The chances of surviving death

Kngersoll Hectares on SmmortaUtg

Immortality and the New Theodicy. By
George A. Gordon. 1896.

Human Immortality. Two supposed Objections
to the Doctrine. By William James. 1897.

Dionysos and Immortality: By Benjamin Ide
Wheeler. 1898.

The Conception of Immortality. By Josiah
Royce. 1899.

Life Everlasting. By John Fiske. 1900.

Science and Immortality. By Wm. Osier. 1904.

The Endless Life. By S. M. Crothers. 1005.

Individuality and Immortality. By Wilhelm
Ostwald. 1906.

The Hope of Immortality. By C. F. Dole. 1907.

Buddhism and Immortality. By William S.
Bigelow. 1908.

Is Immortality Desirable? By G. Lowes
Dickinson. 1909.

Egyptian Conceptions of Immortality. By
George A. Reisner. 1911.

Intimations of Immortality in the Sonnets
of Shakespeare. By George H. Palmer. 1912.

Metempsychosis. By George Foot Moore. 1914.

Pagan Ideas of Immortality During the Early
Roman Empire. By C. H. Moore. 1918.

Living Again. By Charles Reynolds Brown. 1920.

Immortality and Theism. ByW.W.Fenn. 1921.

Immortality and the Modern Mind. By Kirsopp
Lake. 1922.

The Christian Faith and Eternal Life. By
George E. Horr. 1923.

The SenIiE of Immortality. By Philip Cabot.
1924. |

Immortality in Post-Kantian Idealism. By
Edgar S. Brightman. 1925.

The Immortality of Man. By G. Kruger. 1926.

Spiritual Values and Eternal Life. By Harry
Emerson Fosdick. 1927.

The Meaning of Selfhood and Faith in Immor¬
tality. By Eugene William Lyman. 1928.

Man’s Consciousness of Immortality. By W.
Douglas Mackenzie. 1929.

The Idea of Immortality and Western Civili¬
zation. By Robert A. Falconer. 1930.

Immortality and the Present Mood. By Julius
Seelye Bixler. 1931.

The Chances of Surviving Death. By Wm.
Pepperell Montague. 1932.

Immortality and the Cosmic Process. By
Shailer Mathews. 1933.

THE CHANCES
OF SURVIVING DEATH

LONDON : HUMPHREY MILFORD

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

B D
j £ T5 L i

TEbe flngersoll Xecture, 1032

THE CHANCES
OF SURVIVING DEATH

BY

WM. PEPPERELL MONTAGUE

PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN BARNARD COLLEGE
COLUMBLV UNIVERSITY

CAMBRIDGE

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

I 934

scmool^'JSt

at CLA-A min

(3<a l if-ofn »<■

COPYRIGHT, I934

BY THE PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF
HARVARD COLLEGE

PRINTED AT THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U. S. A.

TO THE MEMORY OF

R. P. C. M.

THE INGERSOLL LECTURESHIP

Extract from the will of Miss Caroline Haskell Ingersoll, who died in
Keene, County of Cheshire, New Hampshire, Jan. 26,1883

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 Cambridge, 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 Lecture¬
ship on a plan somewhat similar to that of the Dudleian
lecture, that is — one lecture to be delivered each year,
on any convenient 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 in¬
struction, 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 appointment to take place at
least six months before the delivery of said lecture. . . .
The same lecture to be named and known as “the
Ingersoll lecture on the Immortality of Man.”

_

THE CHANCES
OF SURVIVING DEATH

—-- —

THE CHANCES
OF SURVIVING DEATH

I

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IMMORTALITY AND
THE HOLLOWNESS OF ITS
SUBSTITUTES

B ELIEF in the immortality of the
I soul is probably less widely held
today than at any time in history.
Taken as a matter of course in primitive
culture, cherished as an all-important
article of faith by the great religions, and
clung to as a vague hope by many who
could not subscribe formally to any
creed, the belief in survival has now been
abandoned by a decisive majority of
those who are often referred to as intel¬
lectuals.

When a hope of this kind is aban¬
doned there are always compensations

4

THE CHANCES

to be discovered or concocted, for men do
not willingly accept mere disillusionment
and defeat. The usual tactic is to dis¬
parage the thing that we cannot get.
Aesop’s fox was very human in charac¬
terizing the unattainable grapes as sour.
And so today we hear frequent and fer¬
vent depreciations of the personal sur¬
vival of death. Is it not grotesque to
think of John Doe, for example, with his
nagging wife and squabbling children
living on forever and ever? Such small
significance as his life may have is bound
up with its very local and temporal set¬
ting. It had better be “rounded by a
sleep,” for to think of it as continuing
without end is like imagining a rather
poor chromo infinitely extended in space
and not thereby improved. And even for
ourselves the prospect of endless living
may be envisaged not merely as a bore
but as a nightmare from which there
could be no waking nor any sort of sur-

OF SURVIVING DEATH 5

cease. Life, we are told, is like a play —
it should have a beginning, a middle, and
an end. Its best in the way of signifi¬
cance and poignancy is derived from its
finitude.

All this is well enough if it brings
solace to those who have lost their zest
for life as well as any hope of its possible
continuance. But we should not allow
ourselves to be frightened by caricature.
And the notion of a continuing life as a
kind of sleepless monotony or as like the
condition of a man deprived of his eye¬
lids and exposed to the sun through end¬
less days is a caricature of life as we find
it or can imagine it; for life’s grateful
rhythms and cumulative hierarchies of
successively more embracing purposes,
with their alternations of novelty and
familiar repetitions, are of life’s very es¬
sence and need no terminus to make
them sweet. The nightmare of an eter¬
nity of unwinking monotony may serve

6

THE CHANCES

as an antidote to the other nightmare of
eternal annihilation; but to praise obliv¬
ion as the only alternative to intoler¬
able ennui is the mistake of a tired fancy.

If we turn from the current deprecia¬
tions of immortality to the substitutes
that are offered, we immediately enter a
more cheerful domain. The conviction
that the quality of a life rather than its
quantity is what should count is one very
good and ancient substitute, which, how¬
ever, is no substitute at all; for if a life is
made, as it can be made, regardless of its
. length, high and fine in quality, there is
more rather than less reason for grief at
its destruction. Again, the phrase “to
live in hearts we leave below is not to
die” may console us somewhat for the
death of friends; and the prospect for
ourselves of posthumous recognition may
clothe our vanity with a kind of solemn
pathos. But we must realize that poster¬
ity has a short and increasingly crowded

OF SURVIVING DEATH

7

memory, and that for most of us this
pseudo-immortality is as fitful and haz¬
ardous as it is vicarious.

Best of all the substitutes for personal
survival is the survival of the causes
which we espouse and to which our deeds
and their consequences contribute. A
sure road to happiness is that of the ex-
travert who wisely hitches his little
wagon to some star of his fancy and so
makes his own the larger and more en¬
during life of his family, his country or
religion, his guild or party, or even an
uninstitutionalized and quite private
movement for the achievement of ideals
of truth or beauty or goodness which
may appeal to him as of supreme im¬
portance. These causes usually outlast
the individuals who serve them, and de¬
votion to them does more to rob death
of its sting than anything else can do.

But just here with this best of all sub¬
stitutes we must remind the happy ex-

8

THE CHANCES

travert of a very grim and unescapable
fact. The great causes of which we have
been speaking are themselves all mortal
— not almost certainly mortal as we
are supposed to be, but quite certainly
mortal. Art, science, industry, the tech¬
nical mastery of nature, and all the mon¬
uments of culture, — social institutions
and organizations, past, present, and Uto¬
pian, —the human race itself and every
form of earthly life, are doomed to perish.
Not because of the reasons set forth in
the learned and pompous analogies of
Spengler, but because of the purely phys¬
ical contingencies which, given a suffi¬
cient length of time, are sure to get us.
Geologists and astronomers may expand
and contract the universe and may allow
to our planet and the life it carries a dur¬
ation of a million, a billion, or a trillion
years; but sooner or later there will be an
end — the earth will bum or freeze or
crash, and human life with all the causes

OF SURVIVING DEATH 19

approach the question indirectly and in-
ferentially, by examining the nature of
the mind and the nature of the body,
and attempt as best I can to estimate
the probability that the former continues
to exist after the latter has ceased to
function.

