Add, then, this advantage to the trans- mission-theory, — an advantage which I am well aware that some of you will not rate very high, — and also add the advantage of not conflicting with a life hereafter, and I hope you will agree with me that it has many points of superiority to the more familiar theory. It is a theory which, in the history of opinion on such matters, has never been wholly left out of account, though never developed at any great length. In the great orthodox philosophic tradition, the body is treated as an essential condition to the soul's life in this world of sense; but after death, it is said, the soul is set free, and becomes a purely intellectual and non- appetitive being. Kant expresses this idea in terms that come singularly close to those of our transmission-theory. The death of the body, he says, may indeed be the end of the sensational use of our mind, but only the beginning of the intellectual use. " The body," he continues, " would thus be, not the cause of our thinking, but merely a Human Immortality 29 condition restrictive thereof, and, although essential to our sensuous and animal con- sciousness, it may be regarded as an im- peder of our pure spiritual life.8 And in a recent book of great suggestiveness and power, less well-known as yet than it de- serves, — I mean ' Riddles of the Sphinx/ by Mr. F. C. S. Schiller of Oxford, late of Cornell University, — the transmission- j theory is defended at some length.9 But still, you will ask, in what positive way does this theory help us to realize our immortality in imagination? What we all wish to keep is just these individual restric- tions, these selfsame tendencies and pecu- liarities that define us to ourselves and oth- ers, and constitute our identity, so called. Our finitenesses and limitations seem to be our personal essence; and when the finiting organ drops away, and our several spirits revert to their original source and resume their unrestricted condition, will they then be anything like those sweet streams of feeling which we know, and which even now So Human Immortality our brains are sifting out from the great reservoir for our enjoyment here below? Such questions are truly living questions, and surely they must be seriously discussed by future lecturers upon this Ingersoll foundation. I hope, for my part, that more than one such lecturer will penetratingly discuss the conditions of our immortal- ity, and tell us how much we may lose, and how much we may possibly gain, if its finiting outlines should be changed? If all determination is negation, as the phi- losophers say, it might well prove that the loss of some of the particular determina- tions which the brain imposes would not appear a matter for such absolute regret.
But into these higher and more tran- scendental matters I refuse to enter upon this occasion; and I proceed, during the remainder of the hour, to treat of my sec- ond point. Fragmentary and negative it is, as my first one has been. Yet, between them, they do give to our belief in immor- tality a freer wing.
Human Immortality 31 My second point is relative to the in- credible and intolerable number of beings which, with our modern imagination, we must believe to be immortal, if immortal- ity be true. I cannot but suspect that this, too, is a stumbling-block to many of my present audience. And it is a stum- bling-block which I should thoroughly like to clear away.
It is, I fancy, a stumbling-block of alto- gether modern origin, due to the strain upon the quantitative imagination which recent scientific theories, and the moral feelings consequent upon them, have brought in their train.
For our ancestors the world was a small, and — compared with our modern sense of it — a comparatively snug affair. Six thousand years at most it had lasted. In its history a few particular human he- roes, kings, ecclesiarchs, and saints stood forth very prominent, overshadowing the imagination with their claims and merits, so that not only they, but all who were j?2 Human Immortality associated familiarly with them, shone with a glamour which even the Almighty, it was supposed, must recognize and respect. pThese prominent personages and their as- sociates were the nucleus of the immortal group; the minor heroes and saints of minor sects came next, and people with- out distinction formed a sort of background and filling in. The whole scene of eter- nity (so far, at least, as Heaven and not the nether place was concerned in it) never struck to the believer's fancy as an overwhelmingly large or inconveniently crowded stage. One might call this an aristocratic view of immortality; the im- mortals — I speak of Heaven exclusively, for an immortality of torment need not now concern us — were always an elite, a ^select and manageable number.
