PHILOSOPHY AND THE BELIEF IN

A LIFE AFTER DEATH

LIBRARY OF PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION

General Editor: John Hick, Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in
the Humanities, University of Birmingham

This series of books explores contemporary religious understandings of

humanity and the universe. The books contribute to various aspects of the
continuing dialogues between religion and philosophy, between scepticism
and faith, and between the different religions and ideologies. The authors
represent a correspondingly wide range of viewpoints. Some of the books
in the series are written for the general educated public and others for a
more specialised philosophical or theological readership.

Selected titles

ISSUES IN CONTEMPORARY JUDAISM

Dan Cohn-Sherbok
ISLAM IN A WORLD OF DIVERSE FAITHS (editor)
MORAL SCEPTICISM
Clement Do re
GOD, SUFFERING AND SOLIPSISM
PROBLEMS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF
Harold Hewitt RELIGION (editor)
J. Kellenberger INTER-RELIGIOUS MODELS AND CRITERIA
Carl Olson THE THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY OE
ELIADE
Alan G. Padgett GOD, ETERNH Y AND THE NATURE OF TIME
Joseph Runzo IS GOD REAL? (editor)
WORLD VIEWS AND PERCEIVING GOD
Arvind Sharma A HINDU PERSPECTIVE ON HE PHILOSOPHY
OF RELIGION
Norman Solomon JUDAISM AND WORLD RELIGION
Melville Y. Stewart THE GREATER-GOOD DEFENCE
Jonathan Sutton THE RELIGIOUS IT IILOSOPHY OF VLADIMIR
SOLOVYOV
Roger Teichmann ABSTRACT ENTITIES
Donald Wiebe BEYOND LEGITIMATION
Richard Worsley HUMAN FREEDOM AND THE LOGIC OF EVIL
Philosophy and the
Belief in a Life
After Death

R. W. K. Paterson
Formerly Senior Lecturer in Philosophy
University of Hull
w First published in Great Britain 1995 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
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from the British Library.
ISBN 0 333 61633-2

First published in the United States of America 1995 by

& ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC.,
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 0-312-12838-X

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Paterson, R. W. K. (Ronald William Keith)
Philosophy and the belief in a life after death / R. W. K. Paterson
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-312-12838-X
1. Future life. 2. Future life—Controversial literature.
3. Immortality (Philosophy) 4. Immortality (Philosophy)-
-Controversial literature. I. Title.
BL535.347 1995
129—dc20 95-23638
CIP

© R . W . K . Paterson 1995
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 Contents

1 Philosophy, Belief and Disbelief 1

2 Problems of Post-Mortem Identity 21

3 The Mental and the Physical 59

4 General Arguments for the Immortality of the Soul 103

5 The Evidence from Psychical Research 131

6 The Concept of an Afterlife 191

Notes and References 213

Index 221

v
 1
Philosophy, Belief and
Disbelief

By engaging in philosophy we are agreeing to put our beliefs to

the test of logic. We are demonstrating our willingness to subject
the concepts which figure in our beliefs to logical analysis, to an
intensive scanning for hidden inconsistencies, obscurities, or
ambiguities; and we are accepting that the grounds on which we
hold our beliefs need to be logically evaluated, fallacies in
reasoning detected, concealed premises identified, and different
forms of relevance established. Actually, we have no option. An
incoherent belief is not a belief at all, but merely a jumble of
words or perhaps of muddled impressions and feelings. And
although we may indeed hold beliefs for which we have no good
grounds, we must then expose ourselves to the wholly justified
charge of childishly sheltering in private fantasies.
Some of the issues tackled by philosophers are purely
philosophical in character. Examples of these are problems about
universals, the justification of induction, the ontological argu-
ment for the existence of a God, or about the general notion of
identity. Such problems centre entirely on the possible logical
relations between concepts and involve only arguments of a
purely formal character, with no admixture of any empirical
content whatsoever. But there are many other problems, in
which philosophers have a major interest, which are intellec-
tually composite. That is, in addition to strictly philosophical
elements, these kinds of problem also involve reference to
various types of claimed empirical fact. Hence a complete
solution to these problems would require answers to both the

1
2 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

logical and the factual questions of which they are composed.

The distinctive contribution of philosophy in these cases is thus
absolutely necessary, but (perhaps subject to a qualification
which we shall later note) is by no means sufficient. Examples of
such intellectually composite problems are the free will/
determinism controversy, the nature of the relation between
mind and brain, and the religious problem of evil. Another
example is the problem of whether or not human personality
survives bodily death.
Admittedly there are a few celebrated arguments for the
immortality of the soul which are of a purely philosophical kind
because they depend entirely on drawing out the logical
implications of concepts like 'unity', 'destruction', and so on.
These will be examined in due course. Mainly, however, the
present work will be concerned, not with the concept of
immortality or endless life, but with the more limited concept
of a life after death. No doubt many people believe that, if they
were to survive bodily death, this would be a sure sign that they
were immortal, perhaps on the not completely unreasonable
principle that 'il n'y a que le premier pas qui coute'. However (to
say the least) this is a question which must not be begged. At any
rate if a person did not survive his bodily death for an initial
finite time, it seems clear that he could not survive his death for
an endless time. 1 Because survival of death is clearly a necessary
condition of personal immortality, this alone would justify us in
examining the many philosophical objections to the former
concept, since if these objections have adequate force they will
necessarily rule out the latter concept. It need hardly be added
that, if it should turn out that there were no adequate objections
to the concept of a life after death, this philosophical conclusion
would in no way establish that there is a life after death.
Nevertheless such an outcome would be of the first importance.
For if it could be shown that a life after death was not a priori
impossible, we should then be mandated to collect, sift, and
weigh up the many varieties of evidence which putatively bear
upon this question, in the hope that empirical inquiry would
progressively enable us to make a reasoned assessment of the
relative probability or improbability of survival.
Now because philosophy (like pure mathematics) is an a priori
inquiry, its conclusions, if correct, are held to be necessarily
 Philosophy, Belief and Disbelief 3

correct. What these conclusions assert is the only possible state of

affairs, and all alternative states of affairs are logically impos-
sible. And if something is logically impossible, it cannot be.
Because empirical beliefs, however improbable, may be true, it is
always a meaningful exercise to investigate the chances of
their being true. Thus there might be a golden mountain in the
jungles of Brazil, but there cannot be a spherical golden cube
anywhere on earth, and it is quite useless for explorers to hunt
for one.
As a consequence we can, I think, detect a certain professional
tendency among philosophers who have addressed the intellec-
tually composite types of problem I have mentioned. They have
tended to seek answers to the philosophical elements in the
overall problem which, consisting of necessary truths, will
decisively rule out various classes of solution to the whole
problem. For example, many philosophers have argued that the
notion of a 'free acf is logically incoherent, or that interactionist
dualism is literally inconceivable because mental processes,
endowed with no physical energy, could not possibly be thought
of as producing changes in a physical brain. If these findings
were valid, they would absolutely rule out all beliefs in free will
or in interactionist dualism as a theory of mind and body, thus
demonstrating any empirical research into these hypotheses to
be a complete waste of time. Such an outcome, though seemingly
negative, would be an immense achievement, serving to focus
research efforts on truly worthwhile problems.2
Of course philosophers might alternatively conclude that some
a priori arguments for free will, or immortality, or the existence
of a Creator, were formally valid. In that case, whatever the
apparent evidence against these beliefs, it would be a necessary
truth that we were free, or immortal, or the creatures of a God,
and all empirical research into the opposite hypotheses would
have been shown to be useless and wasteful.
Finally, philosophical analysis might show that free will, mind-
brain interaction, or the existence of a Creator, are logically
coherent notions but that there are no sound arguments which can
either demonstrate or refute them a priori. Unless they produced
further grounds to show that such great problems are intrinsically
incapable of solution and that we must therefore remain forever
agnostic on these issues (a possibility we shall later consider), the
4 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

upshot of their philosophical work would be that the solutions to

them must ultimately come from empirical inquiry. The con-
tribution of philosophy will then have been to open u p the way for
empirical research by showing that the search for relevant
empirical facts is indeed a significant intellectual endeavour.
But the contribution of philosophy will not stop there. It will have
logical comments to make on proposed classifications of the facts,
on criteria of relevance, on research methodologies, on the
legitimacy of inferences from the assembled facts, on alternative
models for interpreting the facts, and on many associated topics
which solicit philosophical attention. However, it will have
performed the crucial philosophical service of showing that the
issue is primarily a factual one.
Now I shall proceed on the assumption that the problem of
whether there is or is not in some sense a life after death is not a
purely philosophical problem but is an intellectually composite
problem, made u p of both philosophical and empirical elements.
I shall argue that the concept of a post-mortem existence is not
logically incoherent, despite the major philosophical objections
often marshalled against it; and hence that the truth or falsehood
of the proposition that people survive their bodily deaths is pre-
eminently a matter of empirical fact, one way or the other. Thus
the probability or improbability of the belief in this proposition
will reflect the degree to which it is relevantly supported or
undermined by the best evidence available from psychology,
parapsychology, physiology, historical research, physics, and
perhaps other fields of empirical inquiry. Too many professional
philosophers have tended to suppose that the issue can be
resolved very quickly through philosophical analysis alone, by
means of a few knock-down arguments showing that the very
idea of personal survival of bodily death is logically impossible
and that the putatively favourable evidence is therefore
necessarily irrelevant and can be dismissed after little more than
a token inspection, conducted mainly for the purpose of
illustrating a number of endemic fallacies. But equally too many
unsophisticated believers in survival have tended to be utterly
ignorant of the real philosophical difficulties in the way of their
cherished belief, or to dismiss these as mere logic chopping.
The principal aim of the present work, therefore, will be to
show that the idea of personal survival of bodily death is a
 Philosophy, Belief and Disbelief 5

logically possible one, and that ultimately the issue depends on

the most reasonable interpretation to be placed on the relevant
facts. Yet, even if this conclusion is correct, two large
philosophical tasks remain. First, the idea of a life after death,
even if coherent, is still pretty vague and ambiguous, and the
various senses in which it is conceivable need to be distinguished
and compared. Secondly, the evidence for and against survival is
drawn from a number of very different fields of inquiry, some
highly rigorous and definite, such as neurophysiology, and
others, such as parapsychology, much more problematic and less
rigorous. In the nature of the case all the unfavourable evidence
is indirect, purporting to show that, given the massive quantity
and high quality of this evidence, survival of death is extremely
improbable; while most (but not all) of the favourable evidence is
of a direct kind and professes to show that, despite the huge
quantity of intellectually formidable counter-evidence, there is a
relatively small but sufficiently sizable body of directly suppor-
tive facts which demonstrate survival in the teeth of its
antecedent improbability. The comparative evaluation of quan-
tity, quality, rigour, directness and indirectness in respect of
diverse types and bodies of evidence is, it will surely be granted,
a properly (though not exclusively) philosophical task.