Ill

THE CASE FOR THE SELF AS ADJECTIVE

The evidence for the view so widely
prevalent in learned circles that the mind
is an adjective of the body is enormously
voluminous. It is, in fact, coextensive
not only with human cerebral physiology
and the associated phases of psychology,
but also with a great deal of general bi¬
ology, both ontogenetic and phylogenetic.
Fortunately for our inquiry, this evi¬
dence, in spite of its vast number of de¬
tails, is fairly homogeneous. It can all
be epitomized as follows:

20

THE CHANCES

The mind varies as the brain varies; and to
the extent that the brain ceases to function
the mind ceases to produce its characteristic
effects; from which it may be inferred with
overwhelming probability that the mind de¬
pends upon the brain as an adjective depends
on its substantive, and that when at death the
brain ceases to function, the mind will cease to
exist.

This is the argument in general, and its
constituent particular elements comprise
all the particular observations and infer¬
ences that have been made as to the cor¬
relation of mental and neural events.

There is a foolish thing that a person
may be tempted to say at this juncture.
Realizing that a conscious experience, a
sensation, thought, or what not, is (as
experienced by you who have it) utterly
different in quality or appearance from
the moving particles which an external
observer might see or infer by examining
your brain, you may be tempted to say
that because feelings as such are quali-

OF SURVIVING DEATH

21

tatively distinct from brain processes, it
follows that the two classes of appear¬
ances are numerically or substantively
non-identical and that your mind is in¬
dependent of your brain. This seems to
have been Descartes’ conviction when he
said Cogito ergo sum, and believed that
consciousness in revealing itself as an
essence qualitatively different from the
brain also revealed itself as a substance
existentially different from the brain. “ I
think, therefore I am”—Yes, but am
how, and am what? All I know is that I
exist as conscious at this moment, but
whether I exist as a substantive, or as an
adjective of something else, is not to be
discovered by any direct experience. In
short, to make the qualitative distinction
between the appearance of a mental state
and the appearance of a moving particle
the basis for inferring their existential or
substantive difference is like inferring
that a square table and a red table can

22

THE CHANCES

never be the same thing because square¬
ness is not the same as redness. The
same fallacy is of course committed by
those who try to prove that they are out
of their heads by pointing triumphantly
to the fact they don’t see the insides of
their heads as such, with all the neurons
and things that are really there and that
they ought to see if they were there too.
This seems to me merely amusing. What
right have we to suppose that we can see
ourselves as others see us? The probabil¬
ity that a thing would appear to itself or
“ from within ” under the same form as it
appears to another “from without” is
very small; and to assume that body and
mind are separable merely because they
appear as different is quite unwarranted.
The essential thesis of materialism is not
to be refuted so easily as all that.

And now that these misunderstand¬
ings of the meaning of mental events and
brain events have been disposed of we

OF SURVIVING DEATH

23

may return to the main argument for the
hypothesis of materialism and consider
some of the outstanding examples of the
way in which the mind varies with the
functioning of the brain and thus seems
to depend entirely upon it.

There is in the first place the broad
biological fact that the higher the mind
(as judged behavioristically by the adap¬
tiveness and purposefulness of the per¬
formances of an individual) the higher or
more elaborate and systematized is the
brain (as explored by the physiologist).
This holds phylogenetically when the
brains of various species are correlated
with their intelligence as exemplified in
or inferred from their behavior. Man’s
brain is more intricately developed than
that of his nearest cousins, the apes, and
far more developed than the brains of
still lower animals. And man’s mind as
judged by his achievements is corre¬
spondingly as much higher than that of

THE CHANCES

24

the apes as theirs is higher than that of
brutes with still simpler nervous systems.
And ontogenetically there is the same
sort of correlation; as the brain grows
from infancy to adulthood the mental
abilities grow also.

When we turn from this general corre¬
lation of cerebral development with
mental development in the species and
in the individual to the more specific and
controllable variations in a brain which
result from lesions, either natural or ex¬
perimental, and from drugs or glandular
secretions being added or subtracted, we
find very definite and strikingly correla¬
tive changes in the mind. And in these
more specific and physiological variations
we can often supplement the indirect
study of the mind through its body’s be¬
havior by the direct method of intro¬
spection; whereas in the more general
and biological changes (except when
we can compare in memory the mind

OF SURVIVING DEATH 25

of our early childhood with our mind
today) we have to get at the mental
changes entirely through observation of
behavior.

Everybody has experienced both in-
trospectively and behavioristically the
effect on his intelligence, his emotions,
and his volitions of narcotics and stimu¬
lants, of exercise, of fatigue, or of dis¬
eases and their toxins. We can observe
the rise of a child’s moods and mentality
from cretinous idiocy to almost normal
brightness, and its relapse into idiocy
again, by first giving and then withhold¬
ing the extract of the thyroid gland. We
can observe the progressive degenera¬
tion of a personality in intellect, senti¬
ment, and will through the ravages
made in the brain by syphilis. We can
observe the successive declines of intelli¬
gence in a dog or a cat as successive por¬
tions of its brain are removed. And we
can observe quite analogous changes re-

26

THE CHANCES

suiting in a human mind from analogous
cerebral wounds.

It is difficult in the face of countless
facts like these to resist the conclusion of
the materialist that mind is adjectival
rather than substantive, and that be¬
cause it varies with the variations of the
brain and its functionings it must de¬
pend entirely upon those physical struc¬
tures and processes.

Is there indeed anything at all to be
said against this conclusion unless new
facts are found? There is, I think, one
thing that may be said against the con¬
clusiveness of the argument as thus far
stated. It is not a very strong defense,
but it counts for something.

Materialism has to reckon with the
possibility, never to be completely re¬
moved, that the mind, which is discovered
through introspection and through be¬
havior and which varies with the body’s
changes, is a function not merely of that

OF SURVIVING DEATH

27

body but also of an immaterial entity or
soul which, during life as we know it,
must operate through the body and use
it as its instrument in much the same
way as a musician must use his instru¬
ment to make manifest the harmonies
within him. If you take the instrument
on which a musician (whom you cannot
see) is playing, clean it, tune it, and
increase its number of strings or stops,
its music will become purer and more
elaborate. If, on the other hand, you
take the instrument and poison it with
the injection of fluids that impede its
vibrations, deprive it of the air against
which it beats, or “vivisect” it by cut¬
ting out one after another of its essential
parts — what then will happen? Obvi¬
ously the music will become imperfect,
abnormal, discordant, harsh; as the proc¬
ess continues there will be an insane and
even idiotic jumble of sounds; and, at
last, will come silence and the mercy of

THE CHANCES

28

death. Perhaps you would feel trium¬
phant and make conscientious claim to
having proved that the music is a function
of the instrument, an adjective of its mo¬
tion, dependent upon it, and upon it
alone. And yet you would be wrong, for
despite the impressive assemblage of con¬
comitant variations between the instru¬
ment and the music, that music was not
“robot” music. The instrument did not
play itself; it was played upon by an in¬
visible operator.

Please do not sneer this off as “ just an
argument from analogy.” Of course it is
an argument from analogy. What else
could it be? We can conclude from the
known to the unknown by taking as our
premises the relations that are given and
extending them by the “rule of three”
method of extrapolation to what is not
given. When I see you weeping I attrib¬
ute to you an inner grief. I do not, to
be sure, do this by any argument analog-

OF SURVIVING DEATH

29

ical or non-analogical; I do it spontane¬
ously as an act of “animal faith.” It is
the “pathetic fallacy,” the instinctive
ascription to the outside world of what
is really our inner stuff, not only our
feelings but our sensory forms and con¬
ceptual relations. All men, and animals,
too, live by the pathetic fallacy. With¬
out committing it they could not carry
on at all. But if, and when, I am asked
to prove my spontaneous interpretation
of your observable tears as indicative
of inner grief, then I can only argue by
analogy. A is to B as A' is to B'. As my
own remembered weeping is to my own
remembered grief, so is your observed
weeping to your (by me unobservable
and hence hypothetical) grief. When I
put it this way I see that of course I may
be mistaken in my conclusion despite
the feeling of certainty due to my “ani¬
mal faith.” You may not be weeping
from grief but from tear gas or onion

3 °

THE CHANCES

juice or from a desire to deceive. This
risk of error I must always take in in¬
ferring anything beyond the here-and-
now appearance.

Whether an analogy is good or bad
depends on whether the resembling re¬
lations are essential and causal, or trivial
and casual. Now with regard to the
analogy between a possible but unknown
soul in its relation to the body and its
consciousness, on the one hand, and a
musician (invisible to the observer) in his
relation to his instrument and its music
on the other hand — I do not claim that
it is convincing or even very good. I
claim only that it is pedagogically clari¬
fying and sufficiently plausible to give us
pause and make us realize that the con¬
comitant variation of one thing with
another does not prove the adjectival
dependence of the one thing on the other.

