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William James on Immortality: An unsigned review of Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine, by William James
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London: J. M. Dent, 1917.
These two editions are convenient reprints of the Ingersoll Lecture of 1898.
The place of the lecture among James’s works, it must be admitted, is not a very important one. The sub-title of the lecture is characteristic of an attitude very frequent in James: the union of sceptical and destructive habits of mind with positive enthusiasm for freedom in philosophy and thought. His own personal feeling about immortality, he admits frankly, “has never been of the keenest order” [13], but he had great curiosity, and a curiously charming willingness to believe anything that seemed preposterous to the ordinary scientific mind. He hated oppression in any form; the oppression of dogmatic theology was remote from him, who lived in the atmosphere of Unitarian Harvard; but the oppression of idealistic philosophy and the oppression of scientific materialism were very real to him. Many of James’s ideas may be due rather to his antipathy to other people’s narrow convictions than to convictions of his own; as when, in a footnote to this lecture, he suggests a notion which he repeats elsewhere more emphatically, that “there might be many minds [
Philosophically, the footnotes, though they are chiefly citations, contain several suggestions which are more provocative than the lecture itself. They show that James was already struggling toward the philosophy barely outlined at his death, the “Radical Empiricism” which he considered more
An absolute phenomenism, not believing such a dualism (of mind and matter) to be ultimate, may possibly end by solving some of the problems that are insoluble when propounded in dualistic terms. [62]
The two points made and elaborated in the body of the lecture are the “transmission” theory of psycho-physics,