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THAT THERE is for the human individual some sort of life after death has been
and still is widely believed. To the majority of mankind, this idea has not
seemed paradoxical nor a life after death difficult to imagine. It has often
been conceived as lived in a body and surroundings nearly or quite as material
as our present ones, though the future environment and the experiences to be had
in it have generally been thought of as rather different whether for the better
or the worse, from those of life on earth.
1. Life: physiological or psychological? [top]
Persons, however, who find such a
material conception of a future life incredible either because of its crudity or
because of the destruction the body undeniably undergoes after it has died, are
likely to think of survival in essentially psychological terms and therefore to
mean by "personal survival" more or less what Dean W. R. Matthews does, to wit,
- that the center of consciousness which was in existence before death does not
cease to be in existence after death and that the experience of this center
after death has the same kind of continuity with its experience before death as
that of a man who sleeps for a while and wakes again."(1)
(1) Psychical Research and Theology, The Sixth Myers Memorial Lecture,
Proc.
Soc. for Psychical Research, Vol. 46:15, 1940-41.
As we shall see eventually, a number of difficulties are implicit even in this
seemingly clear statement. Yet, some meaning thus psychological rather than
physiological has to be given to the word "life," if the hypothesis of a life
after death is to have any of the personal and social interest it commonly has.
For life in the merely biological sense of the word - the sense in which even
the body of a man in coma. or a vegetable, has life - has, by itself, only an
impersonal scientific interest for us. It acquires any other only if, or in so
far as, an organism alive in this physiological sense is a necessary basis for
life in the sense of conscious psychological experience. In these pages,
therefore, the words, "life after death" - except at places where a different
sense may be indicated specifically or by context - will be taken to mean at
least conscious psychological experience of some sort, no matter how caused and
whether incarnate or discarnate.
2. Survival, immortality, eternal life
[top]
I shall refer to the belief that there
is for the individual a life after death as belief in survival rather than as
belief in immortality; for immortality, strictly speaking, is incapacity to die,
which, as ascribed to a human consciousness, entails survival of it forever
after bodily death. But survival for some indeterminate though considerable
period, rather than specifically forever, is probably what most persons actually
have in mind when they think of a life after death. Assurance of survival for a
thousand years, or even a hundred, would, for those of us who desire survival,
have virtually as much present psychological value as would assurance of
survival forever: we should be troubled very little by the idea of individual
extinction at so distant a time - even less troubled than is now a healthy and
happy youth by the knowledge that he will die within fifty or sixty years.
Persons, on the other hand, who are tired of life; or who have found it to have
for them negative rather than positive value and believe this to be of its
essence; or who, like Professor C. D. Broad would for some other reason welcome
assurance of non-survival; would be more distressed by prospect of survival for
a long period, and even more by prospect of survival forever, than by that of
survival for only a short time.
The expression "eternal life" is sometimes used to express, in a positive way,
what "immortality" - distinguished from simply survival - expresses negatively.
"Eternal" life, as so used, then generally means life that is everlasting
in the
future - life without end though not without beginning. Conceivably, however, life
might be without beginning as well as without end. This is what theories such as
that of metempsychosis assume, which regard not only the human body but also the
human mind or consciousness or soul as an evolutionary product.
Similarly, when God's being is spoken of as "eternal" what is meant is sometimes
that he is both without beginning and without end - that he always did and
always will exist. Perhaps more often, however, what is meant is that God's
consciousness is timeless. Eternal life, then, or consciousness of eternity,
whether experienced by God inherently or by man on rare occasions, means a form
of consciousness that does not include or that transcends consciousness of time.
For a person the content of whose consciousness were thus timeless, the question
whether that content endured but a moment, or a thousand years, would have no
meaning since he would have no consciousness either of duration or of change.
Indeed, the question could not even present itself to him. But were external
observation possible of the consciousness of such a person - for example, of a
mystic in ecstasy - the observer could meaningfully say that the other
experienced eternal life, or lived in eternity, for five minutes, or as the case
might be, for fifteen, or for some other finite time, on a given occasion.
3. Causes of belief in survival
[top]
The first question which arises in connection
with the idea that there is for the individual an after-death life is why the
belief in it is so widespread.
The clue to the answer is to be found in the fact that each of us has always
been alive and conscious as far back as he can remember. It is true, of course,
that his body is sometimes sunk in deep sleep, or in a faint, or in coma from
some injury or grave illness; or that the inhaling of ether or some other
anaesthetic makes him unconscious of the surgical operation he then undergoes.
But, even at those times a person does not experience unconsciousness, for to
experience it would mean being conscious of being unconscious; and this, being a
contradiction, is impossible. Indeed, at such times, he may be having vivid
dreams; and these are one kind of consciousness. The only experience of
unconsciousness a person ever has is, not of total unconsciousness, but of
unconsciousness of this or that; as when he reports: "I am not conscious of any
pain," or "of any difference between the color of this and of that," etc.