But in spite of our analogy and all
that may be said for it, the materialist

OF SURVIVING DEATH

31

theory is still very strong, because of
the prior rights enjoyed by the more nearly
known over the less nearly known in all
sound methodology. That there may be
a soul is possible, but until it is shown
on other grounds to be not merely pos¬
sible but also probable, the physiological
scientist and the materialistic philos¬
opher have the right and even the duty
to disregard the dualistic hypothesis.
The burden of proof is on the dualist
to transform an empty and sterile possi¬
bility into a possibility that shall at least
be probable, even if not fruitful.

How can this transformation be
effected? In only one way — by examin¬
ing the nature of the mind as we know it
and of the brain as we know it and dem¬
onstrating that the latter is not the
kind of thing that could with any plausi¬
bility serve as the sole ground for the
former, and that its inadequacy is such
that something other than the body must

32

THE CHANCES

be postulated as operating upon or co¬
operating with the body. Of such evi¬
dence there is a goodly quantity, and it
constitutes the positive as distinct from
the merely negative argument for the
existence of a soul. Let us now proceed
to examine it.

IV

THE CASE FOR THE SELF AS SUBSTANTIVE

i. The Distinctive Aspects of Mind.
There are a number of curious properties
possessed by mental states and processes
which are so different from the proper¬
ties of bodies, or at least from those of
inorganic or non-living bodies, that there
is difficulty in imagining how they can be
mere aspects of a mechanistic aggregate.

All of these properties are character¬
ized by a self-transcendence or reference
to what is other than themselves. There
are four kinds of self-transcending refer¬
ence — prospective, retrospective, spa-

OF SURVIVING DEATH 33

tial, and logical. Let us consider them in
turn.

Prospective self-transcendence is the
characteristic of a process in which some¬
thing not yet existent appears to act as
a causal determiner of the train of events
that leads up to it. Processes determined
in this way are called purposive or teleo¬
logical. And the goal of such a process,
whether it is actually attained or only
approached, is called its purpose or telos.

When a purposive process is experi¬
enced from within we are conscious of
the purpose or telos as a present idea of a
possible future situation. Our attitude
towards it is one of desire or interest; we
make efforts to actualize it and charac¬
terize it as a good or a value, and what¬
ever seems to contribute to its attain¬
ment shares this quality of value in a
secondary or instrumental fashion. Cor¬
respondingly, whatever opposes or hin¬
ders our striving has the character of a

34

THE CHANCES

bad or negative value. When such a proc¬
ess is accelerated we have the feeling of
pleasantness, when it is retarded that of
unpleasantness.

These purposive activities, so familiar
in our own subjective experience, are not
lacking in objective or externally observ¬
able characteristics that make them
more or less easy to identify. Such ob¬
jective characteristics are, however, not
positive as in subjective experience, but
negative. They result from the fact that
an externally observable process is not
adequately determined by externally ob¬
servable causes. Two perfectly similar
inanimate bodies or the same inanimate
body on two successive occasions, when
put in the same environmental situation
will behave in the same way. And as the
environment becomes specifically differ¬
ent the behavior of the bodies will be¬
come specifically different. There is, in
short, what Professor Jennings calls Ex-

OF SURVIVING DEATH

35

perimental Determinism. For every ob¬
servable episode or element in the conse¬
quent there can be found an observable
episode or element in the antecedent.
Now in a purposive process such as we
fin d subjectively to characterize mind,
the situation is quite different. Two ex¬
ternally similar beings placed in similar
environments may behave differently;
and conversely, when placed in different
environments they may behave in the
same way. The result is that there ap¬
pears to be no complete Experimental
Determinism, i. e. no one-to-one corre¬
spondence between the externally ob¬
servable phenomena of purposive conduct
and the externally observable phenom¬
ena of the environment in which that
conduct takes place. When we wish to
emphasize the absence of external deter¬
mination we speak of the being’s freedom-,
when we wish to put the emphasis on
the presence of internal causes we speak

THE CHANCES

36

of the being’s teleology or purposiveness.
Whether we take the internal and sub¬
jective standpoint or the standpoint of
an external observer, mind or a being
endowed with mind exhibits in its be¬
havior a curious self-transcending refer¬
ence to the future situations in which
that behavior will eventuate.

As mental processes are determined
by, and extend forward toward, the not
yet existent events of the future, so do
they also extend backward to the no
longer existent events of the past. When
this present inclusion of the past is con¬
tinuous with the sensory experience of
the present moment, it is called “dura¬
tion,” when discontinuous, “memory.”
Bergson has with great clearness and
originality analyzed this characteristic of
conscious life. In a mind the past is not
lost as in the world of physical motions,
but preserved. It is not displaced by the
present, but coexists with it, with the re-

OF SURVIVING DEATH

37

suit that the mind is made up of a cumu¬
lative and growing system of memories
intensively superimposed upon one an¬
other; and in addition to a three-dimen¬
sional space reference, it possesses a
fourth or purely temporal dimension,
not merely as a futuristic potentiality
of purposive behavior but as an actually
achieved and present body of past
experience.

In addition to its temporal dimension
the mind in most of its sensory states has
a self-transcending reference to spatially
distant objects. We perceive and visu¬
ally imagine such objects by means of
inner cerebral states. We are tempted to
say, and we can say, that each being with
a mind carries about inside his skull a
sort of copy or map of the extra-organic
world. But having said this we must im¬
mediately add that the map thus carried
is no ordinary map whose puny dimen¬
sions can be perceived alongside of the

THE CHANCES

38

large domain of which it is the copy. The
mental map that is here and now reveals
a world of objects that are there and
then , not by being just a copy of them
but by functioning as a dynamically and
causally effective substitute for them.
The mental map itself is never seen as
such; through it and by means of it the
world is seen. This is due to the fact that
our mental states do not in general act in
their own right and produce effects char¬
acteristic of their intrinsic sensory na¬
ture. Their behavior is governed not by
what they are but by what they mean.
They are comparable to marionettes
whose capers are only to be understood
and explained by the agents who pull
them about by strings. In the hurly-
burly of perceiving, remembering, and
acting we cannot realize this, for we are
conscious only of the objects meant and
not of the sensory states that mean or
reveal them.

OF SURVIVING DEATH

39

It is only in the fourth kind of self-
transcending reference, which is exempli¬
fied in abstract reflection, that we can be
conscious not only of the meaning but
also of the symbol that carries it. When
we write “a + b = b + a,” we are aware
of the letters as well as of their meanings.
The mind is, as we have said, imprisoned
in the skull, but the skull is so comfort¬
able a prison that the prisoner is hardly
aware of his plight. By means of the sen¬
sory effects which he receives and pre¬
serves, he gets a free view of the world
outside. It is as though the walls of his
prison were transparent. He does not see
them; nor does he see the effects pro¬
duced upon him, just because he sees by
means of them, and so through them.
The effects within mean or “reveal”
their actual or possible external causes.
To be conscious of the world without, is
to have that world vicariously within
you. From this standpoint the mind

40

THE CHANCES

might be defined as a condition for the
vicarious or virtual presence of events
which actually are distant from it in
space and in time. If you looked into the
man’s brain you would not see what the
man saw. You could at best see only the
events by which he saw. In this sense
each field of consciousness is private.

And now that we have examined the
mind and found it to involve as its essen¬
tial character the curious function of self-
transcending reference to what is not it¬
self, let us turn to an examination of the
brain with a view to discovering whether
its nature is such as to enable it to have
the mind as its adjective.

2. The Distinctive Aspects of the Brain.
Even to the untutored eye, the brain is a
slippery and complicated object with
strange convolutions on the outside and
queer caverns within. It has its exits and
entrances which give it dual connections
with practically every part of the body;

OF SURVIVING DEATH

41

and through the whole of it run innumer¬
able pathways, which keep its various
regions and centers even more closely
and intricately connected with one an¬
other than they are with the sense or¬
gans, muscles, and glands of the body.
Supplement this bird’s-eye view of the
layman with the carefully directed mi¬
croscopic views of anatomists and histol¬
ogists, and with physiological discoveries
such as those of Sherrington, Pavlow,
and Cannon—crucially and pitifully cor¬
roborated by the testimony of numberless
dogs and cats — and the brain assumes
momentous proportions. Its millions
of interconnected neuronic elements are
organized in hierarchies of sensori-motor
arcs, and the more or less well marked
levels of these hierarchies correspond
most instructively to the successive
levels of cerebral development displayed
by the species in their evolutionary
ascent. Here, as elsewhere, phylogeny

42

THE CHANCES

is recapitulated and confirmed by on¬
togeny.

