Page:Humanimmortality00jame.djvu/46

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28
Human Immortality

Add, then, this advantage to the transmission-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 yon 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