THE PROBLEM OF IMMORTALITY
(Discusses the survival of personality from the moral point of
view: that is, have we any claim upon life, entitling us to live
forever?)
As we explore the deeps of the subconsciousness, our own and other
people's, we find ourselves confronting the strange question: Is it all
our own mind, and that of other living people, or are we by any chance
dealing with the minds of those who are dead? A great many earnest
people, and some very learned people, are fully convinced that the
latter is the case, and we have now to consider their arguments.
When I was a little boy I used to read and hear ghost stories, and would
shudder over them; but I was given to understand that all this was just
imagination, I must not take ghosts seriously, any more than fairies or
dragons or nymphs or satyrs. For an educated person to take ghosts
seriously--well, such a person would be almost as comical as that
supremely comical person, the flying-machine man. Would you believe it,
in those days there actually were people who believed they could learn
to fly in the air, and spent their time manufacturing machines for this
purpose! There was a scientist in Washington who had this "bug," and
built himself a machine and started to fly, and fell into the Potomac
river. We all laughed at him--we laughed so long and so loud that we
killed the poor man; and then, a few years later, somebody took that
machine of Professor Langley's and actually did fly with it! But that
was after I had grown up a bit more, and was not quite so ready to laugh
at an idea because it was new.
I remember vividly my first meeting with a man who believed in ghosts.
He was a Unitarian clergyman, the Reverend Minot J. Savage of New York.
I was sixteen years old, and just breaking out of my theological shell,
and Doctor Savage helped to pry me loose. He was a grave and kindly man,
of great learning and intelligence, and I remember vividly my
consternation when one day he told me--oh, yes, he had seen many ghosts,
he was accustomed to talk with ghosts every now and then. There was no
doubt whatever that ghosts existed!
He told me many stories. I remember one so well that I do not have to go
back to his books to look up the details. It was in the days before the
Atlantic cable, and he had a friend who took a steamer to England. One
night Doctor Savage was awakened and found the ghost of his friend
standing by his bedside. The ship had gone down off the Irish coast, so
the ghost declared, but the friend did not want Doctor Savage to think
that he had suffered from the pangs of drowning; he had been struck on
the left side of the head by a beam of the ship and had been killed
instantly. Doctor Savage wrote down these circumstances and had them
witnessed by a number of people, and two or three weeks later he
received word that the body of his friend had been found on the Irish
coast, with the left side of the head crushed in.
So then, of course, I studied the subject of ghosts. I have studied it
off and on ever since, and have read most of the important new
discoveries and arguments of the psychic researchers. To begin with, I
will mention the contents of two large volumes, Gurney's "Phantasms of
the Living." In this book are narrated many hundreds of cases, of which
Doctor Savage's story is a type. It appears that persons at the moment
of death, or in times of great mental stress, do somehow have the power
to communicate with other people, even at the other side of the world. A
few such cases might be attributed to coincidence or to fraud, but when
you have so many cases, attested in minute detail by so many hundreds of
otherwise honest people, you are not being scientific but simply stupid
if you dismiss the whole subject with contempt.
Gurney discusses the phenomenon and its probable causes. We know, of
course, that hallucinations are among the most common of psychic
phenomenon. Your subconscious mind can be caused to see and hear and
feel anything; likewise it has power to cause you to see and hear and
feel anything. In practically all cases of multiple personality some of
the split-off personalities can cause the others to see and hear and
feel. And the consciousness, you must understand, takes these things to
be just as real as real things; there is no way you can tell an
hallucination from reality--except to ask other people about it. And if
we admit the idea of telepathy, we may say that phantasms are
hallucinations caused by this means; that is, the subconscious mind of
your wife or your mother or your friend who is ill or dying, transmits
to your subconscious mind some vivid impression, which causes your own
subconscious mind to present to your consciousness a perfect image of
that person, walking and talking with you, and your consciousness has no
way of telling but that the image is real.
So much for phantasms of the living. But are there any phantasms of the
dead? Are there any cases in which the time of the appearance can be
proven to be subsequent to the time of death? Even this would not prove
survival, of course; it is perfectly possible that the telepathic
impulse might be delayed in our own minds, it might not flash into
consciousness until our own state of mind made it possible. Can we say
that there are cases in which the facts communicated are such as to
convince us that the person was already dead, and was telling us
something as a dead person and not as a living one?