We have seen that if some state of affairs is logically impossible,

that state of affairs necessarily does not obtain. There is no room
for probability, because logical impossibility is absolute impos-
sibility. However, establishing that a claimed state of affairs is
logically impossible may be fraught with difficulties, since it
tends to be only uninteresting beliefs which are self-evidently
false. 'Smith was born in January and Brown in July, but they
have the same birthday' is transparently self-contradictory, and
therefore not worth discussing. Somewhat more interesting
beliefs, for example 'A physical object can sometimes be in two
places at once', may be somewhat more difficult to prove self-
contradictory, since they may secrete relevant ambiguities, for
example about criteria of physical identity. And highly interest-
ing beliefs, such as 'A dream has no location in physical space',
may be so extremely difficult to establish as inherently false (or
true) that philosophers who have spent years considering them
6 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

may disagree about whether they are necessarily false or

necessarily true, whilst agreeing that they are necessarily one
or the other.
The reason for this is that human beings are fallible, and that
some beliefs are extremely complex. Even in so straightforward a
matter as adding up a long column of figures, knowing that there
can be only one correct answer, two intelligent people may
disconcertingly arrive at different answers. It is not surprising
that, in the case of propositions such as 'A truly individual thing
cannot be divisible and therefore cannot be extended in space',
involving highly abstract concepts with extensive logical
ramifications, clever and patient people should find themselves
in deep and lasting disagreement. With straightforward addition
there are at least simple and uncontroversial procedures for
settling disagreements. But a feature of philosophical problems,
on top of their intrinsic complexity, is that there is often a marked
lack of consensus about the most fruitful procedures for tackling
them, about where analysis needs to start and may legitimately
stop, and even about what would count as partial or complete
solutions to them.
Thus, in addition to the logical necessity on which we have so
far dwelt, there is what we may call cognitive certainty. In a
particular state of human knowledge, a logically necessary truth
may be far from cognitively certain. Cognitive certainty, unlike
logical necessity, is a matter of degree. The degree of cognitive
certainty of a belief may be high or low, and is always capable of
radical change. This is obviously the case with regard to beliefs
about matters of empirical fact. However, it is also the case with
regard to the beliefs we hold on the basis of purely a priori
reasoning. Our reasoning may not furnish us with coercive
grounds for declaring unequivocally that a given proposition is
necessarily true or necessarily false, and when this happens, as it
so often does in philosophy, we need to weigh u p what degree of
credence may be reasonably given to each of the conflicting
beliefs. This is not congenial to minds who crave neatly
parcelled-up solutions, but here an appetite for tidiness can be
an obstacle to truth. If we have to live with a measure of
uncertainty, we must not demand absolute certainty.
What we can and must seek is the best possible estimate of a
belief's degree of cognitive certainty - its 'cognitive probability'.
 Philosophy, Belief and Disbelief 7

We need to estimate how probable or improbable it is that the

disputed belief is or is not necessarily true or necessarily false.
Naturally, in philosophy and other spheres of a priori inquiry
this is not a question of empirical probability or improbability:
the improbability of there being uncaused physical events, or of
there being a highest prime number, is of an entirely different
kind from the improbability of snow falling in Egypt in July.
Inductive procedures, for instance, are of almost no use as guides
to the degree of cognitive certainty of an a priori belief.3 The
answer must come from more and more careful inspection of the
concepts and arguments involved, from closer and closer
scrutiny of the respective grounds appealed to by the disputants,
and from a wider search for analogous problems for which some
kind of consensual answer has already been secured. As we do
this, we may come gradually to the conclusion that one a priori
belief is cognitively superior to its rival. Some a priori beliefs will
come to seem relatively well founded, others relatively poorly
founded.
Take now the belief, 'It is logically impossible that discarnate
persons should exist and acf. All those who have seriously
debated this belief have been fallible, albeit highly rational and
skilled in argument. It is very evident, I suggest, that the
necessary truth of this belief is by no means cognitively certain
and perhaps much less than cognitively probable. It makes a
claim which can be and is rationally contested, and which is
therefore contestable. Hence we cannot grant this belief the
status of a necessary truth but at most the status of (if I may use
the expression) a possibly necessary truth. If this belief expressed
a necessary truth, then indeed it would be quite pointless to
examine alleged evidence for the existence and action of
discarnate persons. But since at most it expresses a possibly
necessary truth, we are not entitled to rule out a priori the
possibility of there occurring evidence which might tend to
suggest that there exist discarnate persons who can from time to
time make their presence felt. Unless or until the belief in the
logical impossibility of this state of affairs is proved - that is,
shown to have cognitive certainty in coercively high degree - the
hypothesis that there are active discarnate persons must be
judged to be an intellectually legitimate subject of appropriate
empirical investigation.
8 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

I must not, of course, be understood to have been suggesting that

the logical problems surrounding the belief in a life after death
may be ignored or minimized. It is specifically the purpose of
this book to examine these kinds of conceptual difficulty. Nor
would I want to go much of the way with philosophers like
Quine, Popper, or Feyerabend, who seem to me to want to
relativize the idea of necessary truths, reducing or varying their
logical force by reference to the changing parts which they play
in the development of different theories. In this book I shall
adopt the stance of a diehard rationalist. Facts are facts, and
logical necessities are logical necessities. The two can never be
real rivals, since if a seeming fact runs counter to a logical
necessity that seeming fact cannot be a fact. Empirical theories are
hypotheses which like all hypotheses are subject to logic, and
also have to be firmly based on facts. Where some recent
philosophers seem to me to be right, however, is in their protest
against the too familiar use of logic to smother speculation and
inhibit the formation of adventurous new theories. But I think
this is sufficiently guarded against if we recognize the difference
between facts and claimed facts, and also between logical
necessities and claimed logical necessities.
Now as well as claimed logical necessities which often (and
often erroneously) operate as absolute barriers to serious
empirical research, there are barriers of another type, which in
practice can be even more effective as deterrents to a serious
consideration of facts claimed to support belief in a life after
death, because they are more widely if tacitly respected and
adhered to within the scientific community at large. I am
alluding to what C D . Broad called Basic Limiting Principles. 4
Although these do not impose strictly logical prohibitions, they
may still function as decisive constraints on what may be
rationally believed, and therefore counted as admissible evi-
dence, by people who are regarded as educated members of
modern Western and other advanced industrial societies. For our
present purposes it will be sufficient to enumerate a number of
basic limiting principles within which all theorizing and
empirical research are required to take place in the opinion of
nearly all soi-disant Western 'rationalists' who are engaged in
promoting our understanding of human nature, viz. by the great
majority of contemporary psychologists, sociologists and anthro-
 Philosophy, Belief and Disbelief 9

pologists. In the absence of sophisticated philosophical reason-

ing, it remains of course merely a sociological fact - indeed
merely a generalization, since there are some notable counter-
examples - that these principles make u p the governing
conceptual framework of psychology and the other human
sciences as fields of inquiry. Nevertheless the small minority of
human scientists whose work seems to infringe these principles
are in professional peril, for they risk having their activities
stigmatized as unscientific and irrational.

Governing conceptual framework of psychology and the

human sciences generally

1. There can be no mental activity whatsoever in the

absence of a brain, nervous system, or analogous
physical structure.
2. There can be no acquisition of knowledge of contem-
porary states of affairs other than by sense-perception
or inference.
3. There can be no knowledge of past states of affairs other
than by memory or inference.
4. There can be no non-inferential knowledge of past
states of affairs other than those formerly experienced
by the knower himself.
5. There can be no non-inferential knowledge of future
states of affairs.
6. There can be no non-inferential knowledge of another's
mental state.
7. No one can produce changes in his physical environ-
ment otherwise than by first causing movements in his
own body.
8. No mind can be displaced from its body by another
mind.

There are strong practical reasons why psychologists, for

example, should demand that theories about human personality
10 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

should always be developed within the above protective frame-

work. It is comparatively recently that the more advanced
portions of the human race have emerged from the dark night of
superstition, and scientists are rightly cautious lest they inad-
vertently open the floodgates to a tide of magical, occult, and
supernaturalistic beliefs which would threaten our precious and
hard-won rationality. In particular, psychologists, who in then-
efforts to justify the scientific status still somewhat grudgingly
accorded to psychology often try to align its methods and
findings with the 'hard' physical sciences, are professionally
reluctant to consider data supposedly at odds with the
governing principles on which scientific research into purely
physical problems is based. In their proper desire to secure solid
results, their research programmes focus on problems which can
be resolved within the prevailing conceptual framework, and
thus can be generally perceived to have been satisfactorily
resolved; hence seemingly anomalous phenomena (e.g. tele-
pathy) are normally viewed as essentially a challenge to de-
anomalize them by showing that they are really instances of
fraud, coincidence, malobservation, or some other known
aberration which can readily be fitted into a thoroughly
naturalistic explanatory framework. Moreover, the very possibi-
lity of controlled experiments, the paradigmatic method of
scientifically resolving disputed questions, would be placed in
dire jeopardy if 'wild' and unpredictable factors (e.g. psychokin-
esis) had to be admitted as capable of influencing experimental
outcomes. For all these powerful reasons, the great majority of
psychologists and other scientific investigators of h u m a n
personality evince a systematic determination to acknowledge
as facts only phenomena whose acknowledgement as facts
would not undermine any of the basic limiting principles which
govern the practice of 'normal' science.
The basic limiting principles which I have listed are all
negative in character. This is not just an accident of my
formulation. In their nature they are intended to function as
constraints, identifying the limits of what can actually exist and
happen by identifying the kinds of thing which cannot ever exist
or happen, that is, by identifying the limits of what is empirically
possible. They are intended to demarcate rational from irrational
types of belief, and useful from useless lines of inquiry.
 Philosophy, Belief and Disbelief 11

Let me now subject the idea of such basic limiting principles to

a measure of criticism.

(a) These general principles clearly do not merely state

certain very basic laws of nature (although naive people
may wrongly understand them to do so). A proposition
states a natural law when it expresses a generalization
about patterns of natural occurrence based on sufficiently
comprehensive, exact, and repeated observation of these
types of occurrence and on a total absence of incompa-
tible observations. A purported natural law stands or falls
by the facts which support it or fail to support it. But the
basic limiting principles we are considering, far from
being based on observed facts, are rather designed to
stipulate what is to be admitted and what is not to be
admitted as observed facts. Since no alleged new fact can
possibly refute them, it would be specious for then-
defenders to claim that all (or any) of the facts 'support'
them, just as it would be specious for a candidate for
office in a totalitarian state to claim that he had massive
electoral support if he and his allies were wholly
responsible for carefully compiling the lists of those
entitled to vote.
(b) If the basic limiting principles of 'normal' science do not
express very fundamental and comprehensive empirical
generalizations (like the laws of thermodynamics), and
they do not express formal logical requirements (like the
law of excluded middle), what then is their precise
epistemological status? This question is manifestly a
philosophical question, and it is natural that practising
psychologists, anthropologists, neurophysiologists, and
other empirical scientists should tend to give it scant
attention. What this means, however, is that the research
strategies and canons of inquiry followed by these
scientists are adopted within an overall conceptual
framework which remains largely unexamined by them.
And the answer to the philosophical question is, I
suggest, glaringly obvious to philosophers. The conceptual
framework governing rational belief-formation throughout
official science expresses the general standpoint of metaphysical
12 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

materialism. The term 'materialism', of course, is very

vague and can cover any of a rather ill-defined group of
doctrines. For scientists hostile to the concept of the
paranormal, however, it hardly matters which particular
version of materialism is accepted. Every version either
denies reality to non-material entities and processes, or
denies that non-material entities and processes (if they are
grudgingly allowed some kind of tenuous, marginal
existence) can have independent causal efficacy. In
pursuing scientific research, therefore, non-material enti-
ties and processes can be altogether disregarded.
The type of theory I am calling metaphysical materi-
alism is intellectually composite in the sense which I
explained earlier in this chapter. It needs to be based both
on logical analysis and on relevant empirical facts. Now,
it may well be that metaphysical materialism is true. But
the most convinced metaphysical materialist is not
entitled to claim that his belief that this theory is true is
cognitively certain. Indeed contemporary philosophers
who regard themselves as materialists (Smart, Arm-
strong, the Churchlands, and the rest) will at most claim
that their favoured versions of materialism have a very
high degree of cognitive probability. If anyone, philoso-
pher or scientist, ignores this crucial distinction in his
subsequent theory or practice, treating materialism as if it
were cognitively absolutely certain, the price he pays, as
we have seen above, is to forfeit the whole of its claimed
empirical support. For it is one thing to claim that the
complete absence of well-substantiated paranormal data,
for example, provides relevant support for materialism;
and it is quite another thing to claim that, materialism
having been asserted as true, we cannot ever be justified
in regarding any paranormal data as well substantiated
whatever the kind and degree of substantiation available
on their behalf. The second claim enshrines a colossal
vicious circle. It converts materialism from a theory into a
policy, from a rational metaphysical standpoint into an
ideology. This type of dogmatic materialism operates as a
form of scientific and cultural censorship. It constrains
critical thought and freedom of investigation in ways
 Philosophy, Belief and Disbelief 13

analogous to those formerly enforced in Marxist countries

or during medieval Christendom. It pretends to offer an
intellectual framework for science. In fact it offers a
propagandist framework for scientism.
(c) Since the basic limiting principles of orthodox science do
not state logically necessary truths, it is at least logically
possible that there should be facts which are incompatible
with these principles. But if all scientists slavishly
followed these principles, no such facts could ever gain
acceptance. In 1748, in his 'Essay on Miracles', 5 David
Hume defended a similar prohibition, albeit a much more
severe one, on the admittance of any testimony which
was inconsistent with the then known laws of nature. A
law of nature, he claimed, is based on the uniform
experience of mankind up to the present moment, and
this vast weight of experience must always outweigh any
new experience which runs counter to it. As Alfred Russel
Wallace, the great naturalist, pointed out:

Such a simple fact as the existence of flying fish could

never be proved, if Hume's argument is a good one; for
the first man who saw and described one, would have
the universal experience against him that fish do not
fly, or make any approach to flying, and his evidence
being rejected, the same argument would apply to the
second, and to every subsequent witness . . .

