As we explore the deeps of the subconsciousness, our own and other people's, we find ourselves confronting the strange question: Is it all our own mind, and that of other living people, or are we by any chance dealing with the minds of those who are dead? A great many earnest people, and some very learned people, are fully convinced that the latter is the case, and we have now to consider their arguments.
When I was a little boy I used to read and hear ghost stories, and would shudder over them; but I was given to understand that all this was just imagination, I must not take ghosts seriously, any more than fairies or dragons or nymphs or satyrs. For an educated person to take ghosts seriously—well, such a person would be almost as comical as that supremely comical person, the flying-machine man. Would you believe it, in those days there actually were people who believed they could learn to fly in the air, and spent their time manufacturing machines for this purpose! There was a scientist in Washington who had this "bug," and built himself a machine and started to fly, and fell into the Potomac river. We all laughed at him—we laughed so long and so loud that we killed the poor man; and then, a few years later, somebody took that machine of Professor Langley's and actually did fly with it! But that was after I had grown up a bit more, and was not quite so ready to laugh at an idea because it was new.
I remember vividly my first meeting with a man who believed in ghosts. He was a Unitarian clergyman, the Reverend Minot J. Savage of New York. I was sixteen years old, and just breaking out of my theological shell, and Doctor Savage helped to pry me loose. He was a grave and kindly man, of great learning and intelligence, and I remember vividly my consternation when one day he told me—oh, yes, he had seen many ghosts, he was accustomed to talk with ghosts every now and then. There was no doubt whatever that ghosts existed!
He told me many stories. I remember one so well that I do not have to go back to his books to look up the details. It was in the days before the Atlantic cable, and he had a friend who took a steamer to England. One night Doctor Savage was awakened and found the ghost of his friend standing by his bedside. The ship had gone down off the Irish coast, so the ghost declared, but the friend did not want Doctor Savage to think that he had suffered from the pangs of drowning; he had been struck on the left side of the head by a beam of the ship and had been killed instantly. Doctor Savage wrote down these circumstances and had them witnessed by a number of people, and two or three weeks later he received word that the body of his friend had been found on the Irish coast, with the left side of the head crushed in.
So then, of course, I studied the subject of ghosts. I have studied it off and on ever since, and have read most of the important new discoveries and arguments of the psychic researchers. To begin with, I will mention the contents of two large volumes, Gurney's "Phantasms of the Living." In this book are narrated many hundreds of cases, of which Doctor Savage's story is a type. It appears that persons at the moment of death, or in times of great mental stress, do somehow have the power to communicate with other people, even at the other side of the world. A few such cases might be attributed to coincidence or to fraud, but when you have so many cases, attested in minute detail by so many hundreds of otherwise honest people, you are not being scientific but simply stupid if you dismiss the whole subject with contempt.
Gurney discusses the phenomenon and its probable causes. We know, of course, that hallucinations are among the most common of psychic phenomenon. Your subconscious mind can be caused to see and hear and feel anything; likewise it has power to cause you to see and hear and feel anything. In practically all cases of multiple personality some of the split-off personalities can cause the others to see and hear and feel. And the consciousness, you must understand, takes these things to be just as real as real things; there is no way you can tell an hallucination from reality—except to ask other people about it. And if we admit the idea of telepathy, we may say that phantasms are hallucinations caused by this means; that is, the subconscious mind of your wife or your mother or your friend who is ill or dying, transmits to your subconscious mind some vivid impression, which causes your own subconscious mind to present to your consciousness a perfect image of that person, walking and talking with you, and your consciousness has no way of telling but that the image is real.
So much for phantasms of the living. But are there any phantasms of the dead? Are there any cases in which the time of the appearance can be proven to be subsequent to the time of death? Even this would not prove survival, of course; it is perfectly possible that the telepathic impulse might be delayed in our own minds, it might not flash into consciousness until our own state of mind made it possible. Can we say that there are cases in which the facts communicated are such as to convince us that the person was already dead, and was telling us something as a dead person and not as a living one?