Nor do we ever experience as present in another person unconsciousness itself,
but only the fact that, sometimes, some or all of the ordinary activities of his
body, through which his being conscious previously manifested itself to us,
cease to occur. That consciousness itself is extinguished at such times is only
a hypothesis which we construct to account for certain changes in the behavior
of another person's body; or to explain the eventual lack in him - or, as the
case may be, in ourselves - of memories relating to the period during which the
body - his or our own was in an inert, unresponsive state.
Lack of present memory of having been conscious at a particular past time
obviously is no proof at all that one was unconscious at that time; for if it
were, then it would prove that one was unconscious during the first few years of
one's life, and indeed during the vast majority of its days, since one has no
memory whatever of one's experiences on any but a very small minority of one's
past days. That we were conscious on the others is known to us not by memory of
them, but only by inference from facts of various kinds.
The fact, then, is that each person has been alive and conscious at all times he
can remember. Being alive and conscious has therefore become in him an ingrained
habit; and habit automatically entails both tacit expectations and tacit belief
that what is tacitly expected will occur(2). Just as every step which finds
ground underfoot builds up tacit belief that so will the subsequent steps, and
every breath which finds air to breathe, tacit belief that so will the
subsequent breaths, just so does the fact that every past day of one's life was
found to have a morrow contribute to generate tacit expectation and belief that
every day of one's life will have a living morrow. As J. B. Pratt has pointed
out, the child takes the continuity of life for granted. It is the fact of death
that has to be taught him. But when he has learned it, and the idea of a future
life is then put explicitly before his mind, it seems to him the most natural
thing in the world(3).
(2) Cf. C. D. Broad: The Mind and its Place in Nature, p. 524.
(3) S. B. Pratt: The Religious Consciousness, Macmillan, New York, 1943, p. 225.
Such, undoubtedly, is the psychological origin of the widespread ingenuous
belief that one's life and that of one's fellows does not end at death.
Another root of the idea and belief that persons who were known to us and have
died continue to live - and hence that we too shall survive after death - is the
fact that sometimes those persons, as well as persons who are still in the
flesh, appear to us in dreams. Especially when the dream was both vivid and
plausible, it easily suggests a view of the human personality which is rather
common among primitive peoples and which has been held even by some educated and
critical persons. It is that each person's body of flesh has a subtle
counterpart or double, which can become detached from and function independently
of that body; this separation being temporary as it occurs in periods of sleep
during life, but permanent at the death of the body.
Evidently, such an idea of the constitution of man fits in very well with the
ingenuous natural belief in life beyond death, for it provides concrete images
in which to clothe the otherwise elusive abstract notion of a personality living
on, discarnate.
Belief in a life after death, however, might conceivably originate in a given
person in either one of two ways less ingenuous than those described in what
precedes. One of these more critical ways would be out of attention to certain
occurrences observed or reported, and then interpreted as empirical evidence of
the survival of a deceased person. Communications purportedly from such a person
and containing identifying details, received either through a "medium" or by
oneself through automatic writing; or sight of an "apparition" of the dead
person, would be examples of the kinds of experience in view.
The other possible kind of rational origin which belief in a life after death
might have in a given person would be attention by him to arguments which,
whether really or only seemingly, cogent, purport to prove immortality on
metaphysical grounds. It is safe to say, however, that the belief can have this
origin only in a very few persons, and that those arguments, irrespective of
their cogency or lack of it, function in fact for the majority of those who know
and accept them, much rather only as rationalizations of a belief in immortality
they had previously acquired either in the automatic manner described earlier,
or out of wishful thinking, or out of uncritically accepted childhood teachings.
We shall eventually consider the merits of both of the above kinds - empirical
and theoretical - of prima facie evidence for survival. At this point, however,
what we must ask is why survival is desired by the many persons who do desire
it; and what general connection obtains between desire and belief, lack of
desire and lack of belief.
4. Why a life after death is desired
[top]
One does not actually desire valued things
which one already has or assumes one has. They get desired only when loss of
them occurs or threatens. This, which is true for instance of desire for air to
breathe or for earth to stand on, is equally true of desire for continuation of
life. It is not until the witnessing or the awareness of death thrusts upon the
mind the question whether the life that was continues somehow, that actual
desire for life beyond death arises. From then on, the desire operates
automatically to bolster the shaken naive belief in survival, and the belief in
so far becomes a "wishful belief."