The history of science contains many examples of the

neglect of outstandingly good evidence because it seemed
to contemporary savants to be subversive of received
scientific opinion - for example, the great anatomist
Cuvier's contemptuous destruction of fossil remains
which seemed to deny the fixity of species and to suggest
the gradual development of homo sapiens, or the refusal
(right up until 1803) by the French Academy of Sciences
and modern European scientists generally to accept the
reality of meteorites despite the testimony of thousands of
reputable eye-witnesses. Among human phenomena, to
cite only two notable instances, are the facts of biofeed-
back and of the hypnotic trance, these days generally
 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

recognized but until comparatively recent times univer-

sally denied by orthodox science because both types of
phenomena seemed to savour of the occult. To be sure,
there is a big difference between refusing to take evidence
seriously because it conflicts with the present state of
scientific opinion and refusing to take evidence seriously
because it conflicts with an overall framework which
expresses a materialist metaphysic. Although both are
errors, the former is arguably much the more harmful
error. But we need to repudiate both forms of doctoring
evidence. All evidence is evidence, however feeble,
however narrow and limited, however tainted its source
by ignorance, bias, or superstition. If it suffers from these
defects, it is very poor evidence; yet it must still be put in
the balance, however minuscule a difference it makes.
Obviously there can even be a fair amount of good
evidence, which we have to admit, for propositions which
we nevertheless know to be false; when this is so, either
we must find a truer interpretation of this evidence or, if
we cannot, we ought to temper our self-assurance that we
do indeed know the truth. What I am arguing we must
never do is deny the existence of the evidence.
Hume, more celebrated in his day as a historian than as a
philosopher, has been criticized for allowing science to
dictate to history what the latter's findings may and may
not be: on Hume's principles no quantity and quality of
evidence could ever suffice to establish a proposition
which was contrary to the natural laws accepted by
contemporary science. Such a proposition would affirm a
'miracle' and no amount of evidence can ever prove a
'miracle' or even tend to make a 'miracle' anything other
than absolutely impossible. At the present time orthodox
scientists uphold a similar dictatorship on the part of an
overall conceptual framework based on a materialist
metaphysic held dogmatically. As a consequence the
physical sciences are allowed to dictate to psychology
what its findings may and may not be, and how they may
and may not be arrived at. Psychologists may find that
cryptomnesia exists, but they must not find that telepathy
exists. They may employ properly-designed laboratory
 Philosophy, Belief and Disbelief 15

experiments, despite the artificial situations in which they

place their human subjects, but they must not sift and
weigh u p human testimony about claimed spontaneous
experiences, since these are of their nature 'anecdotal' and
therefore (necessarily and uniformly, it is insinuated)
hopelessly untrustworthy.
Anyway it is an oversimplification to regard the
distinction between experimental evidence and sponta-
neously occurring evidence as marking an absolute
difference in kind. Both involve the acceptance or rejection
of reports (viz. of testimony). And in practice the reported
observations of, for example, zoologists describing the
behaviour of gorillas in the wild, or astronomers describ-
ing spectral changes in some remote galaxy, will
generally find their way into the received data of zoology
and astronomy; whereas the reports by psychical
researchers of carefully designed experiments, in rigor-
ously controlled conditions, with mediums or other
psychics, will normally be treated with casual disdain
(unless the experimental results turn out to be totally
unfavourable to mediumistic or psychic claims). What
this shows is that the real constraints are not focused on
methodology but on findings. Any finding which might
legitimate belief in paranormal occurrences is unaccep-
table. The use of testimony as a resource of rational
inquiry is a target of disparagement in the case of
psychical research - although not in the cases of historical
research, police work, legal trials and other areas in which
the role of testimony is often crucial - only because the
case for paranormal occurrences tends to be so heavily
dependent on testimony and because belief in paranormal
occurrences is perceived to be incompatible with materi-
alist ideology,
(e) A governing conceptual framework which places restric-
tions on the kinds of facts which may be considered, and
the kinds of hypotheses which may be formed, can put
investigators under a severe (if happily accepted because
unnoticed) handicap where certain types of unusual
occurrence call out for an explanation. It may be that
the explanation of dowsing, for example, is to be found, at
 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

least in part, in areas of possibility - extra-sensory

perception, perhaps - which are forbidden to orthodox
scientific investigators. A complete explanation will thus
elude these investigators. It may also be that the correct
explanation of spiritual healing, say, is only to be found if
the reality of spiritual forces is admitted, but that
orthodox medical scientists will insist on ideologically
safe 'explanations' in terms of the psychosomatic effects
produced by intense faith, although such explanations
seem quite unable to account for the efficacy of spiritual
healers on the ailments of infants or animals. In that case
these scientists would be favouring a form of explanation
which was essentially false. Or where poltergeist phe-
nomena occur (the spontaneous and physically inexplic-
able movements of objects observed in a particular
location or around a particular human subject), the only
recourse available to conventional scientists is to deny
that the movements are physically inexplicable, for
example, by alleging fraud, or even that any movements
have taken place, for example, by alleging malobserva-
tion. Hence, if the physically inexplicable movements do
occur in fact, and so create a scientific problem, the
response of these scientists will have been simply to
ignore the problem by denying the facts which give rise to
it. Now, I am not claiming that any of these types of
phenomena do actually occur. But I am claiming that, if
they occur, minds which are trapped in a materialist
ideology are under-equipped, or ill-equipped, or even at
worst completely disabled, for the purpose of shedding
light on them.
One entirely legitimate aim of a governing conceptual
framework is to try to ensure that the findings of all the
sciences operating within the framework shall be mu-
tually consistent. The findings of the distinctively human
sciences should not contradict any of the findings of the
purely physical sciences. However, in effect all this
requirement demands of us is that we must not tolerate
contradictions anywhere within the gamut of human
knowledge, and this light yoke is really no yoke at all.
And it is by no means clear that the claimed facts of
 Philosophy, Belief and Disbelief 17

psychical research do ever contradict established physical

laws. Again take alleged poltergeist phenomena. If the
wind, or a human hand, sweeps a small ornament from a
shelf, no one argues that ordinary physical laws have
been broken. We can retrospectively calculate the mini-
mum amount of force which must have been exerted by
the wind or the hand to bring about this physical result.
We then speak of a 'physical' force of so many dynes
because we know that the force was exerted by a physical
object or process. Where the same physical result is
brought about by an immaterial agent, say a disembodied
intelligence, we may then appropriately speak of a
'psychokinetic' force, but the minimum amount of force
needed can still be correctly calculated as so many dynes.
The force is the same, although its initiation is utterly
different, and the laws of physics (e.g. the law of gravity)
remain equally unviolated when the initiator is a
disembodied intelligence as when the initiator is the
angry owner of an ordinary human hand. When some
living bystander catches the falling ornament, the law of
gravity is not violated; nor would it be violated if the
ornament were held suspended in mid-air by the
psychokinetic power of an immaterial intelligence.
Would psychokinetic intervention violate the principle
of the conservation of energy? As C D. Broad 7 and
Jerome Shaffer8 have argued, spirit intervention could in
theory produce changes in the distribution of energy, and
hence causal changes, without supplying any new energy
and so contradicting the conservation of energy principle.
But even if a spirit were deemed to supply new energy,
this would not of itself invalidate the physical principle of
the conservation of energy, since this principle applies
only to closed physical systems, not to physical systems
which are open to non-physical invasion from without.
It is one thing to demand that the claimed facts of
psychical research shall be compatible with established
physical laws. This is necessary and reasonable. It is quite
another to demand that they shall, on pain of rejection, be
wholly derivable from processes already known to
physical science or conceivable in wholly physical terms.
18 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

This is unnecessary and unreasonable. It is no more than

a dogma of reductionism, and no one is rationally entitled
to lay down such a requirement a priori. One set of facts
may well turn out to be wholly the products of another set
of facts, but whether this is the case must depend on the
actual nature of the facts in question. It must be a
conclusion drawn from scientific inquiry, not a condition
limiting and shaping scientific inquiry from its outset,
(g) Contrary to much received opinion, then, there is no need
to suppose that any of the claimed facts which bear upon
the possibility of a life after death - telepathy, psychokin-
esis, out-of-the-body experiences, poltergeist events,
apparitions of the dead, or mediumistic communications
- conflict with any of the truths established or necessarily
postulated by physical science. The conflict is not with
science but with a group of basic limiting principles
rooted in a materialist metaphysic held dogmatically - i.e.
with a group of dogmas. There is no rational threat from
dogmas. However, as we have seen, various types of
materialist metaphysic also exist as highly rational
constructions, supported by a very wide range of relevant
empirical facts as well as by detailed philosophical
argument and rigorous logical analysis. Any attempt to
produce a case for the belief in a life after death must
therefore come to grips with many rational positions
defended by philosophical materialism. All I will say at
this stage is this. Where we are considering an intellec-
tually composite system of beliefs like metaphysical
materialism, full weight must be given both to philoso-
phical models and to empirical facts. A very powerful
philosophical model ought not to be allowed to give way
to a small number of rather marginal facts. But if a
constant pressure of well attested and obviously relevant
facts builds up, it may reach a level of volume and quality
which renders the once powerful model a much less
formidable barrier to change, and philosophers ought
then to look for alternative models which do fuller justice
to the new facts in addition to preserving the integrity of
existing knowledge. The belief in a life after death faces a
finite measure of antecedent improbability. Whether this
 Philosophy, Belief and Disbelief 19

antecedent improbability can be reduced, or altogether

abolished, will depend in part on facts discovered by
psychical research, but also on the possibility of devel-
oping alternative and more convincing models of human
personality and its place in the universe,
(h) It would be a mistake to suppose that the claimed facts
which would be excluded by the basic limiting principles
of dogmatic materialism necessarily yield support for
belief in a life after death. This mistake is often made by
materialist thinkers, both dogmatic and undogmatic.
Serious students of the paranormal, on the other hand,
are well aware that some types of alleged paranormal fact
may significantly undermine much of the evidence for
personal survival of bodily death. Given that telepathy
can occur, for example, much of the accurate information
ostensibly relayed by mediums from surviving spirits
may be better explained by telepathic interaction between
the medium and her sitter. However, a materialist for
whom telepathy is an impossibility finds that he is
debarred from using such an explanation, although it
may often seem by far the most cogent explanation
available. Thus it is, I hope, clear that an unbiased and
complete examination of the evidence both for and
against the belief in a life after death needs to take
account of all the putatively relevant facts, normal and
paranormal, and if it fails to do this it must not pretend to
have explored this issue with the degree of exhaustive-
ness which so momentous an issue surely deserves.

