The Limits of Evolution/Essay 6

by George Holmes Howison

HUMAN IMMORTALITY: ITS POSITIVE ARGUMENT

WITH REFERENCE TO THE INGERSOLL LECTURE OF PROFESSOR JAMES

In offering you to-night some words on the great question of human immortality, I enjoy the advantage of the interest awakened by the essay of my brilliant friend from Harvard, read a few months ago in this room.^[1] The memory of that noble evening lives with you, I doubt not, still undimmed, and long will live, as it lives and long will live with me. The thoughts then stirred within you, I can count upon as having waked many another of those questions which haunt us concerning the mystery of life; and I may feel assured of your sympathy when I now attempt to renew their current.

I may assume, I judge, that some of you not only felt regarding immortality the difficulties which our guest addressed himself to obviating, but were also conscious of a certain feeling of insufficiency left by the method he took to relieve them. Probably, too, many of you wished, as I did, that we might be supplied in some way with something more positive, something more satisfyingly affirmative, than the mere opening of a chance to pull ourselves together and seize upon immortal life by a tour de force of resolute belief. For this was all that our essayist could achieve by simply replying to objections, though it was no doubt all that he aimed at achieving.

Many others of you, I moreover suspect, wondered in particular if there might not be some course of thought in which that idealistic theory of our existence, suggested by his transmission-view of the functional relation between our conscious experiences and the brain, would be carried up above the region of mere hypothesis into the world of real fact. I mean the theory, that, as Professor James himself expresses it, “the whole universe of material things — the furniture of earth and choir of heaven — should turn out to be a mere surface-veil of phenomena, hiding and keeping back the world of genuine realities; . . . the whole world of natural experience, as we get it, to be but a time-mask, shattering or refracting the one infinite Thought which is the sole reality of those millions of finite streams of consciousness known to us as our private selves.”^[2] This theory, Professor James in his argument presents as a possible supposition merely, and his logical aim is simply to show that the superficially alarming proclamation of physiological psychology, which declares all consciousness to be a function of the brain, cannot exclude the chance for this supposition, nor our rational right to make it if we will. He puts it, indeed, as an imaginative possibility rather than a scientific hypothesis, and gives it great poetic force as well as logical plausibility by his quotation of Shelley’s lines,^[3] —

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

Stains the white radiance of eternity.

“Suppose,” he adds, "that this were really so, and suppose, moreover, that the dome, opaque enough at all times to the full super-solar blaze, could at certain times and places grow less so, and let certain beams pierce through into this sublunary world. . . . 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. . . . Admit now that our brains are such thin 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, . . . even so the genuine matter of reality, the life of souls as it is in its fulness, will break through our several brains into this world in all sorts of restricted forms, and with all the imperfections and queernesses that characterise our finite individualities here below.”^[4]

This ideal theory of the true and real being that hides behind phenomena. Professor James, I repeat, puts forward only as a possible hypothesis, to point and emphasise his contention 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.”^[5] For, on this hypothesis, “our soul’s life, as we here know it, would none the less in literal strictness be the function of the brain.”^[6] And bis object in this contention is to display the pertinent and pointed moral, that “dependence of this sort 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 hereafter.”^[7] So that “in strict logic, then, the fangs of cerebralistic materialism are drawn;” . . . “the fatal consequence is not coercive, the conclusion which materialism draws being due solely to its one-sided way of taking the word ‘function.’”^[8] He points out that it assumes the functional relation of brain to consciousness to be always and solely productive, ignoring the fact that it may just as well be either (1) permissive, i.e. releasing, or (2) transmissive. “My words,” he closes by saying, “ought consequently to exert a releasing function on your hopes. You may believe henceforward, whether you care to profit by the permission or not.”^[9]

Upon this merely permissive conclusion of his argument, this bare opening of room for belief, — to take advantage of which we must summon the courage to risk the belief, and so leave it after all a matter of sheer resolution, — I repeat I can hardly doubt that many of you wondered if this were all that philosophic thought can do for our heart’s desire after light and foothold beyond the grave. You must have wondered if that region of “super-solar blaze” must always remain this blank Perhaps; if that “white radiance of eternity” always must be visible to the poet’s eye alone; or if it might not, rather, by some better philosophic fortune be revealed to clear insight as a reality undeniable, and so our belief in it become the act of intelligence, solid and supported, instead of being an act of that desperate courage which risks all, because not to risk is to perish anyhow.