Confronted with such knowledge one
is overwhelmed. The brain, with its affil¬
iated ramifications throughout the body,
is so vast in its complexities, so marvellous
in its internal and external articulations,
that the proper attitude towards it would
seem to be one of prayerful admiration
and humble trust — a kind of religious
faith that since it can do so much it can
do everything, and that in the further
and as yet undiscovered details of its
mighty organization lie hidden the whole
secret of human personality and the
entire and sufficient cause of mind and
spirit.

Is there any way of getting closer to
the object of our worship, closer even
than the physiologist can get? Yes, there
is the way of the chemist. Viewed
through the eyes of the chemist the cere¬
bral landscape undergoes a rather curi-

OF SURVIVING DEATH

43

ous change. In place of organized hier¬
archies involving the whole organism or
large tracts of it, we get multitudes of
narrowly localized chemical reactions.
The atoms in the complex organic mole¬
cules are continually dissolving their as¬
sociations and forming new ones. But
the divorce and remarriage of atoms
which the chemist studies is a piecemeal
affair. Naturally it must be observed col¬
lectively and in the mass because of the
minuteness of the parties to the transac¬
tion. But the relations inferred from the
observation are in the main dyadic rela¬
tions, the tete-a-tete intercourse of one
molecule with another. Of course, there
are the catalyzers, and there are several
other indications that chemical reactions
are not purely dyadic. But the factor of
Gestalt, the influence of the structural
pattern of the whole upon the parts, is al¬
most gone. For the chemist, the nervous
system and the rest of the body is a vast

THE CHANCES

44

conglomerate of comparatively inde¬
pendent and separate processes, in per¬
petual interaction with one another, to
be sure, but lacking the benefit of any
presiding genius or controlling organic
structure. For such a thing there is no
chemical formula. This new and more
intimate view of the organism brings
with it a new mystery — the mystery of
the regulation and self-regulation of a
living system, the whole amazing con¬
spiracy of the various chemical sub¬
stances and activities to play into each
other’s hands and with exquisite cooper¬
ation maintain the balance of the organ¬
ism and its life.

Is there any further way in which we
can get even closer than the chemist to
the intimate and ultimate structure of
the brain? Yes, there is the way of phys¬
ics. Taking this further way we now
pass beyond the conglomerate of organic
molecules and their chemical reactions,

OF SURVIVING DEATH

45

and see the brain dissolving before our
conceptual eyes into a swarm of atom-
systems, comprising as to type some
dozen or so of the 92 known kinds. Each
of these atoms, or atom-systems, is com¬
posed of a nucleus and outlying planets.
The nucleus consists of electric parti¬
cles or units of positive charge packed
closely together with a lesser number
of particles or units of negative charge;
the planets or outlying fringe are en¬
tirely of negative charge and (apart
from ionization) are just sufficient in
number to balance the deficit of negative
charge in the nucleus. This, or something
like it, is the atom. We may leave its
further details to the experts in quantum
physics. For us it is sufficient to view the
brain as a swarm of quintillions of tiny
particles, pushing and pulling each other
about and continuously moving with in¬
credible velocities in all directions. This
is the physicist’s picture of the brain. It

THE CHANCES

46

is like that of the chemist only more so.
And it is vastly different from the pic¬
tures made by biologist and physiologist.

Where in this picture can we find
the Gestalt, the ground for the self¬
regulating and self-perpetuating unity of
pattern that does so surely pervade the
nervous system as a whole? And where
indeed can we find in these scudding
clouds of spatially separate particles,
with their motions governed by the
beautifully simple laws of attraction and
repulsion, any basis or ground for ex¬
plaining the thing called mind — the
hidden thing, stored with rich and cu¬
mulative memories of events that no
longer exist, and capable of purposeful
actions successfully directed to what
does not yet exist? Surely in the light
of this more intimate “close-up” of
the brain the chance of reducing the
mind to a bodily adjective seems rather
remote. And the counter-hypothesis of

OF SURVIVING DEATH

47

the mind as substantive in its own right,
a veritable soul has passed from the
status of a bare and sterile possibility to
one of respectable, if not overwhelming,
probability.

V

A COMPARATIVE EVALUATION OF THE
TWO HYPOTHESES: STERILE TRUTH
VERSUS FRUITFUL FALSEHOOD

“Confound you! Get out of my way
and let me on with my work!” Such
might well be the words of a physiologist
who by some chance had been tricked
into listening to arguments of the kind
that I have offered. Even if they cannot
be answered (and I don’t see how they
can be, though of course they may be)
they will be regarded, and more or less
justifiably regarded, as mischievous. For
the game of mechanistic science is to ex¬
plain wholes in terms of their parts and

THE CHANCES

48

to find a natural or physical cause for
every natural or physical effect. It is a
great game, and it has been won many
times even when the odds against win¬
ning seemed quite overwhelming. The
fruits of the materialistic victory consti¬
tute the whole of the material portion of
modern civilization and culture. Clear
mathematical understanding, miracu¬
lously reliable prediction, precise experi¬
mental verification, make possible the
application of natural laws to human
uses and give us mastery over nature.
This is what materialistic science has
brought us, and we should hesitate long
before forsaking its methods. Suppose
you do have to admit the impossibility
of explaining the mind in material terms.
Suppose further that you are compelled
to admit the existence of some non¬
natural or supernatural factor such as
a soul that, depending upon the body
for its birth and activity, is nevertheless

OF SURVIVING DEATH

49

separable from it, and so capable of sur¬
viving it. Well if you can’t rid yourself
of such beliefs, do at least try to forget
them. At any rate, don’t bring them
into the laboratory where people are
busy working. Keep them for church
or for the metaphysician’s palace of
dreams. To try to use such hypotheses
in a scientific inquiry would be pure sa¬
botage. If when your colleagues failed to
find a natural cause for a natural event
you as a vitalist, animist, or dualist ran
tattling to the parson claiming a triumph
for God or the soul, you would be de¬
servedly unpopular. If natural processes
are directed by unnatural or super¬
natural agencies which can in no way
be affiliated with working concepts tried
and true that provide means for their
own correction and supplementation,
then the postulate of such ungermane
agencies may be true and may be neces¬
sary, but it will be a sterile truth; and

THE CHANCES

So

the materialistic theory will continue to
be used because even though a falsehood
it is at least a falsehood that is fruitful.

The outcome of our discussion up to
this point seems to me to amount to just
this: the soul exists, a substantive mind,
whose positive characteristics, being
what they are, prevent it from being
explained as an adjective or dependent
function of the brain. But the brain and
the material world generally, being what
they are, can be put into no intelligible,
profitable, or verifiable relation to these
souls except the brute factual relation of
correlation.

The whole psycho-physical argument
between vitalist and mechanist thus
seems to end in a stalemate.

OF SURVIVING DEATH

51

VI

THE HYPOTHESIS OF A PHYSICAL SOUL

Let us consider whether the mind as
we have described it in terms of Mem¬
ory, Meaning, and Purpose is not, after
all, more homogeneous with the physical
world than it appeared to be in our
previous account of it. When we looked
for mind in the reflex-arcs of physiology,
in the reactions of chemistry, and in
the whirling atoms of physics, we failed
to find it or any conceivably adequate
ground for it. The mind did not seem
to belong anywhere in the system,
though obviously it was somehow there
and functioning in and through the neu¬
rons and their constituent molecules and
atoms. There is however something else
in the physical world besides the ma¬
terial particles and their motions. There
is that which is between them. This me-

THE CHANCES

5 2

dium has a continuity and unity about
it which aggregates of particles do not
have. There are no non-spatial gaps
between spaces, and space cannot be
broken into separable pieces in the way
matter can. It used to be customary to
speak of a medium called ether that was
coextensive with space and that par¬
took of its unity and continuity. This
ether was the medium, the subject or
bearer of light waves and of the other
forms of radiant energy that go from
atom to atom and from star to star. It
was also the bearer of the stresses and
strains which are present between two
particles when they are attracted or re¬
pelled by what was called force. Einstein
has shown us how to substitute for the
mechanical forces in ordinary or Euclid¬
ean space a purely geometrical though
non-Euclidean conception of spatial
regions of varying curvature. As Des¬
cartes succeeded in translating geometry

OF SURVIVING DEATH 53

into algebra, so Einstein and Minkowski
have translated mechanics into a new
geometry in which space and time be¬
come the blended and inter-dependent
dimensions of a single four-dimensional
continuum called “space-time.” Now,
the old-fashioned ether was in some ways
analogous to an elastic jelly. When a
jelly is forced to undergo a temporary
distortion from which it will recover we
can say that there is a mere “strain ” in
the jelly. A distortion that is so strong
that it will be permanent and never re¬
covered from is called a “set.” These
older conceptions can, I think, be trans¬
lated into the language of Relativity.
The distortion of the ether jelly becomes
a non-Euclidean warp or bend or wrinkle
in space-time or in th e field. If the warp
is temporary and due to flatten out when
the particles that determine it move
away it is a “strain.” Correspondingly
the set in the ether jelly when translated

THE CHANCES

54

into Einsteinian terms would become a
permanent non-Euclidean warp or bend
in the field, one that would not flatten
out, or not completely flatten out, when
the material factors by which it had been
initiated went their several ways.