So far I have made no allusion to the place of religious faith in

furnishing a warrant for the belief in a life after death. This is
because a religiously grounded belief in a life after death cannot
have greater cognitive certainty, and may have much less
cognitive certainty, than the religious faith on which it is
grounded; because there are many rival religious faiths; and
because assessing the degree of cognitive certainty of even one of
them would be a monumental task, particularly when under-
taken simply as a preliminary to our actual subject of a life after
death. Moreover, the great systems of religious belief commonly
20 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

rest on tradition, revelation, and personal faith, and these are in

themselves poor supports for any belief which is being subjected
to purely rational evaluation. I say poor, but I do not say
worthless. Some very slight degree of evidential value attaches, I
think, to the mere circumstance that someone believes some-
thing, even before we enquire what grounds he has (or lacks) for
his belief, since the mere fact that something seems to someone to
be the case does constitute very slight prima facie evidence - no
doubt often easily defeated - that it is in fact the case.
Far from religion providing strong rational support for
the belief in survival, it could turn out that a rationally grounded
belief in survival provided one of the strongest forms of support
for the general claims of religion. To many contemporary minds
the inherent implausibility of religious claims is a reflection of
the inherent implausibility of any system of belief which refers to
dimensions of reality and theatres of activity which transcend the
common world of material things and processes. In other words,
the great initial barrier to religious belief, as to belief in a life after
death, is our widely-held materialist world-picture. A refutation
of that world-picture, which could come about if the belief in
survival could be rationally demonstrated to have quite high
probability, would, I suggest, clear the way for many reflective
and critical people to consider the distinctive claims of the great
religions with renewed seriousness.
Of course, where a religion has rational considerations to put
before us in favour of life after death, these must be considered
as impartially as rational considerations arising from any other
source. The chief points at which one would expect religious
doctrines to impinge on a philosophical study, however, are
those where the nature of a possible post-mortem existence is
under discussion. Christianity envisages a Judgment, with
Heaven or Hell as the destinations of different souls, and a
bodily resurrection. Hinduism and Buddhism envisage for every
soul a protracted, but not endless, cycle of reincarnations, each
determined by his karma. Clearly such theories call out for
interpretation and analysis. This task will be undertaken in a
later chapter, where the teachings of the great religions will also
need to be compared with the versions of post-mortem existence
which seem to arise from other, non-religious sources.
 2
Problems of Post-Mortem
Identity

Suppose someone claims that an individual who is known to

have died, Sir Winston Churchill for instance, in fact survived his
bodily death and now exists as a discarnate spirit. One of the first
puzzles that this claim would produce is this. How can a spirit
which has no body, and therefore no physical characteristics
whatsoever, possibly be one and the same person as the
historical, flesh-and-blood Winston Churchill? Even understand-
ing this claim may be a matter of some difficulty.
Thinking about how to substantiate the claim can generate fresh
difficulties. For even if we assume that we have made contact
with some spirit, on what grounds can we be justified in
regarding this spirit as the surviving spirit of Winston Churchill,
and not just someone or something (whether a different
disembodied spirit or the trance-persona of a medium) falsely
representing itself to be the surviving spirit of Winston
Churchill?
The second of these problems would arise, even supposing
that one were oneself a disembodied spirit. The inhabitant of a
spirit world who encountered another spirit, announcing itself to
be the spirit of Winston Churchill, would need to ask himself
whether he was in truth meeting the surviving spirit of the late
British Prime Minister or whether he merely had to do with a
masquerading spirit. And by what possible tests could he
establish which was the case?
Let me call the first problem the ontological problem. What is it
that makes an individual one and the same unique individual,

21
22 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

however much he may change and however closely he may

resemble other individuals? And let me call the second problem
the epistemological problem. How can we satisfactorily pick out
some present individual as being one and the same person as
some past individual of whom we have knowledge, and as being
distinct from all other individuals, whatever their degree of
resemblance to him?
Appropriate solutions to both problems are commonly alleged
to be crucial for any belief in survival of death. Certainly,
whether it is death or indeed any other crisis that an individual is
held to have 'survived', the individual who comes out of the
crisis obviously has to be the same individual who went into it.
Billions of people survived Winston Churchill's death, the
present writer among them. But did Winston Churchill do so?
Unless what constituted Winston Churchill as 'Winston Church-
ill' survived or could have survived his bodily death in January
1965, Winston Churchill did not survive and could not have
survived, and we are therefore bound to regard any alleged
evidence of his survival as necessarily bearing some other
interpretation. If, for example, having Winston Churchill's living
body is a logically necessary condition of being Winston
Churchill, Churchill has certainly not survived, and could not
possibly have survived, his bodily death.
Were we to grant that there is some sense in which a
disembodied spirit might correctly be said to be Winston
Churchill' (perhaps, say, because the ante-mortem and post-
mortem experiences of this spirit were deemed to be linked by
being all of them experiences of the same soul), we should still
need to resolve the problem of what would count as good
evidence for this possibility having been realized. If we could not
say what kinds of evidence would be relevant evidence of the
ante-mortem Winston Churchill's post-mortem identity, the
possibility of Churchill's survival would remain no more than
an abstract possibility, in whose actualization we could never
have rational grounds for belief. In theory we might have good
evidence for the existence of some kinds of disembodied spirits
in general, although none of these could ever be identified as the
surviving spirit of Winston Churchill. There are apparently
Christian believers who believe in spirits (angels or demons) but
who deny that we can ever have good evidence for identifying
 Problems of Post-Mortem Identity 23

any of these as the surviving spirits of particular deceased

human beings.
The ontological problem of identity and the epistemological
problem of identification, then, allegedly represent two crucial
preliminary difficulties in the way of anyone seeking to make a
case for the belief in a life after death. Of course it is not only, or
mainly, in this context that these philosophical problems arise.

Ever since John Locke, problems about personal identity have

figured largely among the concerns of the philosophy of mind. In
part because of various recent advances in the scientific study of
the brain, contemporary philosophers have given special atten-
tion to the problems of personal identity.1 Most of these
discussions understandably tend to focus on questions about
the nature of personal identity, and the grounds on which it can
be ascribed, in relation to living persons. Of all philosophical
questions, the questions concerning personal identity have been
widely recognized to be among the most intractable. In 1739
David Hume wrote pessimistically that 'all the nice and subtile
questions concerning personal identity can never possibly be
decided' 2 and that he found himself 'involved in such a
labyrinth, that, I must confess, I neither know how to correct
my former opinions, nor how to render them consistent7.3
Hume's sense of bewilderment and dismay has, I imagine, been
shared by every subsequent philosopher who has tried to come
to grips with these questions. We find a plethora of theories, to
each of which there seem to be decisive objections.
Clearly I am not going to solve the riddle of the Sphinx in the
next few pages. Instead I shall discuss the relevance of this tale of
philosophical failure to the belief in a life after death. For this
purpose I shall very quickly review the principal theories of
personal identity which have entered the fray, and the nature of
the logical defeats which have been inflicted on them. I shall then
claim that from our failure to discover the fons et origo of the
continuing and unique identity we ascribe to living persons it
follows that we have no special, imperative, inescapable
intellectual obligation to discover it and set it forth in the case
of deceased persons. No one doubts that the British Prime
Minister in 1940 was the same individual as the Lieutenant
Churchill who took part in the charge of the 21st Lancers at
24 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

Omdurman in 1898, although we do not have a satisfactory

theory of what united these two slices of a single biography or
what held the whole biography together. Equally, if we lack a
satisfactory theory of what would hold the experiences of the
ante-mortem Churchill and the experiences of the post-mortem
Churchill into a single biography, this philosophical deficiency, I
shall claim, does not of itself invalidate the claim that Churchill
has survived his bodily death. We confidently identify the 1898
Lieutenant with the 1940 Prime Minister because we possess an
abundance of relevant evidence connecting u p the two very
different life-slices. The believer in personal survival of bodily
death needs, first, to show what types of evidence can reasonably
be considered relevant to the identification of an ostensible post-
mortem individual with some known deceased person; and
secondly to show that such evidence actually exists, in sufficient
quantity and of sufficient quality. In the last part of this chapter I
shall argue that it is possible to specify relevant types of evidence
of identity; and I shall comment briefly on the somewhat more
fluid issue of what should count, and what should not count, as
adequate quantity and acceptable quality.

Before very briefly reviewing the main attempts by philosophers

to solve the ontological problem of identity, it will be appropriate
for me to make one or two preliminary comments on the general
character of the problem. We are seeking the basis of identity.
Tautologically, at a particular time every particular thing is
identical with itself. The one and only pencil in my right hand at
this moment is the same as the one and only pencil in my right
hand at this moment. What differentiates it from another, exactly
similar pencil on my desk at this moment is that they occupy
different portions of space. The interesting question is: what
makes the first pencil remain that pencil when it changes place
with the second pencil, and when I further change it in a number
of ways, wearing it down with use, sharpening it, and so on?
Now, if over a period of time a thing does not change at all, it
manifestly remains one and the same thing throughout that
whole period. If it is a complex object, like my pencil, we
recognize that it may change in quite a large number of respects
while remaining numerically the same pencil. But it must not
 Problems of Post-Mortem Identity 25

change too drastically. After using it for an hour I am not

surprised to find it blunt, or after a week to have somewhat
shrunk in length because of sharpening, but if I leave the room
for a minute and on returning find in its place a grubby unusable
stump of a pencil, my normal conclusion is not that my original
pencil has somehow changed but that a different pencil has been
substituted for it. In other words, identity is compatible with
change, but not with too drastic change. My pencil's 'changes'
occurred with incredible suddenness, and they were provoca-
tively far-reaching. Nevertheless, minor changes which occur
suddenly, and far-reaching changes which occur gradually, may
be regarded as compatible with the qualitatively-changed object
remaining numerically one and the same object as an earlier and
qualitatively very different object.
Take something, which we shall call A, with five discernible
characteristics (possibly including spatial location). At time t\ A
has the characteristics a b c d c, at t2 it has characteristics ab c d f,
at 13a bcfg, att4ab fgh, and at t5afgh i. Here we are confronted
by gradual but far-reaching changes. Does A still exist at t5? The
answer we give to this question will depend partly on whether
we are operating with the concept of strict, absolute, and perfect
identity or with the looser concept of relative and imperfect
identity, and partly on what precisely we were calling 'A at t\. If
we are asking about strict, absolute, and perfect identity, and if
the whole constellation of characteristics a b c d e was what
originally we called 'A', then A definitely ceased to exist by t2. If
we are still asking about strict identity and someone asserts that
A continued to be in existence at t5, it follows that he cannot be
using 'A' to designate the whole constellation of characteristics a
b c d e but merely to designate the single characteristic a, which
alone has survived all the way through to t5 from t\. However,
someone else may contend that A was still in existence at t5,
whilst denying that he is using 'A to designate the single
surviving characteristic a, because he reveals that he is operating
with the looser concept of relative and imperfect identity. For
him, 'A does not pick out one constant thing, characteristic, or
set of characteristics, but has a fluid, rolling use, and in our
example covers any and all of the combinations of characteristics
listed at different times and could cover many others not listed,
provided that they were sufficiently related to some combinations
26 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

or other from the whole family of combinations. And when fresh

combinations have been admitted to the family, still fresher
combinations which are sufficiently related to these new
members may also reasonably have to be admitted.
It is very easy to see that the strict sense of identity captures
our intuitive understanding of what it is for something to remain
the same, and that the concept of relative identity largely fails to
capture this. If HMS Bellerophon, the ship on board which
Napoleon surrendered in 1815, had been preserved absolutely
unchanged for 150 years, there could be no question whatever of
its identity when visited in 1965, since its continued identity
would simply be a natural fact. If, however, its decks, guns, and
masts had been replaced in the interval, a literal-minded visitor
could significantly ask himself whether this was really the ship on
board of which Napoleon had surrendered. Whether this naval
relic was still to be thus designated would essentially be a matter
to be decided, not a simple natural fact to be recognized. While the
decision would not, of course, be an arbitrary one, it would
nevertheless be a matter of expediency and convention. There
would be ample room for disagreement. If every single item of
the original ship, down to each and every plank, screw and nail
had been replaced over the interval of 150 years, there would be
many visitors in 1965 who quite reasonably regarded themselves
as now standing merely on a faithful replica of the original
Bellerophon. Or if the original masts, decks, and guns had all been
used in the construction of some other ship, leaving only the hull
and keel in their original place, there would be people who
would reasonably regard this other ship as the better candidate
for being the ship on board of which Napoleon surrendered. In
these and other readily imaginable cases of relative identity, the
relevant facts might all be known, but there could nevertheless
be an entirely reasonable dispute about which of the candidates
was identical with the original object, and indeed whether any of
the candidates really was the original and not just a replica or a
descendant of it.
None of this invalidates the concept of relative identity. Since
over periods of time most objects change considerably and often
completely, there is perhaps much more use for this concept than
for the concept of strict and absolute identity. However, it is very
clear which of the two concepts is primary and which is
 Problems of Post-Mortem Identity 27

derivative, which is natural and which is artificial. The concept of

relative identity is obviously parasitical on the concept of strict
identity. Its use is largely governed by such factors as
expediency, sentiment and convention, whereas the concept of
strict identity is governed solely by what is in fact the case.
Let us now very briefly review the main attempts to establish
the source and nature of each person's unique and continuing
identity, that is, the main attempts to solve the ontological
problem. I shall classify these broadly as: I - physical; II -
psychological; and III - transcendental. Obviously a physicalist
account of the meaning of personal identity would be the most
congenial to a disbeliever in personal survival of bodily death,
while a psychological or transcendental account would be the
most congenial to believers. If every attempt proves unsatisfac-
tory, I shall argue that such a wholly negative result is,
paradoxically, on balance more helpful to the believer.