Before we go into this question, let us clear the ground for the subject
by discussing the survival of personality from a more general
standpoint. What is it that we want to prove? What are the probabilities
of its being true? What would be the consequences of its not being true?
Have we any grounds, other than those of psychic research, for thinking
that it is true, or that it may be true, or that it ought to be true?
What, so to speak, are the morals of the doctrine of immortality?
Well, to begin with, the survival of the soul after death and forever is
one of the principal doctrines of the Christian religion. Many devout
Christians will read this book, and I will seem to them blasphemous when
I say that this argument does not concern me. I count myself one of the
lovers and friends of Jesus, I am presumptuous enough to believe that if
he were on earth, I would understand him and get along with him
excellently; but I do not know any reason why I should believe this,
that, or the other doctrine about life because any religious sect,
founded upon the name of Jesus, commands me so to believe. I see no more
reason for adopting the idea of heaven because it is a Christian idea
than I see for adopting the idea of reincarnation because it is a
precious and holy idea to hundreds of millions of Buddhists. I have some
very good friends who are Theosophists, and are quite convinced of this
idea of reincarnation; that is, that the soul comes back into life over
and over again in many different bodies, thus completing itself and
renewing itself and expiating its sins. My Theosophist friends have a
most elaborate and complicated body of what they consider to be
knowledge on this subject; yet I have to take the liberty of saying that
I cannot see that it has any relation to reality. It seems to me as
completely unproven as any other fairy story, or myth, or legend--for
example, the seven infernos of Dante, and the elaborate and complicated
torments that are suffered there.
But, it will be argued, Jesus rose from the dead, and thus proved the
immortality of the soul. Now, in the first place, there are many learned
investigators who consider there is insufficient evidence for believing
that Jesus ever lived; and certainly if this be so, it will be difficult
to prove that he rose from the dead. Again, it was a common occurrence
for crucified men not to die; sometimes it happened that their guards
allowed them to be spirited away--even nowadays we have known of prison
guards being bribed to allow a prisoner to escape. Again, the events of
the return of Jesus may have been just such psychic phenomena as we are
trying in this chapter to explain. Or, once more, they may have been
purely legends. A very brief study will convince a thinking person that
the people of that time were ready to believe anything, and to accept
facts upon such authority, and to make them the basis for a scientific
conclusion, is simply to be childish.
I shall be told, of course, that it is in the Bible, and therefore it
must be true. The Bible is inspired, you say; and perhaps this is so.
But then, a great deal of other literature is inspired, and that does
not relieve me of the task of comparing these various inspirations, and
judging them, and picking out what is of use to me. The Bible is the
literature of the ancient Hebrews for a couple of thousand years. It
represents what the race mind of a great people for one generation after
another judged worth recording and preserving. You may get an idea what
this means, if you will picture to yourself a large volume of English
literature, containing some Teutonic myths, and the Saxon chronicles,
and the "Morte d'Arthur," and several of Chaucer's stories, and some
Irish fairy tales, and some of Bacon's essays, and Shakespeare's "Venus
and Adonis," and the English prayer book, and the architect's
specifications for Westminster Abbey, and a good part of "Burke's
Peerage"; also Blackstone's "Commentaries," a number of Wesley's hymns,
and Pope's "Essay on Man," and some chapters of Carlyle's "Past and
Present," and Gladstone's speeches, and Blake's poems, and Captain
Cook's story of his voyage around the world, and Southey's "Life of
Nelson," and Morris's "News from Nowhere," and Blatchford's "Merrie
England," and scores of pages from Hansard, which is the equivalent of
our Congressional Record. You may find this description irreverent, but
do not think it is meant so. Do me the honor to get out your Bible and
look it over from this point of view!
But, you say, if we die altogether when we finish this earthly life,
what becomes of moral responsibility and the punishment of sins? What
shall we say to the wicked man to make him be good, if we cannot reward
him with a heaven and frighten him with a hell? Well, my first answer is
that we have been trying this process for a couple of thousand years,
and the results seem to indicate that we might better seek out some
other method of inducing men to behave themselves. They do not believe
so completely in heaven and hell these days, but there were times in
history when they did believe completely, and not merely were the
believers just as cruel, they were just as treacherous and just as
gluttonous and just as drunken. If you want to satisfy yourself on this
point, I refer you to my book "The Profits of Religion," page 129.
