualities here below.
According to the state in which the brain finds itself, the barrier of its obstruc- tiveness may also be supposed to rise or fall. It sinks so low, when the brain is in full activity, that a comparative flood of spiritual energy pours over. At other times, only such occasional waves of thought as heavy sleep permits get by. And when 1 8 Human Immortality I finally a brain stops acting altogether, or decays, that special stream of conscious- ness which it subserved will vanish entirely from this natural world. But the sphere of being that supplied the consciousness would still be intact; and in that more real world with which, even whilst here, it was continuous, the consciousness might, in ways unknown to us, continue still.
You see that, on all these suppositions, our soul's life, as we here know it, would none the less in literal strictness be the function of the brain. The brain would be the independent variable, the mind would vary dependency on it. But such dependence on the brain for this natural life would in no wise make immortal life impossible, — it might be quite compatible with supernatural life behind the veil here- after.
As I said, then, the fatal consequence is not coercive, the conclusion which mate- rialism draws being due solely to its one- sided way of taking the word 'function.'
Human Immortality ig And, whether we care or not for immortal- ity in itself, we ought, as mere critics doing police duty among the vagaries of man- kind, to insist on the illogicality of a denial based on the flat ignoring of a palpable alternative. How much more ought we to insist, as lovers of truth, when the denial is that of such a vital hope of mankind!
In strict logic, then, the fangs of cere- bralistic materialism are drawn. My words ought consequently already to exert a re- leasing function on your hopes. You may believe henceforward, whether you care to profit by the permission or not. But, as this is a very abstract argument, I think it will help its effect to say a word or two about the more concrete conditions of the case.
All abstract hypotheses sound unreal; and the abstract notion that our brains are colored lenses in the wall of nature, admit- ting light from the super-solar source, but at the same time tingeing and restricting it, has a thoroughly fantastic sound. What 20 Human Immortality is it, you may ask, but a foolish metaphor? And how can such a function be ima- gined? Is n't the common materialistic notion vastly simpler? Is not conscious- ness really more comparable to a sort of steam, or perfume, or electricity, or nerve- glow, generated on the spot in its own peculiar vessel? Is it not more rigorously scientific to treat the brain's function as function of production?
The immediate reply is, that, if we are talking of science positively understood, function can mean nothing more than bare concomitant variation. When the brain- activities change in one way, conscious- ness changes in another; when the cur- rents pour through the occipital lobes, consciousness sees things; when through the lower frontal region, consciousness says things to itself; when they stop, she goes to sleep, etc. In strict science, we can only write down the bare fact of con- comitance; and all talk about either pro- duction or transmission, as the mode of Human Immortality 21 taking place, is pure superadded hypothe- sis, and metaphysical hypothesis at that, for we can frame no more notion of the details on the one alternative than on the other. Ask for any indication of the exact process either of transmission or of production, and Science confesses her imagination to be bankrupt. She has, so far, not the least glimmer of a conjecture or suggestion, — not even a bad verbal metaphor or pun to offer. Ignoramus, ignorabimus, is what most physiologists, in the words of one of their number, will say here. The production of such a thing as consciousness in the brain, they will reply with the late Berlin professor of physio- logy, is the absolute world-enigma, — some- thing so paradoxical and abnormal as to be a stumbling block to Nature, and almost a self-contradiction. Into the mode of pro- duction of steam in a tea-kettle we have conjectural insight, for the terms that change are physically homogeneous one with another, and we can easily imagine 22 Human Immortality the case to consist of nothing but altera- tions of molecular motion. But in the production of consciousness by the brain, the terms are heterogeneous natures alto- gether; and as far as our understanding goes, it is as great a miracle as if we said, Thought is ' spontaneously generated/ or ' created out of nothing.'
The theory of production is therefore not a jot more simple or credible in itself than any other conceivable theory. It is only a little more popular. All that one need do, therefore, if the ordinary materi- alist should challenge one to explain how the brain can be an organ for limiting and determining to a certain form a conscious- ness elsewhere produced, is to retort with a tu quoque, asking him in turn to ex- plain how it can be an organ for producing consciousness out of whole cloth. For polemic purposes, the two theories are thus exactly on a par.