I. Physical. The main theories which try to found personal

identity on some set of physical facts about persons are those
which locate a person's identity in (a) his whole body; (b) his
brain; (c) his genetic constitution; or (d) his spatio-temporal track.

(a) Whole body. No doubt the most convincing evidence of

identity in the case of a living person is often drawn from
his distinctive bodily features (especially facial features),
which we understandably take to be indicative of the
unique identity of the unexamined remainder of his body.
However, can we equate his continuing identity as a
person with his bodily continuity? Is bodily continuity a
necessary and sufficient condition of the continuity of the
person? I suggest not, for the following well-known
reasons:
1. A person continues to be the selfsame individual person
although his body undergoes many radical changes. The
body of Winston Churchill as a baby lying in his cot in
1874, the body of the dashing Cavalry Lieutenant in 1898,
and the bent and shrunken body of the aged ex-Prime
Minister in 1965 are three different bodies, not only in
appearance but also in material composition, yet it is the
same unique Winston Churchill who is continuously
 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

present while his body undergoes these changes. This is

in fact the common lot. We may add that a person may
lose most of his body, or receive extensive transplants
from another human or animal body, without in any way
ceasing to be who he is.
We can easily conceive of one human body being
tenanted by two (or more) distinct persons. This is indeed
the impression often produced by pathological cases of
dual (or multiple) personality. Of course, few if any
psychiatrists would accept this interpretation of the
clinical facts which confront them, preferring explana-
tions in terms of one disturbed person unconsciously
playing two or more dramatic roles. Nor would many
psychiatrists take seriously the claims that the bodies of
some living human beings have been literally 'possessed'
for shorter or longer periods by the spirits of deceased
persons, or that this happens in cases of trance-medium-
ship, but there are competent psychical researchers who
have at least envisaged these as possibilities, and there are
some priests and many spiritualists, theosophists, and
others who are convinced that such things do actually
happen. Let us suppose that the latter's beliefs are
uniformly false. Nevertheless, these falsehoods are
intelligible falsehoods, and so they negate a concept of
personal identity which literally equates this with bodily
identity.
We can easily conceive of a single person animating two
(or more) human bodies, either simultaneously or
successively. Reports of bi-location have occurred in
modern times, and have sometimes been attested by
educated witnesses. Mostly these bi-locating individuals
have been religious personages of great holiness (St
Alphonsus Liguori, Padre Pio, Satya Sai Baba, Dadaji,
etc.). Now, if we firmly disbelieve all of these reports, we
evidently cannot find them incoherent or meaningless;
and so again the concept of personal identity is clearly
detachable from the concept of a particular body in which
its identity is supposed necessarily to rest. The same
logical point holds for reincarnationist beliefs. We are able
to reject the claim that some or all people reincarnate,
 Problems of Post-Mortem Identity 29

only if we first understand the claim that is being made,

and hence we are again driven to accept that the notion of
one person having a series of successive bodies is at least
formally intelligible - which it would not be if his identity
were constituted by his present body.
The idea of a complete, intact human body existing
without there being any person animating that body is
also a perfectly possible idea. Indeed, for a brief period
after death, before the onset of decay, this is what a corpse
is. And in voodoo belief, which we stigmatize as crass
superstition but not as unintelligible superstition, we find
the idea of the zombie, that is the idea of a re-animated
human body now devoid of the person by whose soul it
was formerly animated.
Somewhat different from reports of bi-location (where
both bodies behave like ordinary human bodies, leave
traces, are tangible, and so on) are cases of 'autophany 7 ,
where an individual sees his fetch or double. There are a
few quite well-attested reports of this in the literature of
psychical research. The duplicate body behaves like an
apparitional figure rather than an ordinary human body,
being visible but almost certainly not photographable,
intangible, and leaving no traces. Different again are
many cases of 'autoscopy', often occurring in so-called
out-of-the-body experiences (OBEs), where a subject may
perceive his physical body from a point of view external
to it, and where (in parasomatic OBEs) he is simulta-
neously aware of having a secondary 'body', which is the
body with which his consciousness is associated.
Although we may dismiss all of these as merely dreams
or hallucinations, we thereby admit that we can follow
the kinds of claims being made and hence admit that
there is no conceptual impossibility in the idea of an
individual having a queer secondary 'body' in addition to
his normal physical body.
The ideas of bodily transfer, of an exchange of bodies
between two persons, or of the transformation of a human
body into that of an animal, also seem to be self-consistent
ideas, albeit incredible. Otherwise we would not be able
even to understand stories like H.G. Wells's 'The Late
30 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

Mr. Elvesham' or fairy-tales in which a prince wakes u p

in a cobbler's body and the cobbler wakes u p in the
prince's body, or in which a prince's body has been
transformed into that of a frog while its owner retains the
personality of the prince. In such tales the identity of the
hero is preserved throughout total bodily change, and our
enjoyment of them depends only on a suspension of
disbelief, not on a failure to follow the incredible events
which they narrate.
7. Each of us can easily imagine himself having a body
which is completely different from his actual body, and
no doubt many people from time to time find themselves
wishing that they had a body closely resembling that of
someone else whose appearance and health they envy.
Thus we can dream of remaining ourselves but with a
totally different body. Manifestly we could not perform
this imaginative exercise if our very identities were
necessarily inseparable from our present bodies.
8. If I think of myself as the person who performed some act
last week, I can of course think of my body as engaged in
performing the act, if it was a physical act, although
arguably I do not need to do so, since perhaps I can
instead just think of my then intentions and my
subsequent satisfaction at their result (forgetting or
ignoring everything about the physical element of the
performance). But where the act was a purely mental act -
e.g. mentally rehearsing some cutting remarks which in
the event I never made - I have no difficulty whatever in
simply recollecting my then thoughts and feeling shame
that they were my thoughts and intentions, without
including in my present recollections and feelings any
picture of my body as it was at the time when I had those
thoughts and intentions. In other words, in identifying
myself now as that thinker, I need incorporate no
reference whatsoever to my body, then or now.

Now, I do not believe that any (or all) of the above points
suffice to refute decisively the claim that my identity as a
person is inseparable from the identity of my body. There are,
for example, plenty of philosophers who would dispute the
 Problems of Post-Mortem Identity 31

relevance of imaginary cases in any attempt to disconnect

personal and bodily identity. However, it should be noted that
not all the counter-instances I have cited are contrived
products of the philosophical imagination. Some of them, as
I have pointed out, have been put forward, correctly or
incorrectly, as examples of events which do from time to time
actually occur and therefore must be treated as at least
putative facts. And some of these are not entirely without a
show of support from the outer reaches of contemporary
science, e.g. from some theories in quantum physics which
allegedly destroy the traditional assumption that a particle
cannot occupy more than one spatial position at a time.
Although I have been claiming that the concepts of personal
and bodily identity are different concepts because cases in
which they are disconnected are easily conceivable and
therefore logically possible, some other philosophers will
argue that what is logically possible may not be really possible,
and also that we may think that we can conceive something
without its being genuinely conceivable. The first of these
objections seems to me to be confused, and the second mainly
dogmatic. Let us accept that possession, bi-location, bodily
transfer, etc., are empirically very improbable because they
flout known natural laws. However, we have not been
engaged in challenging an empirical hypothesis, but in testing
a concept by constructing conceptually possible counter-
instances. If these have shown that personal identity is not
logically bound up with bodily identity, then any equation of
these two concepts is bound to be false. It will be logically
impossible - and therefore 'really' or empirically impossible -
to establish personal identity or difference by establishing
bodily identity or difference. Also of course we may be wrong
in thinking that we can conceive something. But it is not nearly
enough for a physicalist critic simply to assert this. He has to
demonstrate that the many millions of serious and intelligent
people who have thought they could conceive of possession,
bi-location, bodily transfer, and the rest have all been
mistaken, by exhibiting logical contradictions hidden in these
concepts or the literal meaninglessness of some of the terms on
which the concepts depend. This would be a huge task, which
physicalists seldom deign even to commence, preferring to
32 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

treat these conceptual counter-instances in a few quick lines of

abrupt dismissal.
My provisional conclusion, then, is that while it is by no
means cognitively certain that an individual's continuance as
the selfsame person is conceptually distinct from the con-
tinuance of his body, we must nevertheless regard it as on the
whole highly probable that personal identity and bodily
identity are logically separable.

(b) Brain. Accounts of what can or might happen to a living

individual's brain occur very frequently in contemporary
discussions of personal identity, not so much with the
hope of finding in the brain the criterion of identity as to
illustrate how very complex and intractable the whole
question of identity is. Thus brains which undergo
hemispheric commissurotomy Cbrain bisection'), brains
which get transplanted into other bodies, left and right
hemispheres which when surgically separated get im-
planted in different bodies ('fission'), and perhaps there
combine with the complementary hemispheres from
originally different brains ('fusion') - such imaginative
exercises abound in recent philosophy, 4 and they are all
of course legitimate, often usefully suggestive, and
occasionally illuminating. For our present purposes,
however, these exercises are, I think, all beside the point:
1. Nearly all the objections to locating a person's unique,
continuing identity in the continuity of his whole body
would apply with equal force to attempt to locate it in his
brain. I shall not trouble to repeat these objections. If they
rule out the identifying of a person with his whole body,
they also rule out identifying him with any part of his
body, including his brain.
2. Contemporary discussions of brain and identity will be
found to centre almost entirely on the surmisable mental
consequences of interfering with a person's physical brain
in this or that way. If relevant memories, or character
traits, or skills, would be dissipated and vanish; or would
accompany the transplanted brain; or would get divided
u p with brain fission, one set of memories, traits, and
skills going with one segment of someone's brain, while
 Problems of Post-Mortem Identity 33

others went with other segments into different bodies; or

if on combining two brains or elements of two or more
brains we would get a personality combining oddly
divergent and perhaps incompatible sets of mental
characteristics: what then would our judgments about
identity be? It is understandably presumed, on the basis
of what we already know about mind and brain, that
massive interference with the integrity of our brains
would produce massive mental changes. However, all we
need to note here is that the mental changes would be
contingent and not necessary consequences of the physical
interference, and that it tends to be implicitly admitted
(though seldom explicitly stated) that it would be these
far-reaching mental consequences, not the brain changes
which caused them, which would give rise to the ensuing
puzzles about identity. In most such discussions, I
suggest, reference to what happens to the physical brain
of the individual is a huge red herring as far as problems
of identity are concerned.