Any distortion of space-time, any
field, whether temporary or permanent,
acts as a regulating or organizing agency,
a kind of Gestalt with reference to the
things in it. A very simple and very
pretty case is that of the magnet placed
under a sheet of paper on which iron fil¬
ings are then sprinkled. At first the fil¬
ings push each other about a little, as
they would if there were no magnetic
field and they were quite “on their own,”
a wholly plural and mechanistic aggre¬
gate. Almost immediately however there
supervenes on this disorderly mob whose
blind action is simply the sum and result¬
ant of the actions of its parts, the regu¬
lating organizing form of the magnetic

OF SURVIVING DEATH S 5

field. The filings cease to be an aggregate
of individuals acting only with reference
to one another and begin to dispose
themselves obediently along the lines of
force which, quite invisible in them¬
selves, are now bodied forth to the
wonder and delight of the spectator.
Suppose that after the magnet was
taken away you were to toss up those
same filings and let them fall on the
paper. Their arrangement would be dis¬
orderly and insignificant. Put them in
a dice box, shake it, and cast again.
The same insignificant result. Do this
a billion times and the chances will be
more than a quadrillion to one against
your getting a repetition of the pattern
which had spontaneously formed itself
when the magnet was under the paper.
Now if a poor simple little field-pattern,
such as that caused by a magnet, with
only a thousand or so of iron particles
needed to incarnate it in a form visible to

THE CHANCES

56

the observer, could not come about by
the blind mechanical actions of the parti¬
cles on one another unless by a miracle of
luck, what would be the chance that the
quintillions of atoms in a living body,
if unaided by any Gestalt or active form,
such as a field, could organize themselves
into single cells, chains of cells, reflex-
arcs, and systems of such arcs — in short
into an organism or the nervous system
of an organism? Any such chance would
be so near zero as to be negligible. This
means what? It means that the life of the
body cannot possibly be grounded merely
in its constituent particles, but must be
grounded in a field or something like a
field that pervades those particles.

I wish now to turn from the kind of
field typified by the magnet to a second
sort of field, one which exhibits not or¬
ganization in space but organization in
time, a capacity to preserve many past
moments in a single present moment.

OF SURVIVING DEATH

57

Take a rope — bend it, twist it, fold it
over on itself again and then again. Hold
it for a while with its intensive hierarchy
of successively superimposed strains
locked in it. Then let it loose and watch
it give back to the outside world with
more or less accuracy the series of suc¬
cessive motions that have been succes¬
sively imposed upon it. Suppose now
that you had a field of strain that com¬
bined the spatially organizing capacity
of the magnetic field with the temporally
organizing capacity exemplified in the
rope for receiving and retaining in an
intensive hierarchy the impulses, or at
least the traces of the impulses, received
from without. You would then have a
system which, though it is described in
physical terms, would greatly resemble
the general character of the mind as it is
revealed, both directly to introspection
and indirectly through behavior.

It is, however, one thing to resemble

THE CHANCES

58

the mind and another thing to be the
mind; and we may well ask for some
specific evidence for the hypothesis that
I am going to propose; the hypothesis,
namely, that the mind is a very compli¬
cated and special kind of physical field.

The mind is an organism within an
organism. It is attached to the brain and
pervades it, and if it is a field, it is not
one whose primary function is the direct
forming of material structures such as the
patterns of iron filings or even the pat¬
terns of particles composing a single cell
or an entire organism. Its stuff is the
stuff of memory, the accumulated traces
of sensations; and such field-like activity
as it may possess seems concerned (1)
with imposing patterns of self-transcend¬
ing meaning upon the sensory contents,
and (2) with imposing patterns of pur¬
poseful action upon the intercourse be¬
tween the body and the environment.

A current of kinetic energy comes over

OF SURVIVING DEATH

59

a sensory nerve to the brain and is re¬
directed outward to a muscle or gland.
Whenever kinetic energy is reversed or
in any way changed in direction, the
whole or a part of it is transformed into
potential energy. Kinetic energy is al¬
ways externally observable; potential
energy is private and not to be observed
from without. It is a form of stress and
strain in the ether, or a non-Euclidean
warp of space-time, whichever you may
please to call it. In any case it is a
specific pattern or modification of the
field — not of the moving cerebral par¬
ticles but of the continuous and unified
region between those particles and per¬
vading them.

Now, as nearly as we can tell, the oc¬
currence of sensations is reported by the
subject, who is the internal observer, at
the very moments when the external ob¬
server of his brain would report that the
kinetic energies of visible motion were

6o

THE CHANCES

changing into merely potential energy
and thus passing from the public view.
Sensations are essentially private events,
and potential energies are also essen¬
tially private. They occur at the same
time and in the same place, and I think
the probability is overwhelming that
they are two names for the same thing.
What the physicist, interested in exter¬
nally observable events, describes as mere
potentialities of motion, the man whose
brain is undergoing the process describes
as actual sensations. From this latter
viewpoint motion could be just as well
described as a potentiality of sensation.
You walk in order that you may rest; or
perhaps you rest in order that you may
walk. Each is the potentiality of the
other, but each is also actual in itself. If
you are more interested in walking you
describe a rest as mere potential walking,
and perhaps you think of it as nothing in
itself. But if it is the rests you are inter-

OF SURVIVING DEATH 61

ested in, then walking will be only poten¬
tial resting. It was the physicist with his
interest in externally observable motion
who got the first chance to give names to
these energies; and naturally he called
the private kind, which he didn’t care
about (because he couldn’t see it and
measure it) “potential” energy. Now
there are three ways and only three in
which this potential energy can be con¬
ceived: (i) as an invisible form of kinetic
energy or motion of the small particles
composing the body; (2) as a mere pos¬
sibility and nothing actual at all; (3) as a
kind of actuality different from motion
but into which motion can be trans¬
formed and from which motion can
result.

The first conception is excluded by the
fact that when a visible body such as
a tennis ball is thrown against a wall
and its motion reversed or in any way
changed in direction, not only the body

62

THE CHANCES

itself but some or all of its particles must
themselves undergo change of direction;
and then their small invisible energies
must pass through a latent or non-kinetic
phase during which they will have the
potentiality rather than the actuality of
motion; and that which we had sought
to explain away would still be with us.
For this reason potential energy as such
is something unique and irreducible. It
cannot possibly be interpreted as re¬
sembling heat or light in being a motion
of the electrons, atoms, or molecules of
the visible body whose energy had been
changed from the observable to the un¬
observable form.

As for the second conception, accord¬
ing to which potential energy is inter¬
preted as a mere possibility having in it¬
self nothing of actuality at all, it would
seem to be excluded by the consideration
that if a definite and measurable magni¬
tude such as the motion of a tennis ball

OF SURVIVING DEATH 63

or the wave-like disturbance in a nerve
fibre were genuinely annihilated and
passed into nothingness, it would be in¬
finitely improbable that there should
emerge from the blankness of nonentity,
quite unscathed by obliteration, the pre¬
cise amount (except for the loss due to
friction) of the motion that had gone
into it.

There remains the third way of inter¬
preting potential energy. This is to con¬
ceive of it as having an actual nature
of its own, but a nature quite different
from that of the motions that precede it
and succeed it. This new type of actual¬
ity would have to be conceived merely in
negative terms as just a sort of antithesis
to motion if it were not for the fact of
sensation. Externally observable things
are not the only kind of observable
things. There are also the quite private
or internally observable things that we
call mental states. It is fortunate that

THE CHANCES

64

we have access to these internally observ¬
able facts, and doubly fortunate that
they seem to occur at just those times
when the externally observable motions
in the nerve fibres disappear from any
possible view. They make this disappear¬
ance when the motion of the stimulus
coming in over the afferent nerve fibre is
being redirected at the cerebral synapses
into an outgoing motion of reaction along
the efferent nerve. At the time and to
the extent that the neural motion disap¬
pears and becomes potential the sensa¬
tion appears and gains in intensity, and
at the time and to the extent that the
motion reappears and becomes actual
the sensation fades down and itself be¬
comes potential — potentially revivable
in later conscious memory.