Before we go into this question, let us clear the ground for the subject by discussing the survival of personality from a more general standpoint. What is it that we want to prove? What are the probabilities of its being true? What would be the consequences of its not being true? Have we any grounds, other than those of psychic research, for thinking that it is true, or that it may be true, or that it ought to be true? What, so to speak, are the morals of the doctrine of immortality?
Well, to begin with, the survival of the soul after death and forever is one of the principal doctrines of the Christian religion. Many devout Christians will read this book, and I will seem to them blasphemous when I say that this argument does not concern me. I count myself one of the lovers and friends of Jesus, I am presumptuous enough to believe that if he were on earth, I would understand him and get along with him excellently; but I do not know any reason why I should believe this, that, or the other doctrine about life because any religious sect, founded upon the name of Jesus, commands me so to believe. I see no more reason for adopting the idea of heaven because it is a Christian idea than I see for adopting the idea of reincarnation because it is a precious and holy idea to hundreds of millions of Buddhists. I have some very good friends who are Theosophists, and are quite convinced of this idea of reincarnation; that is, that the soul comes back into life over and over again in many different bodies, thus completing itself and renewing itself and expiating its sins. My Theosophist friends have a most elaborate and complicated body of what they consider to be knowledge on this subject; yet I have to take the liberty of saying that I cannot see that it has any relation to reality. It seems to me as completely unproven as any other fairy story, or myth, or legend—for example, the seven infernos of Dante, and the elaborate and complicated torments that are suffered there.
But, it will be argued, Jesus rose from the dead, and thus proved the immortality of the soul. Now, in the first place, there are many learned investigators who consider there is insufficient evidence for believing that Jesus ever lived; and certainly if this be so, it will be difficult to prove that he rose from the dead. Again, it was a common occurrence for crucified men not to die; sometimes it happened that their guards allowed them to be spirited away—even nowadays we have known of prison guards being bribed to allow a prisoner to escape. Again, the events of the return of Jesus may have been just such psychic phenomena as we are trying in this chapter to explain. Or, once more, they may have been purely legends. A very brief study will convince a thinking person that the people of that time were ready to believe anything, and to accept facts upon such authority, and to make them the basis for a scientific conclusion, is simply to be childish.
I shall be told, of course, that it is in the Bible, and therefore it must be true. The Bible is inspired, you say; and perhaps this is so. But then, a great deal of other literature is inspired, and that does not relieve me of the task of comparing these various inspirations, and judging them, and picking out what is of use to me. The Bible is the literature of the ancient Hebrews for a couple of thousand years. It represents what the race mind of a great people for one generation after another judged worth recording and preserving. You may get an idea what this means, if you will picture to yourself a large volume of English literature, containing some Teutonic myths, and the Saxon chronicles, and the "Morte d'Arthur," and several of Chaucer's stories, and some Irish fairy tales, and some of Bacon's essays, and Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis," and the English prayer book, and the architect's specifications for Westminster Abbey, and a good part of "Burke's Peerage"; also Blackstone's "Commentaries," a number of Wesley's hymns, and Pope's "Essay on Man," and some chapters of Carlyle's "Past and Present," and Gladstone's speeches, and Blake's poems, and Captain Cook's story of his voyage around the world, and Southey's "Life of Nelson," and Morris's "News from Nowhere," and Blatchford's "Merrie England," and scores of pages from Hansard, which is the equivalent of our Congressional Record. You may find this description irreverent, but do not think it is meant so. Do me the honor to get out your Bible and look it over from this point of view!
But, you say, if we die altogether when we finish this earthly life, what becomes of moral responsibility and the punishment of sins? What shall we say to the wicked man to make him be good, if we cannot reward him with a heaven and frighten him with a hell? Well, my first answer is that we have been trying this process for a couple of thousand years, and the results seem to indicate that we might better seek out some other method of inducing men to behave themselves. They do not believe so completely in heaven and hell these days, but there were times in history when they did believe completely, and not merely were the believers just as cruel, they were just as treacherous and just as gluttonous and just as drunken. If you want to satisfy yourself on this point, I refer you to my book "The Profits of Religion," page 129.