The desire for survival of oneself and of other persons has its roots in a
variety of more specific desires which death immediately frustrates, but
satisfaction of which a life beyond death would make possible even if not
automatically insure. In some persons. the chief of these is desire for reunion
with persons dearly loved. In others, whose lives have been wretched, it is
desire for another chance at the happiness they have missed. In others yet, it
is desire for further opportunity to grow in ability, knowledge, character,
wisdom; or to go on contributing significant achievements. Again, a future life
for oneself and others is often desired in order that the redressing of the many
injustices of the present life shall be possible.
Even in persons who believe that death means complete and final extinction of
the individual's consciousness, the craving for continued existence is testified
to by the comfort they often find in various substitute but assured forms of
"survival." They may, for instance, dwell on the continuity of the individual's
germ plasm in his descendants. Or they find solace in the thought that, the past
being indestructible, the particular life they live will remain ever after an
intrinsic part of the history of the world. Also-and more satisfying to the
craving for personal importance there is the fact that since the acts of one's
life have effects, and these in turn further effects, and so on, therefore what
one has done goes on forever influencing remotely, and sometimes greatly, the
course of future events.
Gratifying to one's vanity, too, is the prospect that, if the achievements of
one's life have been important or even only conspicuous, or one's benefactions
or evil deeds notable, then one's name may be remembered not only by
acquaintances and relatives for a little while, but may live on in recorded
history.
Evidently, survival in any of these senses is but a consolation prize for the
certainty of bodily death - a thin substitute for the continuation of conscious
individual life, which may be disbelieved, but the natural craving for which
nevertheless is evidenced by the comfort which the considerations just mentioned
even then provide.
5. Causes of disinterest or of disbelief in survival
[top]
Lack of belief and even
positive disbelief in survival are certainly more widespread now in Western
countries than was the case in earlier times. Of the various causes which
account for this, one of the chief is probably "the greater attractiveness of
this world in our times and the increase of interests of all sorts which keep
one's attention too firmly fastened here to allow of much thought being spent on
the other world."(4)
(4) J. B. Pratt: The Religious Consciousness, The Macmillan Co. N. Y. 1943, p.
238.
As compared with earlier ages, the standard of living is now high for the large
majority of the populations of Western countries. Leisure has greatly increased,
and so have political liberties. Class distinctions no longer firmly stand, as
formerly, in the way of personal ambition. And when there is pie at the baker's
and money for it in one's pocket, "pie in the sky" is not thought of and hence
not desired. It is when life is hard, joyless, and hopeless that one dreams of
and longs for escape to another world where those who on earth were the
miserable last shall be the happy first.
Again, in the present Age of Science the spirit of critical inquiry, with its
demand for proofs, has robbed the teachings of religion of the authority they
had earlier. One consequence of this, and of the materialistic conception of the
nature of man fostered by contemporary science, has been that the unplausibility
- to use no stronger term-of the picturesque ideas of the life after death which
had been traditional in the Western world has become glaring. And this in turn
has deprived the idea of a future life of the support which desire for it had
previously lent it; for, as Pratt pointedly remarks, "some sort of belief in at
least the possibility of the object is a condition of any real desire for
it."(5)
(5) Op. Cit. p. 239.
These are the chief factors which have caused substantial numbers of persons
today to doubt or positively disbelieve that there is for the individual
consciousness any life after the body's death; or at least to view the idea of
it with little or no interest. These persons, however, although numerous, are
probably still a rather small minority of the population; for death goes on
frustrating of expression one's love of persons who were dear, and thereby
thrusting upon the living the idea of a life after death, stimulating in them
the desire that such life be a fact; and, through this desire, fostering the
belief that it is a fact.
6. Causes of, distinguished from grounds for, belief or disbelief
[top]
It may not be
amiss to stress here, however, that the arguments, the empirical facts, or the
longings which suffice to convince some persons that a given idea is true, are
not necessarily sufficient to prove or even to make objectively probable that
the idea is true. For convincing is a psychological process where rhetoric and
appeal to bias of various kinds are usually more efficacious than would be sound
logic; and where automatic yielding to long-established habits of interpretation
of appearances commonly takes the place of scrupulous verification.
It is only in exceptionally rational persons, or in exceptionally rational
moments of the rest of us, or in circumstances where nothing tempts us to jump
to unwarranted conclusions, that only what suffices to prove suffices to
convince; or, when the conclusion concerned is an unwelcome one, that what does
suffice to prove or to establish a positive probability also suffices to
convince.
However, since we are now emphasizing that many beliefs, for example belief in
survival after death, can be and often are acquired uncritically, i.e., without
adequate evidence or perhaps any evidence that the beliefs are true,
impartiality requires us to stress also that the fact that a given belief has
been acquired uncritically is not by itself positive evidence that the belief
concerned is erroneous. What its having been so acquired does it only to put the
burden of proof on the person who so acquired it, and who maintains that it is
true.
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