It is because of this coincidence in time
and place of the genesis of potential
energy with the genesis of sensation that
the identity of the one with the other is

OF SURVIVING DEATH 65

probable. And as we have said, that
probability is enhanced by the fact that
there seems to be nothing else for the
energy to become when it ceases to be
kinetic or actual except the sensations
that there and then make their appear¬
ance.

And yet despite the fact that mental
states and potential energy are the only
two cases of purely private and not ex¬
ternally observable realities that we
know of, and despite the further fact of
their miraculous concurrence in time and
place, there may still remain a reluctance
to regard them as identical.

Throughout the long evolution of
modern physical science the categories of
Mass, Length, and Time have proved
increasingly potent instruments with
which to describe and predict the proc¬
esses of nature. And along with the in¬
creasing adequacy of the externalistic
concepts of physics there has developed

66

THE CHANCES

an increasing dislike for the internal
realities of minds and their states, which
just don’t seem to belong in the orderly
quantitative society of material terms
and relations. And because there ap¬
pears to be no proper place for them in
the world of causes and effects they have
been banished from that world and rele¬
gated to an alien realm called “conscious¬
ness,” where, deprived of all efficacy,
they are permitted to tag along as the
shadowy and epiphenomenal concomi¬
tants of the brains that bear them.

My hypothesis would seem to go
counter to this whole trend of modern
materialistic science, because it would
put our minds back into the causal nexus
and restore them to the real world from
which they have been expelled. Souls, as
William James reminded us, have worn
out their welcome. And by the term
“soul” is meant the mind conceived not
as an epiphenomenal adjective of the

OF SURVIVING DEATH 67

brain but as an entity in its own right, a
causal agent in the physical world. Now
in pleading that souls be recalled from
their exile and given a new trial, I urge
that new evidence has been discovered,
evidence which if it had been adduced at
their previous trial might have altered
the verdict. If a soul or substantive
mind were, as it is generally supposed to
be, a sort of “thing in itself” with laws of
its own quite incommensurable and un¬
connected with the laws of material
bodies, then there might be small justi¬
fication for taking it back. But if the
soul and its states can be reconceived
as forms of energy related physically
and quantitatively to the atoms and
their motions, the situation is pro¬
foundly altered. To aid in this recon¬
ception I suggest that we return for a
moment to the comparison of material
with mental existence.

Matter and motion are each of them

68

THE CHANCES

both spatial and temporal; but in each of
them it is the spatial factor which is dom¬
inant. Matter is extended, and while it
exists in time the mode of its temporal
existence is to be the same from moment
to moment. Motion, while more obvi¬
ously temporal than matter as such, is
like the latter in that it is a moment-
to-moment affair. The body or wave
in motion is in a continuous series of
places in a continuous series of instants.
Matter, whether at rest or in motion,
never occupies more than one instant at
a time. It binds together and unifies
points of space by its extension, but it
has no such power to unify diverse mo¬
ments of time. We might think that this
was entirely due to the nature of time
and was in no sense the body’s fault or
limitation, were it not for the different
sort of temporal existence which minds
and their sensations exhibit. For with
the latter, although the spatial aspect of

OF SURVIVING DEATH 69

their existence is vague and sketchy at
best, their time-filling power is promi¬
nent and notably different from that of
bodies. Instead of existing just from mo¬
ment to moment they endure or extend
down into the past, binding the series of
instants into a unity analogous to the
unity into which a material body binds
the points of space through which it ex¬
tends. Anything that can be called
mental, from the humblest sensation to
the most far-flung system of concepts
and plans, possesses this capacity for re¬
taining the past as present in the present.
The elaboration and elucidation of this
characteristic of duree by Henri Bergson
is, it seems to me, the greatest achieve¬
ment of modern philosophy. Because of
this predominance of time in all that is
psychical we might be justified in using
the compound word time-space as the
appropriate name for the milieu of the
mental, for the same reason that the

70

THE CHANCES

word space-time suitably describes the
continuum of the material world.

Now when kinetic energy or motion is
checked and redirected and thus trans¬
formed into the invisible thing called
potential energy, is there any indication
of a space-time mode of existence pass¬
ing into a mode of time-space? I think
we shall find that there is. A motion pro¬
ceeding, let us say, along a nerve as some
form of wave possesses a velocity % at
the instant when it arrives at a synapse
where the resistance brings it to rest.
The front segment of the wave is the
first to be changed into a stress or strain
of the type, perhaps, of an electric
charge; then in successive moments the
successive segments of the wave from
front to rear are each in turn similarly
transformed. There is thus a summation
or integration of a series of spatially ex¬
tended motions, one behind the other,
into a series of stresses successively su-

OF SURVIVING DEATH 71

perimposed each upon the other. In the
intensive hierarchy of these stresses the
time factor is preserved in the order in
which they are piled up, but the spatial
factor is all but lost; the phases of stress
are not extensively spread out in a line
as were the phases of the motion; rather
are they intensively heaped up all in
the same place. And while the spaces
covered successively by the motion have
been replaced by the single space, the
time aspect of the situation has under¬
gone a still more significant alteration.
For what was essentially succession has
now become essentially duration. The
series of motions came one after the
other, and one had to go before the other
could come. But in the series of strains,
though the temporal order is preserved,
the earlier members of the series wait
for the later and continue to exist with
them, thus enabling the past to survive
and along with it the present. The new

72

THE CHANCES

kind of being thus brought into existence
waxes and swells by virtue of its dura¬
tion. Instead of giving up one space in
order to attain another, like a body in
motion, the intensive energy into which
extensive energy has been transformed
can acquire newer and later characteris¬
tics while still retaining all of its older
and earlier ones. With things in space-
time the beginning of anything marks
the ceasing of something else and all
happenings die when they are bom.
Mere continuance without change is the
best that can be had. But in time-space
this is not the case. Beginnings of the
new need not be purchased by cessations
of the old; and change and continuance
are compatible with one another.

Perhaps this is enough to indicate my
reasons for maintaining the hypothesis
that energy in changing from its spatio-
temporal or kinetic phase into its tem-
poro-spatial or so-called potential phase

OF SURVIVING DEATH

73

is changing into the very type of dura¬
tional being which is the defining essence
of the psychical. If the potential energies
produced by nerve currents are in truth
sensations, and if the mind is the inten¬
sive hierarchy of these sensations and of
the traces or mnemic forms which they
leave when their energy fades back into
the motions of bodily reactions, then the
conscious and subconscious self as thus
conceived may claim its ancient place in
space and time, as cause and guide of
life’s behavior. For this new soul, unlike
the old, will be interpretable in physical
and quantitative terms, however difficult
the application in detail may prove.
Such a soul would no longer be an alien
intruder in the system of natural proc¬
esses; but like the electric and magnetic
fields to which it is akin, it could give and
take the energies of its environment.

And now, in the light of our hypothe¬
sis, suppose we contemplate again the

74

THE CHANCES

chance that human minds or any other
sort of fields of energy in potential form
could possibly maintain unchanged their
unities of structure and so survive the
death or dissipation of their body.

VII

THE FOUR GRADES OF FIELD: THEIR
SUCCESSIVE EMERGENCE IN EVOLU¬
TION, AND THEIR RESPECTIVE
PROBABILITIES OF SURVIVAL

Fields of the sort we have been discuss¬
ing can be of many kinds. And there
are at least four different grades or levels
which we must take account of. For
want of better names I shall call them
(i) the mechanical or inorganic; (2) the
vital or vegetative; (3) the animal or
sensory; and (4) the personal or rational.
Examining these in turn, we shall try to
form some notion, however vague and
tentative, of what the survival of each

OF SURVIVING DEATH

75

grade of field would mean and what
would be the probability of that survival.

i. Mechanical Fields. In the domain
of inorganic matter transitory fields of
potential energy are constantly being
formed from motions that are reversed or
changed in direction. But the fields thus
formed fade back into motions without
leaving any traces of their temporary
existence. And even with such perma¬
nent or relatively permanent fields as
the gravitational, the electrostatic, and
the magnetic, there seems to be no case in
which the field of force is not completely
dependent upon the bodies and elements
that support it. While the fields exist
they do indeed produce their specific
effects, imposing a quasi-organic form
and structure upon the material ele¬
ments that share their space, as witness
the influence of the field surrounding a
magnet upon the metallic filings that are
made to conform to its lines of force. But

THE CHANCES

76

these effects of the field, howsoever
specific they may be, are entirely de¬
pendent upon the configuration of
bodies. As that configuration is changed
or destroyed the field is changed or de¬
stroyed. It is possible even in this me¬
chanical domain that every episode
leaves some trace upon the ether or
space-time continuum, and that these
traces continue to exist as differentiated
elements in a sort of cosmic memory that
grows in depth or age with the passage of
time. But not only are such traces, if
they exist, unobservable in themselves
and lacking in any observable conse¬
quences; they would seem also to be
without any significant meaning apart
from the momentary material configu¬
rations which, after determining them,
pass completely away and are replaced
by other configurations.