Genetic constitution. Certainly, many of the characteristics

which differentiate an individual from others, and which
provide a stable line of continuity throughout his
development as an individual, are attributable to his
genetic endowment. But his genetic constitution cannot
possibly be what confers on any individual his unique
and continuing identity:
Everyone has many other significant characteristics which
are not inherited but acquired as a result of his life
experience. It would need to be shown that inherited
characteristics were alone relevant to fixing an indivi-
dual's identity, and acquired characteristics not at all
relevant.
Identical twins are distinct individuals, although they
have qualitatively identical genes. Of course, if we think
of a gene as a pattern encoded in the cells of the body, we
must admit that identical twins have numerically
different 'genes' in this sense, for they have numerically
distinct body cells. However, if offered as the criterion of
personal identity, this now faces nearly all the objections
34 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

we have already noted in our criticisms of the bodily

criterion in general.
3. That an individual has a combination of genes inherited
from his parents is at most a contingent fact and hence
cannot provide the necessary and sufficient condition of
his personal identity. Although we perhaps correctly
assume that two individuals who are biologically
unrelated never have qualitatively identical genetic
profiles (just as we assume that two individuals never
have qualitatively identical fingerprints), if we discovered
that this empirical generalization was incorrect in some
cases we certainly would not conclude that the indivi-
duals with these qualitatively identical genes were there-
fore not really distinct individuals at all.
4. In an age of genetic engineering and organ transplants
occurring between individuals with different genetic
constitutions, we shall increasingly find individuals'
genetic profiles changing throughout their lives and
overlapping with the genetic profiles of other individuals.

(d) Spatio-temporal track. Although the place and time at

which an individual is born and at which he dies are
contingent matters of fact, it may be held that it is a
necessary truth that his body moves from its first place to
its last place through a series of successive positions
which form a single uninterrupted track, unique to him;
and it may be held that it is in this necessary spatio-
temporal continuity that his distinctive identity consists.
On this I would make the following comments:
1. As John Hick and others have argued, 5 we can easily
conceive of someone's body disappearing from one place
and reappearing somewhere else, without traversing the
intervening space. We might be very reluctant to accept
that this had happened, but all the other relevant facts
might compel us to do so. (Some quantum physicists
might argue that this kind of thing already happens at the
level of particles.) In other words, spatio-temporal
continuity is a contingent fact, not a necessary truth.
2. The spatio-temporal criterion is obviously parasitical on
the whole body criterion, which we have already rejected
 Problems of Post-Mortem Identity 35

for a number of weighty reasons, most of which also have

force against the spatio-temporal criterion. For example,
we can easily follow the story of the prince who falls
asleep in his palace and wakens up in a cobbler's hovel,
although his body (now tenanted by the cobbler) has
never left the luxurious bed in which he went to sleep.

I shall say no more about attempts to ground personal identity

in some physical fact or set of physical facts. I suggest that the
preceding pages show that all such attempts are doomed to
fail. This is (so far) a gratifying conclusion for believers in
personal survival of bodily death, and an uncomfortable
conclusion for their critics.

II. Psychological. I shall turn now to examine very briefly

attempts to find the basis of a person's identity in his distinctive
mental characteristics, particularly in his memories and in
character traits, aptitudes, and skills. After all, for those who
hope that a loved one has survived death, the content of then-
hope is that the mind of the loved one has survived, that his
patience and good humour, his diverse interests, and his
distinctive personal capacities are still functioning, and of course
that he still remembers those who are dear to him and the
experiences they have shared. His body, they accept, no longer
exists in recognizable form. But they hope that a certain stream of
experiences continues to flow and that a certain pattern of responses
continues to be evinced.

(a) Memory. The capacity to remember many of my dis-

tinctive experiences is obviously intimately connected
with my sense of who I am, and someone's ability to
demonstrate that he can remember experiences which it is
known some person has undergone can provide very
good evidence that he is in fact that person. The identities
of spirits supposedly communicating through mediums,
and the claim that some young child is the reincarnation
of a specific dead person, are plainly matters to which
their ostensible capacity to remember unusual episodes
from the lives of the deceased individuals in question is
greatly relevant. And everyone knows that the case made
 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

by the Tichborne claimant, and Anna Andersen's claim to

be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, largely revolved round
their alleged ability to remember key events and relation-
ships which, it was thought, the true Roger Tichborne or
the true Anastasia (but no outsiders) would be highly
likely to remember. Nevertheless, if presented as the basis
of a person's identity, the criterion of memory is widely
considered to fail:
Memory cannot be a necessary criterion of identity,
because there are often very many of his experiences,
and often whole chunks of his life (e.g. his infancy), which
an individual is quite unable to remember. Yet these are
still his experiences and chunks of his life.
When memory is offered as the necessary link between
experiences which binds all of them into the unique
biography of a single individual, other contradictions
often present themselves. The relation of identity is both
transitive and symmetrical. If the five-year-old Winston
and Lieutenant Churchill are one person, and if Lieute-
nant Churchill and Sir Winston Churchill are one person,
then the five-year-old Winston and Sir Winston Churchill
must be one person; and exactly the same relation holds
in the reverse order. But the linkage of memory is
asymmetrical, for it runs to the past only; and it is not
necessarily transitive, for it may hold between some
stages of a person's life but not others - as when Sir
Winston Churchill remembers an exploit of Lieutenant
Churchill at Omdurman; and Lieutenant Churchill
remembers an escapade of the five-year-old Winston
which, however, Sir Winston Churchill completely fails to
remember.6
Memory cannot be a sufficient criterion of identity,
because there are specious memories, that is, cases of
someone seeming to himself to remember having experi-
enced some episode which he never in fact experienced,
although the episode in question may indeed have
happened more or less as he now ostensibly remembers
it. A famous example is George IV's 'remembering' his
actions at the Battle of Waterloo, in which he did not
participate. And in Bernard Williams's fable about two
 Problems of Post-Mortem Identity 37

individuals, Charles and Robert, both of whom make

astonishingly accurate claims to remember many precise
details of the life of a deceased person, Guy Fawkes, it is
clear that at most one could possibly be Guy Fawkes and
that therefore all the 'memories' of at least one of them
must be specious.
There is, to be sure, a trivial sense in which memory is a
logically sufficient criterion of personal identity, inas-
much as someone who truly remembers having done or
experienced something must obviously be the person
who actually did or experienced that thing. All that this
shows, of course, is that to take memory as constituting
identity is simply to reason in a circle, since if there is no
identity there can be no memory properly so called in the
first place. It does not show, as has sometimes been
claimed, that a bodily criterion of identity is indispen-
sable because we cannot remember something unless we
were physically within observational range when that
thing existed or occurred. The logical possibility of
clairvoyant perception would alone invalidate that
inference. It is also invalidated by the fact that the wholly
private thought processes, feelings, and dreams which we
remember do not require us to have been 'within
observational range' of them at the time they occurred,
since this concept, in this context, seems to be devoid of
sense.

Character. I shall use the term 'character' very widely, to

comprise the whole set of habits, tastes, beliefs, senti-
ments, values, aptitudes, and skills which make an
individual's responses comparatively stable and predict-
able, and which can make him an object of interest and
affection (or indifference and dislike) to those around
him. Despite its importance in our estimate of a human
being, however, it is clearly impossible that an indivi-
dual's unique and continuing identity should be derived
from his character:
Character does not suffice to constitute someone's unique
personal identity. There may be many other people
whose character traits are very similar to mine, and it is
38 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

obviously possible that there should be someone else

whose entire character exactly resembled mine. Two
people who exactly resembled each other in character
would still be two people. And 'resemblance of character 7
is always a matter of degree, of more or less, whereas
identity, in the strict sense we have been considering, is
an absolute. I cannot be 'largely someone else' - but
always, only, and completely myself.
2. Character is not a necessary part of personal identity.
Someone's habits and tastes may alter, he may embrace
different beliefs and adopt different values, his early
acquired skills may atrophy and be replaced by com-
pletely new skills, his vibrant enthusiasm may become a
quiet phlegm - and yet he remains literally one and the
same person we have known for years, whose altered
character we can welcome or regret.

If an individual's identity cannot consist in psychological

characteristics pertaining to his memory or character, and if it
cannot consist in any of his physical characteristics, it would
seem that personal identity cannot be rooted in any set of
empirical characteristics whatsoever. Combining some of the
different types of characteristic we have examined (e.g. body-
plus-memory) would undoubtedly strengthen the evidence that
someone is or is not who he is claimed to be; but since each
separate type of characteristic apparently contains fatal flaws
when put forward as constitutive of anyone's identity,
combining characteristics of different types would simply
multiply the flaws vitiating our attempts to discover the logical
basis of personal identity. Hence it is tempting to look for the
secret of identity in some non-empirical source which
transcends both physical and psychological facts - in the idea
of a 'soul' or in some ultimately unanalysable T .

III. Transcendental
(a) Soul. We may conceive of the soul as a simple non-
material entity or 'substance', existing independently, in
itself unchanging, but underlying and 'owning' the
individual's diverse and changing mental states and
attributes. Because each individual's soul is unique, it is
 Problems of Post-Mortem Identity 39

his soul which furnishes the necessary and sufficient

condition of his identity. To this theory there are famous
objections:
1. Empiricist critics allege that the separation of the soul
from its several attributes and states leaves it a complete
non-entity, or at best as something utterly mysterious and
unintelligible, a sort of 'something, we know not what 7 .
This kind of objection is, I think, confused. In differentiat-
ing between attributes and the owner of these attributes,
the believer in the soul is of course not asserting that they
are utterly divorced from each other. It would indeed be
ridiculous to maintain: 'The soul has no attributes, since
the soul is that which has attributes 7 . For the believer in
souls, it is the soul which has the attributes and states in
question - but is nevertheless not to be identified with
them.
2. Empiricists may also allege that, unlike my introspective
experience of my mental attributes and states, I cannot
ever have direct introspective experience of my soul and
thus have no grounds for believing that it is somehow
connected with these mental attributes and states or even
that there is one soul 'underlying' these, rather than two
or three or more souls at a time, or a whole temporal
procession of souls each yielding place to its successor. To
this it might be replied - as Butler, Reid, McTaggart and
others, including at one time Russell, in their different
ways have claimed - that I do indeed have direct
knowledge of my soul, or underlying permanent self,
although not in a sense in which I can easily detach it
from the rest of my experience. It could be, for example,
that my soul or self bears the kind of relation to its
experiences that the points at the two ends of a line bear
to the line or that the circumference of a circle bears to the
area which it encloses: the line would not be the length
which it is, nor the area have the size and shape which it
does, without the literally invisible geometrical bound-
aries - the points, the breadthless circumference - by
virtue of which they are what they are. Or it could be, as
Richard Swinburne seems to suggest, that I can become
aware of my permanent self or soul on perceiving that
40 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

two or more of my present experiences are united in a

single awareness or that two or more of my successive
experiences are held together in a single unfolding unity.

(b) ' I ' . It is possible to argue that one's identity is not

grounded in a soul-substance or a nuclear self, but is
simply a brute and not further analysable fact. I am
necessarily I and cannot possibly be anyone else in whole
or in part, and my experiences are all absolutely mine,
never given to or in the slightest degree shared by anyone
else. The difficulties involved in such a view are often
held to be as follows:
1. It merely asserts what its critics doubt or deny, rather
than producing arguments in its own favour. (Some
upholders of this kind of view - e.g. Geoffrey Madell -
do, however, produce a variety of arguments against rival
views.)
2. The claim it makes is vacuous, without content. It treats
the word T as if it were a proper name, instead of merely
a demonstrative pronoun - analogous to 'this' or Tiere' -
indicating the speaker. To the question, 'Who is that
speaking?', the answer, 'It is F, is as empty as 'I am here'
would be to the question, 'Where are you?'
3. Such a view does not fill our real conceptual gap. It does
no more than formally record the existence of the gap. It
does not, for example, help us to answer the question,
W h a t made the experiences of Lieutenant Churchill in
1898 and those of Sir Winston Churchill in 1965 the
experiences of one and the same person?', for in the end
its only answer is: 'The fact that both sets of experiences
were his'.