But, with our own generation, an entirely new quantitative imagination has swept over our western world. The theory of evolution now requires us to suppose a far vaster scale of times, spaces, and numbers Human Immortality 33 than our forefathers ever dreamed the cos- mic process to involve. Human history grows continuously out of animal history, and goes back possibly even to the tertiary epoch. From this there has emerged in- sensibly a democratic view, instead of the old aristocratic view, of immortality. For our minds, though in one sense they may have grown a little cynical, in another they have been made sympathetic by the evolu- tionary perspective. Bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh are these half -brutish pre- historic brothers. Girdled about with the immense darkness of this mysterious uni- verse even as we are, they were born and died, suffered and struggled. Given over to fearful crime and passion, plunged in the blackest ignorance, preyed upon by hide- ous and grotesque delusions, yet steadfastly serving the profoundest of ideals in their fixed faith that existence in any form is better than non-existence, they ever res- cued trimphantly from the jaws of ever-im- minent destruction the torch of life, which, 34 Human Immortality thanks to them, now lights the world for us. How small indeed seem individ- ual distinctions when we look back on these overwhelming numbers of human beings panting and straining under the pressure of that vital want! And how inessential in the eyes of God must be the small surplus of the individual's merit, swamped as it is in the vast ocean of the common merit of mankind, dumbly and undauntedly doing the fundamental duty and living the heroic life! We grow hum- ble and reverent as we contemplate the prodigious spectacle. Not our differences and distinctions, — we feel — no, but our common animal essence of patience under suffering and enduring effort must be what redeems us in the Deity's sight. An im- mense compassion and kinship fill the heart. An immortality from which these inconceivable billions of fellow - strivers should be excluded becomes an irrational idea for us. That our superiority in per- sonal refinement or in religious creed Human Immortality 35 should constitute a difference between our- selves and our messmates at life's banquet, fit to entail such a consequential difference of destiny as eternal life for us, and for them torment hereafter, or death with the beasts that perish, is a notion too absurd | to be considered serious. Nay, more, the very beasts themselves — the wild ones at any rate — are leading the heroic life at all times. And a modern mind, ex-j panded as some minds are by cosmic emo-! tion, by the great evolutionist vision of universal continuity, hesitates to draw the line even at man. If any creature lives forever, why not all? — why not the pa- tient brutes? So that a faith in immortal- ity, if we are to indulge it, demands of us nowadays a scale of representation so stu- pendous that our imagination faints before it, and our personal feelings refuse to rise up and face the task. The supposition we are swept along to is too vast, and, rather than face the conclusion, we abandon the premise from which it starts. We give up 36 Human Immortality our own immortality sooner than believe that all the hosts of Hottentots and Aus- tralians that have been, and shall ever be, should share it with us in secula seculorum. Life is a good thing on a reasonably copi- ous scale; but the very heavens themselves, and the cosmic times and spaces, would stand aghast, we think, at the notion of preserving eternally such an ever-swelling plethora and glut of it.
Having myself, as a recipient of modern scientific culture, gone through a subjec- tive experience like this, I feel sure that it must also have been the experience of many, perhaps of most, of you who listen to my words. But I have also come to see that it harbors a tremendous fallacy; and, since the noting of the fallacy has set my own mind free again, I have felt that one service I might render to my listeners to- night would be to point out where it lies.
It is the most obvious fallacy in the world, and the only wonder is that all the world should not see through it. It is the Human Immortality 37 result of nothing but an invincible blind- ness from which we suffer, an insensibility ■ to the inner significance of alien lives, and a conceit that would project our own inca- pacity into the vast cosmos, and measure the wants of the Absolute by our own puny needs. Our christian ancestors dealt with the problem more easily than we do. We, indeed, lack sympathy; but they had a positive antipathy for these alien human creatures, and they nai'vely supposed the Deity to have the antipathy, too. Being, as they were, 'heathen/ our forefathers felt a certain sort of joy in thinking that their Creator made them as so much mere fuel for the fires of hell. Our culture has humanized us beyond that point, but we cannot yet conceive them as our com- rades in the fields of heaven. We have, as the phrase goes, no use for them, and it oppresses us to think of their survival. Take, for instance, all the Chinamen.""! Which of you here, my friends, sees any fitness in their eternal perpetuation unre- 38 Human Immortality duced in numbers? Surely not one of you. At most, you might deem it well to keep a few chosen specimens alive to represent an interesting and peculiar variety of human- ity; but as for the rest, what comes in such surpassing numbers, and what you can only imagine in this abstract summary collective manner, must be something of which the units, you are sure, can have no individual preciousness. God himself, you - think, can have no use for them. An im- mortality of every separate specimen must be to him and to the universe as indiges- tible a load to carry as it is to you. So, engulfing the whole subject in a sort of mental giddiness and nausea, you drift along, first doubting that the mass can be immortal, then losing all assurance in the immortality of your own particular person, precious as you all the while feel and real- \_ize the latter to be. This, I am sure, is the attitude of mind of some of you before me.