It is in a hope to meet this query — to show, if possible, the way of raising this ideal hypothesis into fact resting upon positive evidence — that I offer you what follows in this essay.

I

Before entering upon the affirmative argument for the imperishableness of the light that lighteth every man when he cometh into the world, and essaying to prove really his the white radiance of eternity, which by the dome of physical life, however many-coloured, is only stained, let me point out clearly a certain oversight in the otherwise brilliant reasoning by which our guest and essayist would provide a justifiable chance for faith and courage to cast in for immortality — a chance to risk belief without the risk of demonstrable folly. For that, in brief, is what Professor James’s general aim in the philosophical field may be said to be, — to vindicate the exercise of moral and religious faith against the charge of ignorance, unreason, and folly; to make it plain that one is not a fool, even though he do believe out of sheer fealty and loyal will, when once a proved uncertainty leaves him an open chance; and to display this open chance in face of those “results of modern science” which are so often declared adverse to it.

What, then, is the exact “open chance” that Professor James leaves us, in this urgent question of immortality, by his transmission-theory of the function performed by the brain for consciousness? Does the transmission-theory, in strict logic, indeed draw the fangs of cerebralistic materialism? — does it take away the real sting of death? The answer to this question depends on the answer we shall have to give to another — whether the transmission-theory, as managed by Professor James, establishes any chance for the personal immortality of each of us. For the real sting of death is the apprehension in each of us that he may perish in dying; and no hope of the changeless persistence of any eternal “mother sea” of consciousness, Divine or other, can afford us any consolation if this dread of our personal extinction be not set at rest.

Professor James has himself partly realised this critical issue in the case. “Still you will ask,” he says, “in what positive way does this theory help us to realise our immortality in imagination?”^[10] He alludes here to his previous statement, that the transmission-theory implies the “mother sea” of eternal consciousness, in accordance with which Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/347 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/348 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/349 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/350 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/351 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/352 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/353 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/354 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/355 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/356 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/357 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/358 and must therefore, as the only alternative, be acknowledged to be contributions from the mind's pure self-activity.

But when we have reached this conclusive conviction that the roots of our experience and our experimental knowledge are parts of our own spontaneous life, we then readily come to see, further, that the system of our several elements of consciousness a priori is precisely what we must really understand by our unifying or enwholing self, — is exactly what we try to express when we say we have a soul, and that this soul possesses real knowledge; that is, a hold upon eternal things. The realm of the eternal, in short, then becomes for us just the realm of our self-active intelligence; and this it is which, if we can show its reality in detail, will prove to be the clue to our immortal being. So the critical question is, How can the real existence of such a priori consciousness, such genuinely self-active intelligence, be conclusively made out? I have already in a few sentences indicated the general line of this proof, as we inherit it from Kant; but there is now required some fuller account of it, made intelligible and convincing by clear particulars.

Any comprehensive answer to our question would carry us much farther into the fields of critical speculation than I could possibly go in the brief time at our disposal, and certainly much farther than I could hope to have you willingly follow. But fortunately we can argue here ex exemplo. It will be sufficient for our purpose to establish the reality of a single thread of such a priori or self-active knowing. And this it is simplest to do in the case of such a constituent element in our experience as, for instance, Time or Space. For these elements, as we all know, are the “containing” conditions of the whole of our sense-perceptive life; indeed, of the whole physical world, upon whose decay and destructibility all our fears of death, and of extinction through death, are founded. It will be most pertinent, moreover, to confine ourselves to the single element of Time alone, as it is in this that we find nearest at hand the medium of union between the physical and the psychic series in our experience, and thence the means for connecting both with the unity of our real self.

