Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/276

 262 NEW BOOKS. a neglect which can hardly continue after the striking manner in which he has called attention to it. Nor is the forlorn hope to be envied on whom will devolve the task of attacking Prof. James's position. For that, logically, seems well-nigh impregnable. Among the details of the argument it should be noted that Prof. James is careful to point out that he leaves the nature of the mind which manifests itself through the brain- processes an open question, and that for a good pluralist " there may be many minds behind the scenes as well as one ". Further he holds that the alternative he supports possesses great advantages over the materialist theory in the explaining of the origination of consciousness, and of the shifting of the psychophysical threshold as well as in the comprehension of supernormal phenomena. As for the difficulty of explaining " how the brain can be an organ for limiting and determining to a certain form a consciousness elsewhere produced," all that is needed is " to retort with a tu quoque asking . . . how it can be an organ for producing consciousness out of whole cloth ". Prof. James's second point concerns itself with the objection to an in- finite multiplication of immortal beings of a lowly and disgusting character. This objection is rooted in aesthetic sentiment and is answered by an appeal to religious sentiment. Here, however, Prof. James seems to be dealing with less crucial matters and to answer in a less conclusive way. It may be doubted whether the objection to " the incredible and intoler- able number " of immortal beings is as modern as he supposes, and was not felt while the world seemed " a comparatively small and snug affair ". At all events, the theories of pre -existence and metempsychosis are among the earliest and most universal ingredients in the belief in immortality, and with a little modernising they even now contain a very complete answer to the difficulty in question. Prof. James's suggestion, on the other hand, that God's infinite sympathy transcends ours and embraces even the humblest creatures in its appreciation, postulates a previous decision of the question whether sub specie seternitatis individual personalities retain any value. It may be, of course, that from the point of the whole all its parts possess an equal value which is infinite rather than infinitesimal, but the fact remains that most religious and philosophic ' theologies,' wittingly or unwittingly, render this an uncommonly difficult belief to sustain. Still Prof. James can hardly be wrong in thinking that the difficulty he discusses is a real one and that it is a real service to have ventilated it. For ventilation by the most approved modern methods is what the whole subject most sorely needs. At present it forms one of the darkest and dustiest of the lumber-rooms that are the province of philosophy. It is a mass of decayed traditions and distorted facts, of half-hearted aspira- tions, broken beliefs and uncompleted inferences, haunted and defiled by savage prejudices which cannot bear the light of day. Hardly any attempt has been made to work out systematically the theoretic possibilities of the subject. Almost all the relevant facts are bitterly disputed. Even the psychological facts as to men's actual thoughts, feelings and desires on the subject are very imperfectly known, and would probably occasion no slight surprise to those who are content to adopt the literary tradition that ' man naturally desires to be immortal '. It is only by a complete change in the social atmosphere which envelops it that the subject can be rendered fit for really rigorous investigation. No one who has tried will underrate either the extreme difficulty and delicacy of the task of rendering the social atmosphere fit for such scientific work or the slow- ness with which even under the most favourable circumstances it can be achieved. .But if Prof. James's gallant efforts to introduce some fresh air