But is not such an attitude due to the Human Immortality 59 veriest lack and dearth of your imagina- tion? You take these swarms of alien kinsmen as they are for you: an external picture painted on your retina, represent- ing a crowd oppressive by its vastness and confusion. As they are for you, so you think they positively and absolutely are. / feel no call for them, you say; therefore there is no call for them. But all the while, beyond this externality which is your way of realizing them, they realize themselves with the acutest internality, with the most violent thrills of life. 'Tis you who are dead, stone-dead and blind and senseless, in your way of looking on. You open your eyes upon a scene of which you miss the whole significance. Each of these grotesque or even repulsive aliens is animated by an inner joy of living as hot or hotter than that which you feel beating in your private breast. The sun rises and beauty beams to light his path. To miss the inner joy of him, as Stevenson says, is to miss the whole of him.10 Not a being 40 Human Immortality of the countless throng is there whose con- tinued life is not called for, and called for intensely, by the consciousness that ani- mates the being's form. That you neither realize nor understand nor call for it, that you have no use for it, is an absolutely irrelevant circumstance. That you have a saturation-point of interest tells us no* thing of the interests that absolutely are. I The Universe, with every living entity which her resources create, creates at the same time a call for that entity, and an appetite for its continuance, — creates it, if nowhere else, at least within the heart of the entity itself. It is absurd to suppose, simply because our private power of sym- pathetic vibration with other lives gives out so soon, that in the heart of infinite being itself there can be such a thing as plethora, or glut, or supersaturation. It is not as if there were a bounded room where the minds in possession had to move up or make place and crowd together to accommodate new occupants. Each new Human Immortality 41 mind brings its own edition of the universe of space along with it, its own room to in- habit; and these spaces never crowd each other, — the space of my imagination, for example, in no way interferes with yours. The amount of possible consciousness seems to be governed by no law analogous to that of the so-called conservation of en- ergy in the material world. When one man wakes up, or one is born, another does not have to go to sleep, or die, in order to keep the consciousness of the universe a ^constant quantity. Professor Wundt, in fact, in his 'System of Philosophy/ has formulated a law of the universe which he calls the law of increase of spiritual en- ergy, and which he expressly opposes to the law of conservation of energy in physi- W cal things.11 There seems no formal limit to the positive increase of being in spir- itual respects; and since spiritual being, whenever it comes, affirms itself, expands and craves continuance, we may justly and literally say, regardless of the defects of 42 Human Immortality our own private sympathy, that the supply of individual life in the universe can never possibly, however immeasurable it may become, exceed the demand. The de- mand for that supply is there the moment the supply itself comes into being, for the beings supplied demand their own con- tinuance.
I speak, you see, from the point of view of all the other individual beings, real- izing and enjoying inwardly their own ex- istence. If we are pantheists, we can stop there. We need, then, only say that through them, as through so many diver- sified channels of expression, the eternal * Spirit of the Universe affirms and realizes its own infinite life. But if we are theists, we can go farther without altering the result. God, we can then say, has so in- exhaustible a capacity for love that his call and need is for a literally endless accu- mulation of created lives. He can never faint or grow weary, as we should, under the increasing supply. His scale is infinite Human Immortality 43 in all things. His sympathy can never know satiety or glut.
I hope now that you agree with me that the tiresomeness of an over - peopled Heaven is a purely subjective and illusory notion, a sign of human incapacity, a rem- nant of the old narrow-hearted aristocratic j creed. " Revere the Maker, lift thine eye up to his style and manners of the sky," and you will believe that this is indeed a democratic universe, in which your paltry exclusions play no regulative part. Was your taste consulted in the peopling of this globe? How, then, should it be consulted as to the peopling of the vast City of God? Let us put our hand over our mouth, like Job, and be thankful that in our personal littleness we ourselves are here at all. The Deity that suffers us, we may be sure, can suffer many another queer and won- drous and only half-delightful thing.
