Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine
William James, 1898
If thought depends entirely on the brain, can it survive the brain’s death? The psychologist William James accepts the findings of science without reservation and shows that the conclusion “no” does not follow from them. A short lecture that decides nothing for the reader, but takes apart the two loudest objections.
Who it is for
For those who have heard that brain science has closed the question of life after death, and want to check whether the facts really lead there.
Did anyone consult your taste when this earthly globe was being populated?
The professor who wanted to refuse
Harvard University invites a professor of psychology to deliver the Ingersoll Lecture on human immortality. The invited speaker’s first thought is to refuse, and he says so honestly from the stage. His own longing for eternal life was never sharp, and among the questions that trouble him this one does not come first. For such a subject, he thinks, a prophet in goatskins would be a better choice than a university official.
The professor is named William James, and he comes out to the audience all the same. The topic is vast: at the end of Alger’s “A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life” there is a list of more than five thousand books on it. One lecture will not exhaust it. So James sets out to bring only two grains of truth, to which future lecturers can add their own.
Both grains became answers to objections which, in his words, take the strength out of the old belief in life after death among educated people. The first: our thought depends entirely on the brain, and the brain dies. The second: if immortality exists, an unimaginable number of beings will have to be immortal.
Right away, here is what James does not promise. He does not prove that the soul is immortal, and he himself calls his arguments fragmentary and negative. His task is narrower and more honest: to check whether science really closes this question. If both objections fail the test, faith will gain, as he puts it, a freer wing. Let us see how a psychologist who accepts the findings about the brain in full comes to that conclusion.
Yes, thought depends on the brain. But how exactly?
The objection is heard everywhere, not only from physiologists but from anyone who reads popular science magazines. How can you believe in life after death if science has shown that our inner life is a function of the brain? How can a function outlive its organ once the organ falls apart?
James does not argue with the facts. Everyone knows that a delay in the brain’s development leads to feeblemindedness, a blow to the head wipes out memory or consciousness, and stimulants and poisons change the very thoughts themselves. The laboratories of his time only made this dependence more precise. When we think about what we have seen, the occipital convolutions work. When we think about what we have heard, part of the temporal lobes works. When we think about what we are going to say, one of the frontal convolutions works. James asks his listeners to accept all of this as proven, without reservation, and to sign the formula: thought is a function of the brain.
The question comes down to one point: does this formula force us to give up immortality? Most consistent scientists will say yes and, sadly or not, give up their hope of heaven. Those who still hope, James suspects of a saving inconsistency: they are scientists at one moment and simply people with a burning wish to live at the next. They hold the chain at both ends and do not look at the link in the middle. James decides to test exactly that link.
He finds the weak point in the word “function”. A physiologist says “thought is a function of the brain” the same way he would say that steam is a function of the kettle, or light a function of an electric circuit. Here the thing itself produces its result. This is a productive function, and if the brain produces consciousness, then when the brain dies, consciousness inevitably dies with it.
But nature has other functions too. The trigger of a crossbow creates nothing: it removes an obstacle, and the bow springs back by itself. This is a releasing function. Coloured glass does not create light: it lets light through, limiting its colour, and this is a transmissive function. The organ shows it best. The keys open the pipes and let air out of the wind chest, but the air is not born in the keys. The instrument only releases it into the world in special, limited forms.
Hence James’s main thesis: the law “thought is a function of the brain” does not oblige us to think only about production. We have the right to think about transmission too, and the ordinary physiologist simply does not take that possibility into account. Let us continue his picture: if the organ’s keys break, the music in the hall falls silent. A listener who sees only the keys will decide that the keys made the music. But the air in the wind chest is still there.
About the author
William James was an American psychologist and philosopher, a professor at Harvard and the author of “The Principles of Psychology”. He gave this lecture on immortality at Harvard and published it in 1898.
All books by this author: William James
Terms from the book
- Schiller
- hypothesis
- materialism
- medium
- Locke
- Stevenson
- Ingersoll: Caroline Haskell Ingersoll, by whose will an annual lecture on human immortality is founded at Harvard. The lecture is named after her father, George Goldthwait Ingersoll.
- Alger: William Rounseville Alger, an American clergyman and writer of the nineteenth century, author of “A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life”.
- physiologist: A scientist who studies how the organs and tissues of a living body work, the brain included.
- function: The work an organ or a device performs. James distinguishes a productive, a releasing and a transmissive function.
- convolutions: The folds on the surface of the cerebral hemispheres. Scientists in James’s time linked particular convolutions with particular kinds of thinking.
- Shelley: Percy Bysshe Shelley, English Romantic poet. The lines about the dome of many-coloured glass come from his poem “Adonais” (1821); James quotes them without naming the author.
- Fechner: Gustav Theodor Fechner, a German scientist of the nineteenth century, founder of psychophysics, the science of how the strength of a stimulus relates to sensation. He introduced the concept of the threshold of consciousness.
- Myers: Frederic Myers, a British researcher and one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research, which studied visions, telepathy and mediums.
- pantheism: The doctrine that God and the world form a single whole. Immortality here means the dissolving of the soul into a world-soul, not the life of a separate person.
- theory of evolution: The teaching that species of living beings, humans included, arose through long development from simpler forms. It is chiefly associated with Charles Darwin, a scientist of the nineteenth century.
- Wundt: Wilhelm Wundt, German psychologist and philosopher, founder of the first laboratory of experimental psychology, in Leipzig.
- theist: A person who believes in a personal God who created the world and is not identical with it.
All terms
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