We return, then, to the strict concomitance of the two series, as all that can in exact science be meant by the functional relation between the brain and the sense-perceptive consciousness. And we ask, Must one stop with this mere parallelism of the physical and the psychic? — must we rest in it as an obstinate and impenetrable fact? That we must, is the ordinary dictum of the proclamatory “new” or “objective” or “physiological” psychology — the two “parallel” series are there, and nobody can get beyond the dead fact of their concomitancy! But why not? Surely the concomitance of the two is in Time, and conditioned by Time; that at least is indisputable, is involved in calling the relation concomitance. If it can be shown, now, that Time is no “thing-in-itself,” no thing existing of itself independently of minds, but must be explained as a peculiar form of consciousness, in each of us, that cannot be conceived of as derived from any possible communication ab extra, and consequently must be acknowledged as the expression of our mental self-activity, we shall clearly have connected our empirical consciousness, our varying flood of serial experiences, our states of mind, with our active unit-being, and shall have lodged this our active identity in the eternal world, or order, in the only sense in which such an order of existence can be made intelligible.

I must not delay you with prolonged or intricate proofs that the real nature of Time is such as I have described, though such proofs are indeed numerous and prolific. It is enough for our purposes to-night to call attention, first, to the simple fact that we cannot rationally entertain the proposition that there is, or can be, no Time, — which shows that the consciousness of Time is inseparable from our essential being; in other words, is intrinsic in it. Secondly, let us attend to the more significant fact, that we are conscious of Time as a unity at once absolutely complete and also infinite, and cannot be conscious of it except with these characters, — which shows that it cannot have come to us by transfer or communication. For if it did come in this way, then, in the first place, it must have a history, and a limit of history to date, quite as all else that comes so has; and this would mean that it must be thought as finite in quantity, as well as an incomplete unity capable of increase. And, in the second place, its coming in this heroic fashion is itself unstatable and unthinkable, except in terms of Time itself; and this shows that the pretended empirical explanation requires the preemployment of the thing whose origin it would clear up, — all the light the explanation gives, it borrows from the very thing it pretends to explain.

Time is therefore inevitably brought home to the soul as its real source, and our convinced judgment confesses the consciousness of Time to be a consciousness a priori; that is, an act of the soul, of the individual mind, in the spontaneous unity of its existence. It is seen to be a changeless principle of relation, by which the active-conscious self connects the items of experience into the serial order which we call sequence or succession, and blends the two concomitant series, physical and psychic, into the single whole that expresses the self’s own unity.

So a sufficiently strict interpretation of the modern psychological doctrine, instead of merely making materialism give way, and yield place for a chance and hope that we may be immortal, — instead of simply leaving room for the imperishable eternity of the universal mother sea of Mind, — lays sure the foundations for a certainty that we each belong to the eternal world, not simply to the world of shifting and transient experience. It provides for our selves, for each of them individually, a place in the world not merely of consequences and mediated effects, but of primary and unmediated causes. Hence it gives us assurance that death no more than any other event in experience is our end and close, but that we survive it, ourselves the springs that organise experience. It shows us possessed, intrinsically, of the very roots and sources of perception, not merely of its experienced fact, and so presents us as possessed of power to rise beyond the grave — yes, in and through the very act of death — into new worlds of perception.

Accordingly, it matches the Christian improvement upon the older conception of the future existence — the ascent to the doctrine of “resurrection” or ἀνάστασις, the supplementing of immortality by the exaltation of the “body,” or sense-perceptive life. As ourselves the causal sources of the perceived world and its cosmic order, we are not destined to any colourless life of bare ideas, to “some spectral woof of impalpable abstractions or unearthly ballet of bloodless categories,” but are to go perceptively Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/364 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/365 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/366 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/367 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/368 neither destroy another primary cause nor be destroyed by any. The objector who would open the eternal permanence of the soul to doubt, then, must assail the proofs of a priori knowledge; for so long as these remain free from suspicion, there can be no real question as to what they finally imply. The concomitance of our two streams of experience, the timed stream and the spaced stream, raised from a merely historical into a necessary concomitance by the argument that refers it to the active unity of each soul as its ground, becomes the steadfast sign and visible pledge of the imperishable self-resource of the individual spirit.

IV

We sometimes hear it objected to the foregoing line of proof, that it comes quite short of any immortality which a rational being can value. It can establish nothing, the objectors say, but the indestructible power of staying on, merely in a world of sense-perception.