For my own part, then, so far as logic goes, I am willing that every leaf that ever grew in this world's forests and rustled in 44 Human Immortality the breeze should become immortal. It is purely a question of fact: are the leaves so, or not? Abstract quantity, and the ab- stract needlessness in our eyes of so much reduplication of things so much alike, have ^no connection with the subject. For big- ness and number and generic similarity are only manners of our finite way of think- ing; and, considered in itself and apart from our imagination, one scale of dimen- sions and of numbers for the Universe is no more miraculous or inconceivable than another, the moment you grant to a uni- verse the liberty to be at all, in place of the Non-entity that might conceivably have I reigned.
The heart of being can have no exclu- sions akin to those which our poor little hearts set up. The inner significance of other lives exceeds all our powers of sym- pathy and insight. If we feel a signifi- cance in our own life which would lead us spontaneously to claim its perpetuity, let us be at least tolerant of like claims made Human Immortality 45 by other lives, however numerous, however unideal they may seem to us to be. Let us at any rate not decide adversely on our own claim, whose grounds we feel directly, because we cannot decide favorably on the alien claims, whose grounds we cannot feel at all. That would be letting blindness lay down the law to sight.
NOTES NOTES Note i, page 9. The gaps between the centres first recognized as motor and sensory — gaps which form in man two thirds of the surface of the hemispheres — are thus positively interpreted by Flechsig as intellectual centres strictly so called. [Compare his Gehirn und Seele, 2te Ausgabe, 1896, p. 23.] They have, he considers, a common type of microscopic struc- ture; and the fibres connected with them are a month later in gaining their medullary sheath than are the fibres connected with the other centres. When disordered, they are the starting-point of the insanities, properly so called. Already Wernicke had defined insanity as disease of the organ of asso- ciation, without so definitely pretending to circum- scribe the latter — compare his Grundriss der Psy- chiatrte, 1894.jp. 7. Flechsig goes so far as to say that he finds a difference of symptoms in general par- alytics according as their frontal or their more poste- rior association-centres are diseased. Where it is 48 Notes 48 Notes the frontal centres, the patient's consciousness of self is more deranged than is his perception of purely- objective relations. Where the posterior associa- tive regions suffer, it is rather the patient's system of objective ideas that undergoes disintegration (Joe. tit. pp. 89-91). In rodents Flechsig thinks there is a complete absence of association-centres, — the sensory centres touch each other. In car- nivora and the lower monkeys the latter centres still exceed the association - centres in volume. Only in the katarhinal apes do we begin to find anything like the human type (p. 84).
In his little pamphlet, Die Grenzen geis tiger Gesundheit und Krankheit, Leipzig, 1896, Flech- sig ascribes the moral insensibility which is found in certain criminals to a diminution of internal pain-feeling due to degeneration of the 'Korper- fuhlsphare,' that extensive anterior region first so named by Munk, in which he lays the seat of all the emotions and of the consciousness of self \Gehirn und Seele, pp. 62-68; die Grenzen, etc., pp. 31-39, 48]. — I give these references to Flechsig for concreteness' sake, not because his views are irreversibly made out.
Note 2, page n.
Note 2, page n.
So widespread is this conclusion in positivistic circles, so abundantly is it expressed in conversa- Notes 49 tion, and so frequently implied in things that are written, that I confess that my surprise was great when I came to look into books for a passage explicitly denying immortality on physiological grounds, which I might quote to make my text more concrete. I was unable to find anything blunt and distinct enough to serve. I looked through all the books that would naturally suggest themselves, with no effect; and I vainly asked vari- ous psychological colleagues. And yet I should al- most have been ready to take oath that I had read several such passages of the most categoric sort within the last decade. Very likely this is a false impression, and it may be with this opinion as with many others. The atmosphere is full of them; many a writer's pages logically presuppose and involve them; yet, if you wish to refer a student to an express and radical statement that he may employ as a text to comment on, you find almost nothing that will do. In the present case there are plenty of passages in which, in a general way, mind is said to be conterminous with brain-func- tion, but hardly one in which the author thereupon explicitly denies the possibility of immortality. The best one I have found is perhaps this: " Not only consciousness, but every stirring of life, de- pends on functions that go out like a flame when nourishment is cut off...The phenomena of 50 Notes consciousness correspond, element for element, to the operations of special parts of the brain...The destruction of any piece of the apparatus in- volves the loss of some one or other of the vital operations; and the consequence is that, as far as life extends, we have before us only an organic function, not a Ding-an-sich, or an expression of that imaginary entity the Soul. This fundamental proposition...carries with it the denial of the immortality of the soul, since, where no soul exists, its mortality or immortality cannot be raised as a question...The function fills its time, — the flame illuminates and therein gives out its whole being. That is all; and verily that is enough...Sensation has its definite organic conditions, and, as these decay with the natural decay of life, it is quite impossible for a mind accustomed to deal with realities to suppose any capacity of sensation as surviving when the machinery of our natural existence has stopped." \_E. Duhring: der Werth des Lebensy 3d edition, pp. 48, 168.]