Now, as a matter of fact, I think I can discern the outlines of a system of rewards and punishments automatically working in the life of men. I am not sure that I can prove that the wicked always get punished and the virtuous always rewarded; yet, when I stop and think, I am sure that I would not care to change places with any of the wicked people that I know in this world. Life may not always be "getting" them, but it has a way of "getting" their descendants, and I could not be entirely happy if I knew that my son and his sons were going to share the fate which I now observe befalling, for example, the grand dukes of Russia and their children. Life is one thing, and it does not exist for the individual, but for the race; its causes and effects do not always manifest themselves in one individual, but in a line of descendants. "Why are they called dynasties?" asked one of my professors of history; and a student brought the session to an end by answering: "Because that is what they always seem to do!"
But this is not perfect justice, you will argue. It is not perfect, from the point of view of you or me; but then, I ask, what else is there in the world that is perfect from that point of view? Why should our justice be any more perfect than, for example, our health or our thinking or our climate or our government? And, may it not very well be that our justice is up to us, in precisely the same way that some of these other things are up to us? Maybe what we have to do is to set to work to see to it that virtue does always get rewarded and vice does always get punished, right here and now, instead of waiting for an omnipotent God to attend to it in some hypothetical heaven.
I find this life of mine very wonderful, and enormously interesting. I am willing to take it on the terms that it is given, and to try to make the best of it; and I do not see that I have any right to dictate what shall be given me in some future life. If my father gives me a Christmas present, I am happy and grateful; and, of course, if I know that he is going to give me another present next Christmas, I am still more happy; but I do not see that I have any right to argue that because he gives me one Christmas present, he must give me an unlimited number of them, and I think it would be very ungrateful of me to refuse to thank him for a Christmas present until I had made sure that I was to get one next time!
Neither do I find myself such a wonderful person that I can assert that the morality of the universe absolutely depends upon the fact that I am immortal. Of course, I should like to live forever, and to know all the wonderful things that are going to happen in the world, and if it is true that I am so to live, I shall be immensely delighted. But I cannot say that it must be true, and all I can do is to investigate the probabilities. On this point my view is stated in a sentence of Spinoza's: "He who would love God rightly must not desire that God love him in return."
To sum up, the question of immortality is purely a question of fact. It is one to be approached in a spirit of open-minded inquiry, entirely unaffected by hopes or fears or dogmas or moral claims. It is worth while to get clear that we may be immortal, even though we do not now know it and cannot now prove it; it is possible that all psychic research might end in telepathy, and still, when we die, we might wake up and find ourselves alive. It might possibly be that some of us are immortal and not all of us. It might be that some parts of us are immortal and not the rest. It might be that our subconsciousness is immortal and not our consciousness. It might be that all of us, or some part of us, survive for a time, but not forever. This last is something which I myself am inclined to think may be the case.
Also, it seems worthwhile to mention that it is no argument against immortality that we cannot imagine it, that we cannot picture a universe consisting of uncountable billions of living souls, or what these souls would do to pass the time. It may very well be that among these souls there is no such thing as time. It may be that they are thoroughly occupied in ways beyond our imagining, or again, that they are not occupied, and under no necessity of being occupied. Let the person who presents such arguments begin by picturing to you how the brain cells manage to store up the uncounted millions of memories which you have, the thousands of words and combinations of words, and the thoughts which go with them, musical notes and tunes, colors and odors and visual impressions, memories of the past and hopes of the future and dreams that never were. Where are all those hundreds of millions of things, and what are they like when they are not in our consciousness, and how do they pass the time, and where were they in the hundreds of millions of years before we were born, and where will they be in the hundreds of millions of years of the future? When our wise men can answer these questions completely, it will be time enough for them to tell us about the impossibility of immortality.