The objection is pertinent, and would be serious were our a priori consciousness completely summed up in furnishing the conditions sufficient for a world of sense-perception only, and for self-preservative action in such a world. But the objection vanishes as soon as we realise that our argument, properly judged, rests upon the spontaneous character of the organising cognition as a source, not upon what happen to be the contents to which, for brevity’s sake, we have thus far confined our attention in making out the fact of this spontaneous mental life, The truth is, our a priori cognition is not confined to these conditions of mere perception; it goes, on the contrary, and with still clearer evidence, to the region of our guiding ideals — to the True, to the Beautiful, to the Good. These all-controlling ideals are not only the goal of the sense-perceptive or experiencing spirit, but are actively constituent in the soul’s primary being. The same reasoning that leads us to conclude Time, Space, and Causation, the conditions of sense-perceptive life, to be structural in our active primal being, leads quite as unavoidably, and more directly, to the higher conclusion that the three ideals are also structural in it, and still more profoundly. By their very ideality they conclusively refer themselves to our spontaneous life: nothing ideal can be derived from experience, just as nothing experimental is ever ideal.

The worth-imparting ideals, then, are, by virtue of the active and indivisible unity of our person, in an elemental and inseparable union with the root-principles of our perceptive life. Proof of our indestructible sourcefulness for such percipient life is therefore ipso facto proof that these ideals will reign everlastingly in and over that life. Once let us settle that we are inherently capable of everlasting existence, we are then assured of the highest worth of our existence as measured by the ideals of Truth, of Beauty, and of Good, since these and their effectually directive operation in us are insured by their essential and constitutive place in our being.

’Tis but a surface-view of human nature which gives the impression that the argument to immortality from our a priori powers leads to nothing more than bare continuance. What it really leads to, is the continuance of a being whose most intimate nature is found, not in the capacity of sensory life, but in the power of setting and appreciating values, through its still higher power of determining its ideals. For such a nature to continue, is to continue in the gradual development of all that makes for worth.

Not only does this follow from the general fact that all conscious being — at any rate, all human conscious life — takes hold a priori upon worth of every sort, but it can be made still plainer by considering for a moment just what the a priori cognition of Worth is, when taken in its highest aspect — the aspect of good will, or morality. The consciousness of self is intrinsically personal — the consciousness of a society — of being in essential and inseparable relation with other selves.^[11] That a mind is conscious of itself as a self, means at the least that it discriminates itself from others, but therefore that it also refers its own defining conception to others, — is in relation with them, as unquestionably as it is in the relation of differing from them. It cannot even think itself, except in this relatedness to them; cannot at all be, except as a member of a reciprocal society. Thus the logical roots of each mind's very being are exactly this recognition of itself through its recognition of others, and the recognition of others in its very act of recognising itself. Hence moral life is not only primordial in the nature of mind, but what we commonly call a moral consciousness, as if we would thereby divide it permanently from the rest of consciousness, and count this remainder mere knowledge or mere aesthetic discernment as the case may be, turns out to be in fact and in truth the primary logical spring of all other possible consciousness. So profoundly and so immovably is this deepest Fountain of value and worth inseated in our being.

From this fact it follows, and still more clearly, as was just now said, that the barest proof of our simple continuance must in reality carry the proof of that form of life which we reckon the highest expression of worth. To prove continuance, it suffices to display the self as the spontaneous source of perceptions simply. But equally spontaneous is our positing of the Good, the spring of all excellence and worth, by our recognition of the society of minds in our primary act of being conscious of ourselves. Strange elemental paradox, self-affirmation by self-denial, self-denial in self-affirmation! Ego per alteros! — he that findeth his life shall lose it; and he that loseth his life, the same shall find it! And thus the easy argument of exhibiting the least conditions sufficient for experience, so like a simpleton in its seeming clutch at the thin surface of things, carries in its subtle heart the proof of an imperishable persistence in all that gives life meaning and value.

Notes

1. The essay was read before the Berkeley Club of Oakland, California, in April, 1899. Professor James had read his Ingersoll Lecture to the same company in September, 1898.
2. William James: Human Immortality, p. 15 seq. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., 1898.
3. Shelley’s Adonais, stanza lii.
4. Human Immortality, pp. 16, 17.
5. Ibid., p. 15.
6. Ibid., p. 18.
7. Ibid., p. 18.
8. Human Immortality, pp. 18, 19.
9. Ibid., p. 19.
10. Human Immortality, p. 29.
11. See pp. 351 seq., below.