But if we consider the theory of trans- mission in a wider way, we see that it has Human Immortality 23 certain positive superiorities, quite apart from its connection with the immortality question.
Just how the process of transmission may be carried on, is indeed unimagina- ble; but the outer relations, so to speak, of the process, encourage our belief. Con- sciousness in this process does not have to be generated de novo in a vast number of places. It exists already, behind thej scenes, coeval with the world. The trans- mission-theory not only avoids in this way multiplying miracles, but it puts itself in touch with general idealistic philosophy better than the production-theory does. It should always be reckoned a good thing when science and philosophy thus meet.5 It puts itself also in touch with the con- ception of a ' threshold/ — a word with which, since Fechner wrote his book called ' Esychophysik/ the so-called ' new Psycho- logy 9 has rung. Fechner imagines as the condition of consciousness a certain kind of psycho-physical movement, as he terms 24 Human Immortality it. Before consciousness can come, a cer- tain degree of activity in the movement must be reached. This requisite degree is called the ' threshold; ' but the height of the threshold varies under different cir- cumstances: it may rise or fall. When it falls, as in states of great lucidity, we grow conscious of things of which we should be unconscious at other times; when it rises, as in drowsiness, conscious- ness sinks in amount. This rising and lowering of a psycho - physical threshold exactly conforms to our notion of a per- manent obstruction to the transmission of consciousness, which obstruction may, in our brains, grow alternately greater or less.6 The transmission-theory also puts itself in touch with a whole class of experi- ences that are with difficulty explained by the production-theory. I refer to those ob- scure and exceptional phenomena reported at all times throughout human history, which the ' psychical - researchers/ with Human Immortality 25 Mr. Frederic Myers at their head, are do- ing so much to rehabilitate;7 such phe- nomena, namely, as religious conversions, providential leadings in answer to prayer, instantaneous healings, premonitions, ap- paritions at time of death, clairvoyant vi- sions or impressions, and the whole range of mediumistic capacities, to say nothing of still more exceptional and incomprehen- sible things. If all our human thought be a function of the brain, then of course, if any of these things are facts, — and to my own mind some of them are facts, — we may not suppose that they can occur without preliminary brain-action. But the ordinary production-theory of consciousness is knit up with a peculiar notion of how brain- action can occur, — that notion being that all brain-action, without exception, is due to a prior action, immediate or remote, of the bodily sense-organs on the brain. Such action makes the brain produce sensations and mental images, and out of the sensations and images the higher forms of thought and 26 Human Immortality knowledge in their turn are framed. As transmissionists, we also must admit this to be the condition of all our usual thought. Sense-action is what lowers the brain-bar- rier. My voice and aspect, for instance, strike upon your ears and eyes; your brain thereupon becomes more pervious, and an awareness on your part of what I say and who I am slips into this world from the world behind the veil. But, in the mys- terious phenomena to which I allude, it is often hard to see where the sense-organs can come in. A medium, for example, will show knowledge of his sitter's private af- fairs which it seems impossible he should have acquired through sight or hearing, or inference therefrom. Or you will have an apparition of some one who is now dying hundreds of miles away. On the produc- tion - theory one does not see from what sensations such odd bits of knowledge are produced. On the transmission - theory, they don't have to be 'produced/ — they exist ready-made in the transcendental Human Immortality 27 world, and all that is needed is an abnor- mal lowering of the brain-threshold to let them through. In cases of conversion, in providential leadings, sudden mental heal- ings, etc., it seems to the subjects them- selves of the experience as if a power from without, quite different from the ordi- nary action of the senses or of the sense- led mind, came into their life, as if the latter suddenly opened into that greater life in which it has its source. The word ' influx/ used in Swedenborgian circles, well describes this impression of new insight, or new willingness, sweeping over us like a tide. All such experiences, quite para- doxical and meaningless on the production- theory, fall very naturally into place on the other theory. We need only suppose] the continuity of our consciousness with a mother sea, to allow for exceptional waves occasionally pouring over the dam. Of course the causes of these odd lowerings of the brain's threshold still remain a mys- tery on any terms.
28 Human Immortality