Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/343

282 that our brains are such thin and half-transparent places in the veil. What will happen? Why, as the white radiance comes through the dome with all sorts of staining and distortion imprinted on it by the glass,. . . even so the genuine matter of reality, the life of souls as it is in its fulness, will break through our several brains into this world in all sorts of restricted forms, and with all the imperfections and queernesses that characterise our finite individualities here below.”

This ideal theory of the true and real being that hides behind phenomena. Professor James, I repeat, puts forward only as a possible hypothesis, to point and emphasise his contention that “when we think of the law that thought is a function of the brain, we are not required to think of productive function only; we are entitled also to consider permissive or transmissive function.” For, on this hypothesis, “our soul’s life, as we here know it, would none the less in literal strictness be the function of the brain.” And his object in this contention is to display the pertinent and pointed moral, that “dependence of this sort on the brain for this natural life would in no wise make immortal life impossible; it might be quite compatible with supernatural life behind the veil hereafter.” So that “in strict logic, then,