Note 3, page 12.
Note 3, page 12.
The philosophically instructed reader will notice that I have all along been placing myself at the ordinary dualistic point of view of natural science and of common sense. From this point of view mental facts like feelings are made of one kind of I i Notes 51 stuff or substance, physical facts of another. An absolute phenomenism, not believing such a dual- ism to be ultimate, may possibly end by solving some of the problems that are insoluble when pro- pounded in dualistic terms. Meanwhile, since the physiological objection to immortality has arisen on the ordinary dualistic plane of thought, and since absolute phenomenism has as yet said nothing articulate enough to count about the matter, it is proper that my reply to the objection should be expressed in dualistic terms — leaving me free, of course, on any later occasion to make an attempt, if I wish, to transcend them and use different cate- gories.
Now, on the dualistic assumption, one cannot see more than two really different sorts of dependence of our mind on our brain: Either (1) The brain brings into being the very stuff of consciousness of which our mind consists; or else 4 (2) Consciousness preexists as an entity, and the various brains give to it its various special forms.
If supposition 2 be the true one, and the stuff of mind preexists, there are, again, only two ways of conceiving that our brain confers upon it the spe- cifically human form. It may exist (a) In disseminated particles; and then our brains are organs of concentration, organs for combining 52 Notes and massing these into resultant minds of personal form. Or it may exist (b) In vaster unities (absolute 6 world- soul/ or something less); and then our brains are organs for separating it into parts and giving them finite form.
There are thus three possible theories of the brain's function, and no more. We may name them, severally, — i. The theory of production; 2a. The theory of combination; 2b. The theory of separation.
In the text of the lecture, theory number 2b (spe- cified more particularly as the transmission-theory) is defended against theory number i. Theory 2#, otherwise known as the mind-dust or mind-stuff theory, is left entirely unnoticed for lack of time. I also leave it uncriticised in these notes, having already considered it, as fully as the so-far pub- lished forms of it may seem to call for, in my work, The Principles of Psychology, New York, Holt & Co., 1892, chapter VI. I may say here, however, that Professor W. K. Clifford, one of the ablest champions of the combination-theory, and originator of the useful term ' mind-stuff,' considers that theory incompatible with individual immortal- ity, and in his review of Stewart's and T ait's book, The Unseen Universe, thus expresses his convic- tion: — Notes 55 " The laws connecting consciousness with changes in the brain are very definite and precise, and their necessary consequences are not to be evaded...Consciousness is a complex thing made up of ele- ments, a stream of feelings. The action of the brain is also a complex thing made up of elements, a stream of nerve-messages. For every feeling in consciousness there is at the same time a nerve- message in the brain...Consciousness is not a simple thing, but a complex; it is the combination of feelings into a stream. It exists at the same time with the combination of nerve-messages into a stream. If individual feeling always goes with individual nerve-message, if combination or stream of feelings always goes with stream of nerve-mes- sages, does it not follow that, when the stream of nerve-messages is broken up, the stream of feelings will be broken up also, will no longer form a con- sciousness? Does it not follow that, when the mes- sages themselves are broken up, the individual feel- ings will be resolved into still simpler elements? The force of this evidence is not to be weakened by any number of spiritual bodies. Inexorable facts connect our consciousness with this body that we know; and that not merely as a whole, but the parts of it are connected severally with parts of our brain-action. If there is any similar connection with a spiritual body, it only follows that the spirit- 54 Notes ual body must die at the same time with the natu- ral one." [Lectures and Essays, vol. i. p. 247-49. Compare also passages of similar purport in vol. ii. pp. 65-70.]
Note 4, page 13.
The theory of production, or materialistic the- ory, seldom ventures to formulate itself very dis- tinctly. Perhaps the following passage from Ca- banis is as explicit as anything one can find: —