There is of course a chance that the
“shift to the red” of the light from the

OF SURVIVING DEATH

77

distant nebulae is due not entirely, or
perhaps not at all, to a motion away from
us and from one another which is usually
attributed to the “expansion of the uni¬
verse.” That shift to the red with the
loss of energy that it involves may be due
to the fact that each electro-magnetic vi¬
bration or light-wave leaves a tiny frac¬
tion of its energy at the space in which it
occurs. After a wave had travelled a
thousand years or more the aggregate of
these depletions might be sufficiently
great to produce an observable effect in
the form of a shift to the red. And if this
were true, the farther away the source of
light was from us the greater would be
the sum total of the losses by absorption
which its energy had undergone. Such a
hypothesis would fit the empirical facts
as well as does the generally accepted hy¬
pothesis of a velocity of recession increas¬
ing with the distance of the source from
the observer. In short, the chance for

THE CHANCES

78

“immortality” of even the slightest and
most transitory of events cannot be com¬
pletely excluded, though its significance
would seem to relate to the cosmos as a
whole to whose “memory” the traces
would contribute, rather than to the in¬
dividual traces themselves.

2. Vital Fields. With the first dawn of
protoplasm a new type of field emerges,
a field which grows by what it feeds upon
and which extends itself by propagation.
The peculiar colloidal compound in
which carbon atoms seem to play the
major role affords the opportunity for
fields of force to duplicate themselves
without loss of intensity. The daughter
cells are as vigorous as the parent cells
from which they came. Any field or pat¬
tern of forces will duplicate itself by in¬
duction if suitable material is provided
in the immediate environment. An elec¬
trostatic or magnetic field can for ex¬
ample impress its specific pattern upon

OF SURVIVING DEATH

79

its neighborhood if that neighborhood
contains “food” in the sense of matter
that can be electrified or magnetized.
But the intensity of these induced fields
perpetually decreases. No mere me¬
chanical field possesses the power to an-
abolize or assimilate the energies of the
environment and so increase its strength
and grow. In virtue of this factor of an¬
abolism the protoplasmic fields of force
can by induction duplicate their patterns
without limit and without diminution in
the strength of each. Thus once started
they will tend to cover all the earth. And
as they grow in number they grow also in
complexity. For when the daughter cells
instead of parting company remain to
form a cluster, something of the pattern
of that cluster as a whole is by induction
stamped upon each later cell together
with the pattern of its parent. All the
new cells are thus seeds containing com¬
plex fields, which not only generate their

8o

THE CHANCES

single daughter cells but regenerate the
structure of the whole from which they
came. This growth and deepening of
complexity in metazoic cells involves an
increase of temporal depth, an ever-
lengthening series of past forms em¬
bodied in the present. Such retention by
a single cell of all its past ancestral types
is what we call heredity; and in ontogeny
we see proceeding from the seed a visible
series of phylogenetic forms which in the
germinal stage were all invisibly con¬
tained within the field and in intensive
hierarchy superposed on one another.

In spite of all the richness of potential¬
ity in which these vital fields exceed the
fields of inorganic matter, they fatally
resemble the latter in that their powers
are all directed to the forming of material
structures and to the motions of those
structures and their parts. Hence to the
question of their possibility of survival
we can only answer as before. If any

OF SURVIVING DEATH 81

trace of merely vital fields continues in
existence after the dissolution of the
bodies which they formed, the signifi¬
cance, if any, of such protoplasmic
wraiths would lie not in themselves, but
in their contribution to the meaning of a
larger whole, a cosmic memory in which
they were contained.

3. Sensory Fields. Minds, or at least
minds as we know them, are, as we have
already said, organisms within organ¬
isms. In the course of evolution there
comes a time when the fields of potential
energy built up within their protoplasm
appear to express themselves not merely
in directing the motions of the matter
adjacent to them nor even in the forming
of that adjacent matter into bodily struc¬
tures such as the organisms of plants and
animals, but in adjustments to events in
time or space not adjacent to them but
distant from them. “Action at a dis¬
tance” is the characteristic of this new

82

THE CHANCES

type of field which differentiates the con¬
scious animal from the plant. Energies
from distant objects impinge upon the
organism and a special portion of its pro¬
toplasm receives these energies, and in
addition to reflecting them back to the
environment in what we call reactions
retains their traces in potential form.
These stored up forms of potential en¬
ergy derived from neural stimuli give
the animal a map or chart of things out¬
side him, and by this map he can react to
what is here-and-now in virtue of its re¬
lation to what is there-and-then. Thus
to the energies of sunlight and of air and
food which he anabolizes to build his
body, he adds a set of energies which
provide adjustment to what lies far out¬
side his body. This inner mirror of a past
and future is the mind. Interpretation of
the here-and-now in terms of what is
there-and-then requires hesitation. Re¬
actions are no longer immediate but

OF SURVIVING DEATH 83

postponed; and during the period of
postponement, the tendencies, deprived
of normal efferent outlets, react on one
another and form new qualities. What
are these qualities?

The “ quality ” or aspect of a thing is its
plane of contact with some other thing.
It is a dyadic relation in which two things
are related directly rather than indirectly
through some third thing. Relations are
only recognized as such when they are at
least triadic; and when no third thing
mediates the relationship and mitigates
its intimacy it appears as just an “attri¬
bute” or “quality.” That qualities are
dyadic orcontactual relations can be seen
most easily in what are called primary
qualities — such properties as spatial
shapes and temporal beginnings and
endings. Things merely in space have
merely space relations; and in contrast to
a triadic relation like distance the surface
of contact of a body with its environment

THE CHANCES

84

is its shape. Though obviously relational
it is thought of as the private attribute or
predicate or quality “inhering” as an ad¬
jective or accident in the body as its sub¬
stantive or substance. Analogously the
beginning and ending of a process are its
dyadic contact relations with the tem¬
porally other things that are respectively
immediately before and immediately
after it.

Now in addition to these spatial and
temporal relations which when dyadic
yield the primary qualities, there are
spatio-temporal and temporo-spatial re¬
lations which I am inclined to believe
are never experienced except as dyadic.
These are the contacts or boundaries be¬
tween energy in its potential and energy
in its kinetic form. They are on that
psycho-physical frontier where body and
stimulus end, and mind and sensation
begin. The tactual qualities and those of
color, tone, odor, and savor are such

OF SURVIVING DEATH 85

entities. They are called “secondary”
qualities because they seem to play no
part in determining the processes of in¬
organic nature, the latter being explica¬
ble in terms of those purely spatial or
purely temporal properties which are
called primary. Because of their ineffi¬
cacy, the secondary qualities are usually
regarded as “subjective” and as having
no existence in physical nature at all. I
think, however, that they are as objec¬
tive as they seem, though epiphenomenal
or ineffective.

As soon as energy passes from a pre¬
dominantly kinetic to a predominantly
potential phase a new set of qualities
emerges. These new qualities, sometimes
called “tertiary,” are the purely internal
relations of the phases of the psychic
field to one another. They are such
things as pleasantness and unpleasant¬
ness, anger, curiosity, and tenderness,
and the indefinitely rich totality of those

86

THE CHANCES

forms both simple and complex that are
felt to be essentially and exclusively
mental. Now some of these tertiary
qualities are present in every animal,
that is to say in any form of life in which
there exists a field of potential energies
other than those purely vegetative tend¬
encies that are exclusively concerned
with the building up of bodily structures.
The question as to whether an animal mind
will die with its body is the question as to
whether a system of energy-forms consist¬
ing of tertiary or non-quantitative qualities
can translate its full nature into the purely
quantitative energies of the decaying nerv¬
ous system. To me it seems difficult to
conceive that even such humble qualities
as pleasure and fear could find their
equivalents in the motions of atoms and
molecules. Yet unless the mind or mem¬
ory system of an animal, which is the
field built up in his brain during life, can
be flattened out and adequately ex-

OF SURVIVING DEATH 87

pressed in the mere motions ensuing
upon his death, it must endure as an in¬
effaceable trace of what it was. Such
ghosts of purely sensory or sub-rational
minds, if indeed they do persist, would
seem to possess no intrinsic significance,
and to have no function except as items
in some larger whole. For though the
soul of an animal is not directly a mere
builder of organs and tissues, and thus
differs from the soul of a plant, it does
seem indirectly to be concerned almost
exclusively with preserving its body and
the other bodies of its species. Apart
from the bodily life to which it minis¬
ters, albeit only indirectly, it would
seem to have no way of functioning or
of expressing the kind of potentialities
of which it is constituted.