I shall not apologize to those philosophers who will feel that I

have treated the foregoing theories of personal identity with
indecent brevity, for they will already know how to supplement
my short account in various ways. Readers whose interest rightly
centres on what they believe to be the factual question as to
whether or not a person can survive his physical death will, I
trust, have come to see the relevance to the issue of personal
 Problems of Post-Mortem Identity 41

survival of the many conceptual problems involved in the

preliminary question of settling what a single ongoing person
really is.
We have come to see that there is no obviously correct answer
to this question. Hence, if anyone asserts that Winston Churchill
survived his bodily death and we ask him, 'Precisely what is it
that you are calling "Winston Churchill" which you claim
survived Churchill's bodily death?', we can be reasonably
confident that he will be unable to supply us with an obviously
clear and consistent answer. Perhaps his wisest course would be
to reply, 'Churchill's soul, or self - but we have already seen
something of the objections which that kind of reply would have
to face.
Now, much play has recently been made with the notion of
'partial survival' by philosophers who are impressed by the
difficulties of giving an account of personal identity in the strict
and absolute sense we have been focusing on. Clearly this entails
that a person's survival might be a matter of degree, not an all-
or-nothing affair. And this depends on our replacing the concept
of strict identity with the concept of 'relative identity7, which I
have already admitted to have valid uses.7 However, while we
may admit that it is often sensible and useful to employ the
concept of partial identity in the case of things, like ships or
houses, which change by subtraction, addition, or alteration of
parts and features, we may nevertheless be rightly reluctant to
apply it to the case of persons. After an operation in which
someone loses most of his brain, or in which the lost parts are
replaced by appropriate parts from someone else's brain, or in
which his brain is substantially recast by surgical or other means,
he may well emerge as someone radically different in his bodily
reactions and in his memories, beliefs, habits and preferences,
although there may also remain many resemblances to his pre-
operational body, memories and character. Dismayed, we may
exclaim that he is no longer the same person. More calmly, we
may modify our judgment, declaring that he is to some extent the
same person but has to a considerable extent become a different
person. There is of course no doubt what we mean if we are
referring to his changed empirical characteristics, perhaps to
some physical changes but predominantly to mental changes
observable via the responses we are now getting from a
42 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

manifestly recognizable body. But do we really mean that our

lifelong friend has literally become, in some degree, a numeri-
cally different individual?
Obviously we do not think that whether he is no longer the
same numerical individual depends solely on whether we and
others stipulate that he is not. We could not refuse to pay our
debts to James McDonald, nor could Mrs McDonald be deemed a
widow and little Jean McDonald an orphan, merely because we
and others decide that James McDonald died on the operating
table and was there replaced by someone else, uncannily like him
in many ways, but different enough for us to decide that he must
be given a different name, passport, national insurance number,
and so on. Nor could the friends and relatives of David Williams
who, due to partial brain interchange with McDonald, now
seems to have many of the latter's physical reactions, memories,
beliefs, habits, and preferences, be absolved from their former
loyalties and relationships merely because they choose to
describe David Williams as having died in the operating theatre.
Might there be a surviving 'McDonald/Williams' sent to live
with McDonald's family in Glasgow, and a surviving 'Williams/
McDonald' sent to live with Williams's family in Cardiff? There
are many ways in which the two families could try to cope with
their embarrassing situation, but there is one way which is, I
suggest, not an option available to them. The McDonald family
might judge that their husband and father now partially
possessed and animated two bodies, one in Glasgow and the
other in Cardiff, which he possessed and animated in common
with David Williams, and that they could communicate with him
for some purposes in Glasgow but for other purposes only by
travelling to Cardiff. The James McDonald in question would
then have no fixed location in space. But what, I submit, they
could not judge would be that there was one person living with
them in Glasgow who was both James McDonald and David
Williams, and another person living in Cardiff who was also both
David Williams and James McDonald.
To judge that someone is two different persons is massively
counter-intuitive, not just because of our habits and prejudices,
but because it enshrines a massive contradiction in terms. It is
like saying, '1 =2'. We can judge that one person has two sets of
disparate characteristics, or that two persons have these two sets
 Problems of Post-Mortem Identity 43

of characteristics; or that one person exhibits a familiar set of

characteristics via one body and a complementary set of
characteristics via another body: but we cannot judge that one
person is also another person, or two, or three, or more other
persons. James McDonald and David Williams cannot ever
become one person. This would really mean that each became a
fraction of a person. If there could be fractions of persons, as
philosophers like Parfit seem to believe, 8 there could obviously
be fractions of fractions of persons, and fractions of fractions of
fractions of persons, the process of fractionalization continuing,
not until some ultimate sub-personal particles were reached, but
ad infinitum. We should be left with an amorphous sub-personal
dust, which could form, dissolve, and reform endlessly.
The concept of a set of characteristics is the concept of
something multiple, and divisible. The concept of an individual
is the concept of something intrinsically single, unitary,
indivisible. Just as a finger cannot point in two directions at
once, or the face of a clock show two times at once, so an
individual cannot be two individuals at once. If the identity of a
person can be a matter of degree, then (as Spinoza clearly saw)
persons cannot truly have an identity, and indeed nothing short
of the universe can be truly self-identical.
An individual cannot become two individuals, without ceasing
to be altogether, nor can he become less than, a fraction of, an
individual. But of course it may be the case that there are not,
never have been, and never could be any true individuals, and
that our belief in personal identity is a colossal illusion. Does it
matter whether there are separate, unique, continuing, selfsame
individuals or not? Parfit evidently believes that the disappear-
ance of the illusion would on balance be a very desirable thing
(and not just because it is in his opinion an illusion and all
illusions are per se undesirable): it would open u p all our
relations in ways greatly favouring impersonal, unself-centred
judgment, and would foster the growth of virtues like compas-
sion and tolerance. On the other hand, many of us will feel that
the disappearance of true relationships with other true indivi-
duals, who are often precious to us, and to whom we feel love
and devotion, would be a great impoverishment of life. The
ethical issue is too huge for us to go into here. There is only one
question with which we need be concerned here. If there are in
44 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

fact no persons who have absolute or strict identity, but only

fluctuating and frangible collocations of characteristics with
temporary and partial 'identity 7 , how ought this to affect a belief
in personal survival of bodily death?

Let us recollect why a believer in Winston Churchill's survival of

death will probably be unable to give us an obviously clear and
consistent answer if we ask him precisely what it is about
Churchill which survived his bodily death. His problem is that
there is no obviously correct analysis of what it meant to be
Winston Churchill throughout his earthly life, with its many vast
changes from infancy to old age. At this stage, however, there are
two crucial points which we need to note. First, there are some
facts of which we are unable to give a correct analysis but which
few of us would hesitate to accept as facts. And, secondly, even if
we construe Churchill's identity as a partial, relative, and
fluctuating matter, we are nevertheless able to identify the
infant, the young officer, and the elderly Prime Minister as in
varying degrees sharing in that identity because we have
abundant evidence to support our identification; and thus we
cannot rule out a priori the possibility that there might be
sufficient evidence to support this measure of identification as
between the ante-mortem Churchill and a putative post-mortem
Churchill.
First of all, then, there are unanalysable facts. The fact that
something is yellow, or sweet, or has some other absolutely
simple sensory quality, can be correctly asserted, but not
elucidated by processes of logical analysis to anyone who fails
to understand the assertion (say, because he has been blind from
birth, or because his taste buds were destroyed in infancy).
Although we all understand what time is, we cannot give a clear
explication of what it is; we cannot say what we mean when we
speak of a 'pasf event, for example, and yet we and our hearers
know perfectly well what we mean. These and other such cases
make it more plausible to claim that we all understand what is
meant by the assertion that a certain officer at Omdurman was
numerically absolutely identical with Britain's wartime Prime
Minister - that these descriptions apply to one single, continuing
person, not just to different sequences in a cascade of temporally
 Problems of Post-Mortem Identity 45

overlapping personal characteristics - and yet that we cannot

provide a correct analysis of this simple fact. When I point twice
in swift succession to the same matchbox, saying This matchbox
is this matchbox', the reason I cannot further amplify what I have
just said is not that I have said something extraordinarily
complex, but that I have said something absolutely simple, so
simple as to verge on a tautology.
Thus, even if we are unable to give a full and correct analysis
of the claim that some disembodied person is numerically
absolutely identical with the ante-mortem Winston Churchill, we
understand what is being claimed and are entitled to weigh up
such evidence as is available on behalf of this claim. Similarly,
there may in fact be excellent evidence in favour of the assertion
that something is yellow (e.g. the wavelength of light reflected by
its surface) or that something is past (e.g. ashes in the grate
showing that the fire has gone out), even although we cannot
formulate fully and precisely what we mean by these assertions.
In the second place, moreover, any evidence supporting the
strict identification of some disembodied person with Winston
Churchill will also support a lesser measure of identification. If
the weaker, imperfect type of relative identity is the only type of
identity which can ever be ascribed to someone during his
lifetime, this type of identity is all we can ever be required to
establish after he has undergone physical death. Evidence which
would in this sense suffice to identify an old man of seventy with
a youth of twenty whom we once knew would, if available,
suffice to identify a disembodied person with the deceased
person whom we once knew at twenty and met again at seventy.
What kind of evidence might this be?
This question is easily answered. With one or two exceptions,
the kinds of evidence which would be relevant to establishing
someone's post-mortem identity are the kinds of fact discussed
between pp. 27-38 above, which were there deemed to be
insufficient to furnish a true account of what strict personal
identity consists in. Despite this ontological failure, as we have
just seen they may suffice to provide evidence for identifying
someone, living or dead, even in the strict sense of identity which
we are unable to analyse satisfactorily. And if we grant the
concept of relative identity, they could suffice to identify
someone, living or dead, in this weaker, imperfect sense. I shall
46 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

make only a few brief comments on the scale and quality of such
evidence as is in fact available, since for our present purposes it
will be enough to show what evidence, if available, would tend
to establish the identity of a disembodied person with some
individual known to be deceased.
In the nature of the case, the evidence for someone's post-
mortem identity cannot be specific to his identity in the sense of a
continuing 'soul' or unanalysable T, since these concepts, we
have seen, are explicitly transempirical. Of course if we were
constrained on philosophical grounds to accept some such
transcendental account of the meaning of personal identity, then
any general evidence for someone's post-mortem identity would
necessarily point to the survival of this transcendental reality -
but the bearing of this evidence would then be necessarily
indirect. In its intrinsic character as evidential material (that is, as a
set of publicly available empirical facts), the relevant evidence
would need to be of either a physical or a psychological kind, or
of both kinds, whatever the person's 'identity7 might consist in.