Now, as a matter of fact, I think I can discern the outlines of a system
of rewards and punishments automatically working in the life of men. I
am not sure that I can prove that the wicked always get punished and the
virtuous always rewarded; yet, when I stop and think, I am sure that I
would not care to change places with any of the wicked people that I
know in this world. Life may not always be "getting" them, but it has a
way of "getting" their descendants, and I could not be entirely happy if
I knew that my son and his sons were going to share the fate which I now
observe befalling, for example, the grand dukes of Russia and their
children. Life is one thing, and it does not exist for the individual,
but for the race; its causes and effects do not always manifest
themselves in one individual, but in a line of descendants. "Why are
they called dynasties?" asked one of my professors of history; and a
student brought the session to an end by answering: "Because that is
what they always seem to do!"
But this is not perfect justice, you will argue. It is not perfect, from
the point of view of you or me; but then, I ask, what else is there in
the world that is perfect from that point of view? Why should our
justice be any more perfect than, for example, our health or our
thinking or our climate or our government? And, may it not very well be
that our justice is up to us, in precisely the same way that some of
these other things are up to us? Maybe what we have to do is to set to
work to see to it that virtue does always get rewarded and vice does
always get punished, right here and now, instead of waiting for an
omnipotent God to attend to it in some hypothetical heaven.
I find this life of mine very wonderful, and enormously interesting. I
am willing to take it on the terms that it is given, and to try to make
the best of it; and I do not see that I have any right to dictate what
shall be given me in some future life. If my father gives me a Christmas
present, I am happy and grateful; and, of course, if I know that he is
going to give me another present next Christmas, I am still more happy;
but I do not see that I have any right to argue that because he gives me
one Christmas present, he must give me an unlimited number of them, and
I think it would be very ungrateful of me to refuse to thank him for a
Christmas present until I had made sure that I was to get one next time!
Neither do I find myself such a wonderful person that I can assert that
the morality of the universe absolutely depends upon the fact that I am
immortal. Of course, I should like to live forever, and to know all the
wonderful things that are going to happen in the world, and if it is
true that I am so to live, I shall be immensely delighted. But I cannot
say that it _must_ be true, and all I can do is to investigate the
probabilities. On this point my view is stated in a sentence of
Spinoza's: "He who would love God rightly must not desire that God love
him in return."
To sum up, the question of immortality is purely a question of fact. It
is one to be approached in a spirit of open-minded inquiry, entirely
unaffected by hopes or fears or dogmas or moral claims. It is worth
while to get clear that we may be immortal, even though we do not now
know it and cannot now prove it; it is possible that all psychic
research might end in telepathy, and still, when we die, we might wake
up and find ourselves alive. It might possibly be that some of us are
immortal and not all of us. It might be that some parts of us are
immortal and not the rest. It might be that our subconsciousness is
immortal and not our consciousness. It might be that all of us, or some
part of us, survive for a time, but not forever. This last is something
which I myself am inclined to think may be the case.
Also, it seems worthwhile to mention that it is no argument against
immortality that we cannot imagine it, that we cannot picture a universe
consisting of uncountable billions of living souls, or what these souls
would do to pass the time. It may very well be that among these souls
there is no such thing as time. It may be that they are thoroughly
occupied in ways beyond our imagining, or again, that they are not
occupied, and under no necessity of being occupied. Let the person who
presents such arguments begin by picturing to you how the brain cells
manage to store up the uncounted millions of memories which you have,
the thousands of words and combinations of words, and the thoughts which
go with them, musical notes and tunes, colors and odors and visual
impressions, memories of the past and hopes of the future and dreams
that never were. Where are all those hundreds of millions of things, and
what are they like when they are not in our consciousness, and how do
they pass the time, and where were they in the hundreds of millions of
years before we were born, and where will they be in the hundreds of
millions of years of the future? When our wise men can answer these
questions completely, it will be time enough for them to tell us about
the impossibility of immortality.