play this open chance in face of those “results of modern science” which are so often declared adverse to it.
What, then, is the exact “open chance” that Professor James leaves us, in this urgent question of immortality, by his transmission-theory of the function performed by the brain for consciousness? Does the transmission-theory, in strict logic, indeed draw the fangs of cerebralistic materialism? — does it take away the real sting of death? The answer to this question depends on the answer we shall have to give to another — whether the transmission-theory, as managed by Professor James, establishes any chance for the personal immortality of each of us. For the real sting of death is the apprehension in each of us that he may perish in dying; and no hope of the changeless persistence of any eternal “mother sea” of consciousness, Divine or other, can afford us any consolation if this dread of our personal extinction be not set at rest.
Professor James has himself partly realised this critical issue in the case. “Still you will ask,” he says, “in what positive way does this theory help us to realise our immortality in imagination?”[1] He alludes here to his previous statement, that the transmission-theory implies the “mother sea” of eternal consciousness, in accordance with which
- ↑ Human Immortality, p. 29.