4. Rational Fields. With the dawn
of man a new level of life is achieved.
The traces of the past stored up in mem¬
ory attain sufficient strength to function

88

THE CHANCES

in and for themselves, rather than as
mere guides to bodily conduct. Instead
of the past and the future and the im¬
agined being utilized only for present
action, present action is utilized for them
and their enjoyment. Instead of mind as
organ of the body, body becomes an
organ of the mind, and the whole ma¬
terial set-up is, or may be, treated as the
means and the occasion for personal and
cultural ends. Fancy, freed from the
fetters of present bodily needs, presents
us with a world of waking dreams, with
promises that far outrun performance
and make us humble and ashamed at
what we are when thought of in the
light of what we might be. The human
mind thus constitutes a field of forms in
which there is the possibility continually
present, however seldom used, of build¬
ing an interpersonal community, in
which the duties are to help others
and ourselves to live more richly, and

OF SURVIVING DEATH 89

to grow indefinitely in every sort of
power.

Nor is this all, for there are intima¬
tions (and some would say far more than
intimations) of a chance of union with a
higher or the highest life. If we could
share in that, our own lives, finite at their
best, might be transfigured and gain a
new and different prospect of continu¬
ance.

I have tried to show (1) that the
phenomena of life and mind are not sus¬
ceptible of a mere mechanical interpre¬
tation; (2) that the factor that must be
admitted to supplement the atoms and
their motions, though psychical in na¬
ture and possessed of memory, organic-
ity, and purposiveness, is yet itself de-
scribable in physical terms as a field of
forces or potential energies; (3) that
these fields or systems of the traces of the
past are of four successively emergent
types or grades: the inorganic, the vege-

90

THE CHANCES

tative, the animal, and the personal; and
(4) that in the evolutionary ascent from
the lower and earlier to the later and
higher fields, the constituent forms of
energy seem to become more and more
different in quality from the matter and
motion of their bodily matrices, and
therefore more and more likely to survive
the dissolution of those matrices.

There are one or two things I should
like to say in conclusion.

The differences in complexity and
power of the four kinds of field must not
blind us either to the possibility that all
types survive, or to the counter-possibil¬
ity that none of them do. This latter
alternative should be kept rather sternly
in mind as an offset to the wish-thinking
that the subject of immortality tempts
many of us to indulge in. And it should
also be remembered for the more objec¬
tive reason that fields of potentiality are
never observed — at least in normal ex-

OF SURVIVING DEATH

91

perience — apart from material bodies.
This lapse from the observable may not
mean a lapse from existence, but it un¬
doubtedly puts the burden of proof upon
those who would defend the hypothesis
of survival.

As for the opposite possibility that all
fields of potentiality, the humblest as
well as the highest, continue in existence
after their disappearance from our view,
this also should be kept in mind as an off¬
set to that human conceit which makes
us prone to read into nature distinctions
in value which may be valid only for our
own species.

To us it does seem a great moment in
evolution when fields of potentiality at¬
tain through protoplasm the power not
only to induce or reproduce their own
patterns in neighboring matter (mag¬
netic, electric, and other inorganic fields
can do as much as that), but to induce
those replicas with no diminution of in-

THE CHANCES

92

tensity; so that life once started ramifies
and spreads over the planet, conserving
the cumulative heritage of its increasing
past, and by that heritage evolving new
forms for its future. These new forms,
added to the old which still continue,
make the phylogeny of life no less in¬
creasingly diversified than its ontogeny.

Despite all this, and great as the step
from inorganic to organic fields may
seem, there is the chance that the inter¬
nal natures of the so-called dead matter
of the world may be as rich as that of
the more individuated and self-asser¬
tive fields of protoplasm. What we call
“life” maybe no more than one specific
form of something more generic but
quite as purposeful and psychic as
itself. And, as Josiah Royce with deep
wisdom has suggested, the seeming
blindness of pre-protoplasmic doings
may be no more than the result of our
blindness to rhythms so different from

OF SURVIVING DEATH 93

our own that we cannot detect their
meanings.

The second moment of life’s evolution
comes when protoplasm takes to mirror¬
ing the distant and remembering the past
and thus builds up within a nervous sys¬
tem a private history of its own adven¬
tures by which reactions to the here
and now are modified and guided. The
sensory consciousness and intelligent
conduct that come to supervene upon
the merely vegetative seem certainly to
be a definite advance.

Yet here again we must beware lest
our own animalistic bias should make us
underestimate the possible richness of
the inner being of plants themselves and
of the plant-like aspect of all organisms.

The third great moment comes, and
man emerges from the merely animal
stage and gains a figurative freedom from
the whole material world, which then
becomes a footstool for his spirit and

94

THE CHANCES

a means for realizing his ideals. This
step is more momentous than either of
the two preceding steps — yet even here
we must beware of over-estimation.

The personal or rational stage of evo¬
lution brings with it not only increased
opportunities for life’s enrichment but
increased responsibility for using them.
The principle of noblesse oblige applies to
man’s status as compared with that of
the animal. And as between the human
being who fails to use his great occasion
and the brute who does rise to his small
occasion, the award for superiority in
essential value must go to the latter. The
love of a dog for his master, surmount¬
ing the sad barriers of species and of
rank that separate the two, has in it an
absolute and poignant beauty that ex¬
ceeds the value of any far-flung human
plan in which the quality of love, or some
equivalent or coordinate ideal, is lacking.
And there would be more point in the

OF SURVIVING DEATH

95

continuance through eternity of the poor
brute being who, despite the limitations
of his mental span of comprehension,
could go through pain and death for
loyalty than there would be in the
eternal continuance of the cleverest
human rogue who ever lived. These
ethical comparisons of animal and hu¬
man values may not be so irrelevant
to the hard world of fact as they might
seem. For if we translate the idealistic
language of evaluation which we have
just been using into the physical or ma¬
terialistic language in terms of which our
main discussion has been conducted, we
can say that there well may be a chance
that the moral qualities of a psychic field
would be less easily reduced to mere
material motions than would the intel¬
lectual, and therefore more likely to sur¬
vive.

In short, the simple goodness which
animals and men can both acquire

THE CHANCES

96

(rather than the rationality which man
alone inherits) may be the main deter¬
miner of whether life continues after
death; or at least of whether such con¬
tinuance would hold that promise of un¬
ending progress lacking which eternity
would pall.

This last consideration concerns an
aspect of the problem of survival which
we have hardly more than touched. Not
only do the chances of continuance vary
with the varying kinds of life we find on
earth, but the forms that such continu¬
ance may take are also various, though
for the envisaging of such futures our
present knowledge is of little help.

OF SURVIVING DEATH

97

VIII

THREE PROSPECTS FOR ETERNITY

There are at least three prospects for
eternity that appear as possible alterna¬
tives to annihilation.

The first and lowest of these prospects
is mere continuance in existence of the
memory-system. To the great law that
energy is conserved in quantity we might
add the law that all the qualities of
energy when once achieved within a field
are conserved also. But this for us means
hardly more than everlasting sleep. Just
as a body can be embalmed or frozen in
some glacier and thus endure and not
decay, so would our memories endure
exactly as they were at death, congealed
within the greater memory of the uni¬
verse itself whose past would go on with
it, but as its past, and so unchanged.

The second prospect is that life con-

SURVIVING DEATH

98

tinues not merely in existence as some¬
thing that has been, but really awake
and quick as now it is, and with that
power of ever further growth that seems
all but definitive of life’s essence.

The third and highest prospect for
eternity is that personal life, at least, not
only goes on growing but wins to some
strange mystic union with that greater
Life in which it has its little being. Pre¬
cious and indispensable for value as per¬
sonality appears, there is about it some¬
thing tragically wanting; and as in every
finite thing, but more acutely, a sort of
wound that cries for healing. If that
vaguely longed-for supplement to our
being could come, and come without the
annihilation of such being as we already
have, then would eternity hold out to us
the prospect of something unimaginably
more than mere survival.

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