I. Physical evidence. There is no contradiction involved in the idea

of physical evidence for the identity of a disembodied person. On
a dualistic account of personality, no physical facts can suffice to
analyse what we mean by someone's personal identity,9 but facts
about the body with which a living person is associated,
although logically contingent facts, can nevertheless supply
first-class evidence of that living person's identity.
Hence we can conceive of a deceased human being, now a
disembodied spirit, causing a replica of his former body to arise
in the physical world. If he were capable of this feat -
presumably by 'psychokinesis' - obviously the body he would
try to materialize ought to resemble his former body as this was
best known to the friends or relatives now witnessing his
materialization, since otherwise it would not serve for purposes
of identification. A materialized form of this kind would be a
peculiar but indisputably physical object, occupying space,
entirely visible, tangible and photographable. Now there is
evidence that a few 'physical mediums' (e.g. Florence Cook,
Marthe Beraud, Alec Harris) have occasionally served in the
production of full-form materializations, to which critical
researchers of very high calibre have occasionally testified
 Problems of Post-Mortem Identity 47

(including Presidents of the Royal Society like Sir William

Crookes, OM, Nobel Prize-winning physiologists like Charles
Richet, and biologists of international standing like Professor
Hans Driesch). However, fraud has been so prevalent that few
investigators have been willing to accept any of this evidence as
it stands; and the issue is complicated by the fact that, where a
genuine 'materialization' might perhaps be deemed to have
occurred, the evidence for the identity of the materialized form
has often been very poor or altogether absent. Nevertheless we
can, I think, claim that, if such an identifiable materialization
were to occur, there would exist very strong evidence that the
identified human individual had in fact survived his bodily
death.
The occurrence of apparitions is much less controversial than
the occurrence of materializations. Few if any informed people
doubt that quite a high proportion of the population, probably
somewhere around ten per cent, have while in good health had
the experience (usually only once) of seeming to perceive a figure
which was not in fact physically present at the time of then-
experience. Most of these experiences involve unidentified
figures, and among identified figures the figures of currently
living persons very frequently occur. However, the sub-class of
'apparitions of the dead' (and of the dying) is very numerous. A
significant proportion of these are collectively perceived, that is,
perceived by at least two people simultaneously. And a
significant proportion of these experiences incorporate features
which yield factual knowledge exceeding that possessed at the
time of the experience by the percipient or percipients. If, for
example, someone in the prime of life dies suddenly, perhaps as
the result of an accident, and within an hour or two of his death
his phantasmal figure appears to two of his friends indepen-
dently, the coincidence in time of these three highly unusual
events is obviously extremely suggestive. Should the appari-
tional figure, by unusual characteristics of its dress or bodily
appearance, or by its behaviour, gestures, or speech, convey
additional information which unexpectedly turns out to be true,
the evidential quality of the whole experience is heightened,
perhaps considerably.
An apparitional figure is certainly not a physical object in the
standard sense of 'physical'. It obscures light, casts a shadow,
48 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

makes sounds, appears to be located, and may appear to alter

features of its environment, e.g. shifting an ornament; but it
cannot be photographed, the sounds it makes cannot be
recorded, it is not really located where it seems to be, it is
intangible, and when the apparitional episode comes to an end,
often after only a few seconds, nothing is found to have changed
in its environment and the ornament which it seemed to shift is
still in its original place. Unless we postulate the existence of
'astral' or 'etheric' bodies, largely ad hoc, we have to conclude
that the apparitional figure most nearly resembles a hallucina-
tory figure. Of course the hallucination may be generated in the
minds of the percipients by telepathy from the surviving mind of
a deceased person. This would explain the veridical features of
the experience, for instance any information explicitly or
implicitly conveyed, and it would account for the central element
in the experience, namely the appearance of the recognizable
figure of the deceased individual in question. We may suppose
that the minds of most normal human beings, when alive,
typically include an 'image' of their physical bodies, more or less
subconscious depending on circumstances, and sometimes very
accurate, although often seriously inaccurate, as when an elderly
person overestimates his physical powers by trying to behave as
if he still had a youthful body. Faced with different situations or
tasks, or in different company, an individual's 'body image' may
correspondingly alter. After death, should his memories,
attitudes, and interests survive, it is to be expected that his body
image would survive, although he now no longer in fact has a
physical body. Like the body image of living human beings, it
would be a psychologically produced ensemble of selected
features of build, posture, expression, habits of deportment, and
styles of dress. Its ontological status, as in life, would be mental.
And as such, it could be communicated telepathically to the
minds of living percipients, with no less or greater difficulty than
any other of the contents of the deceased's surviving mind.
Judged as evidence of identity, apparitional figures, because
transient, and because they are 'private' to the minds of those
who experience them, are theoretically inferior to materializa-
tions. However, because of their greater credibility, the absence
of professionally-interested mediums, their comparative abun-
dance, the phenomenological similarities holding within this
 Problems of Post-Mortem Identity 49

very large class of otherwise diverse episodes, and the conviction

carried by the testimony of a host of naturally good witnesses, in
fact apparitions provide by far the stronger evidence for the
belief in personal survival of bodily death. Their all-round value
as evidence will be considered in a later chapter. Here we are
concerned with their bearing on problems of identification. Then-
bearing is obviously not that which might be vouchsafed by a
truly physical body or bodily replica. However, where we need
to identify normal living individuals in ordinary practical
situations, we accept that photographs, film, videotapes and
voice recordings can often serve as admissible and sometimes
coercive evidence. These are representations which enable us to
pick out confidently our absent friend. If they get lost or
destroyed, we can rely on our memory of these representations,
and it will often be unreasonable to deny this as evidence of
identity. Similarly, it will often be unreasonable to deny
someone's clear memory that the figure which recently appeared
to him in an apparitional experience was someone whom he
immediately recognized as the familiar figure of a now deceased
friend.
The other physical criteria of personal identity discussed
earlier in this chapter were: brain identity, identity of genetic
constitution, and spatio-temporal track. We need not seriously
consider brain identity here. On the assumption that a
disembodied spirit might materialize at a seance, we are not
bound to assume that it would or could materialize all its
internal organs, including its brain, or indeed anything more
than its purely surface appearance. Living human beings
generally have only the vaguest, and often erroneous, ideas
about their own internal parts. In any case it would be obviously
impossible to adduce the distinctive features of a materialized
figure's brain as evidence of its identity; but this is also in
practice the case with problems of identifying living human
individuals, whose brain physiology seldom if ever plays any
part in processes of identification.
Evidence of brain identity would be still less relevant in
identifying apparitional figures, given that these are essentially
mental artefacts. The same is true of evidence based on genetic
continuity. Which of us has sufficiently exact knowledge of his
own genetic constitution? 'Genetic profiles' are indeed some-
50 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

times used as evidence of the identity of living human beings,

but in certain very limited contexts only, and with important
safeguards against erroneous identification. If we try to conceive
of a disembodied spirit rapidly constructing either a physical or a
mental replica of his former body, we can immediately see how
unreasonable it would be to examine microscopically the fine
grain of the replica for purposes of identification, even if this
were feasible.
It would also seem inept to look for spatio-temporal continuity
as evidence of the identity of a manifesting spirit. Materialized
figures are not claimed to exist between materializations, and the
same is true of apparitional figures, who during their brief
existence have no real location in physical space anyway. To
demand an uninterrupted spatio-temporal track followed by
such figures would be as much of a misunderstanding as, say, to
demand an uninterrupted spatio-temporal track followed by the
newsreel appearances of the living Winston Churchill.
My conclusion is that physical or quasi-physical evidence of
the identity of the surviving spirits of deceased persons is u p to a
point theoretically conceivable, and in many cases actually
forthcoming; and that there are plausible reasons for believing
that beyond this point it would be unreasonable to expect further
evidence of these kinds to be forthcoming.

II. Psychological evidence

(a) Memories. The primary source of this type of claimed evidence
is to be found in the spoken or written utterances of mediums.
The medium is ostensibly in touch (perhaps indirectly, via her
'control') with the surviving mind of a deceased person, and is
supposed to act as a channel whereby messages can be relayed
from the deceased to the living. At their best, these messages
involve references to situations, incidents, and relationships of
which the deceased person, the ostensible 'communicator', had
knowledge during his lifetime and which therefore afford prima
facie evidence of his continuing consciousness.
To count as evidence of the communicator's claimed identity,
it is obviously not enough that the reports of past events and
relationships should be shown to be correct. Any facts which
could reasonably be judged to fall within the knowledge of the
medium cannot be counted as emanating on this occasion from
 Problems of Post-Mortem Identity 51

the memory of a deceased communicator. She may have gained

knowledge of these facts by dishonest means, e.g. 'fishing7 or
drawing intelligent inferences from what she has already learned
about the deceased from a less-than-vigilant sitter; and of course
honest mediums (the great majority) may achieve the same result
in the same ways quite unconsciously, accompanied by the
sincere delusion that this knowledge is being relayed to them
from discarnate spirits. Supposing these possibilities to have
been ruled out, there remain other possible explanations of the
knowledge provided. Indeed where the knowledge is of a very
detailed sort, involving names, dates, addresses, or facts of some
very unusual kind, to appeal to chance coincidence as the
explanation will often strain credulity to breaking point. The
same applies to explanations in terms of cryptomnesia where the
facts retailed are of a sufficiently private kind, e.g. concerning
childhood nicknames, family jokes, or events only of interest to
the obscure individuals to whom they happened, which it is very
highly improbable that the medium might have learned by
normal means but has now completely forgotten that she had
thus learned at some time in her past.
However, we must always bear in mind that the spirit
hypothesis depends on there being a paranormal channel of
communication, presumably some form of telepathy, between
the mind of the deceased person and the mind of the medium. It
is therefore allowable for us to consider the possibility that some
or all of the knowledge displayed via the medium has been
acquired by telepathy from the sitter. Naturally this theory needs
to be supported by evidence, and sometimes there will be
evidence which seems to refute it. For example, the facts
remembered may be remembered from the point of view of the
deceased. Thus a patient's description of his discomfort during
his last illness may be accepted by the sitter, but the subjective
tonality or angle of his description may strikingly differ from that
which characterizes the recollections of the sitter, just as the
memory of pain one has oneself experienced differs from the
memory of someone else's pain one has observed and compas-
sionated: the two perspectives may be compatible, yet undeni-
ably different. Or we may have coercive reasons for believing
that the facts in question did not lie within the sitter's own
knowledge. He may himself have had to verify them from other
52 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

sources - from the testimony of photographs or old letters, or

from the memory of other relatives and friends of the deceased,
whom he subsequently consults.
Nevertheless, if we grant the occurrence of telepathy and other
paranormal powers of cognition, of whose extent we are still in
ignorance, it remains a possibility that the correct information
relayed via the medium should have originated from some living
mind other than that of the immediate sitter. While the medium
is in trance, it is theoretically possible that her unconscious
should telepathically scan the memories of other living indivi-
duals connected with the sitter and finally present these as
emanating from a deceased communicator. The more remote the
relationship between these unknowns and the immediate sitter,
and the greater the number of them required to contribute
elements of a complex retailed fact, the more strained the
'extended telepathy' explanation obviously becomes. But there is
also the possibility of clairvoyant cognition. The 'memories'
ostensibly emanating from a deceased mind may in theory have
been partly culled by the medium's unconscious from photo-
graphs, letters, or documents of which neither she nor the sitter
(nor perhaps any living person) has normal knowledge.
Although this may seem still more far-fetched a theory, we need
to note that unless the putative information narrated via the
medium can be verified, either directly from the knowledge of
the sitter, or from others, or from objectively existing materials of
some kind, it may all be mere fantasy and thus may not stand in
need of a paranormal explanation of any sort. And once we
admit the possibility of an explanation in terms of 'super-ESP' as
an alternative to the survival hypothesis, there is nothing to stop
us from appealing to the possibility of retrocognitive telepathy,
where the medium may be deemed to tap the former memories
or experiences of a once living but now absolutely dead
individual; or of precognition, where the source of her correct
information is located in the future verifying disclosures, from
her sitter, from unknown persons, or from photographs, letters,
or other materials which will subsequently be brought to light.
All of these are theoretical possibilities which cannot be
foreclosed a priori. My only comment on them at this stage is
that before they can be assigned some measure of relative
 Problems of Post-Mortem Identity 53

probability, they will need to be supported by relevant factual

evidence which at present seems to be conspicuously lacking.
I should like to make three brief final points before leaving the
subject of memory knowledge as evidence of discarnate identity.
First, memories need to be evaluated for this purpose according
to their quality (the accuracy of the claimed memories, and the
idiosyncrasy of the events or other facts which they report); their
quantity, or range; and the degree to which they mirror the
known interests of the deceased when alive. Secondly, a
communicator's failure to remember certain episodes or other
facts may often be surprising, and may tend to undermine
evidence of identity already obtained; but this is only a tendency,
and an abundance of excellent evidence may survive quite a
large number of marginal or interstitial failures; for we know
there to be a great deal that normal living human beings often
have much difficulty in remembering, especially names, dates,
and addresses pertaining to earlier portions of their lives. And
thirdly, the same considerations apply when some of the
'memories' relayed by the medium prove to be inaccurate or
completely specious; these tend to undermine, but do not
necessarily defeat, any impressive evidence of identity which
has already been assembled; for normal living human beings
misremember, as well as forget; and one thing we must never
forget is that any knowledge evinced by a discarnate commu-
nicator will have had to pass through the perhaps distorting grid
or prism of the medium's unconscious mind before it finally
reaches us.
(b) Character. A disembodied spirit might convey via a
medium something of the distinctive flavour of his personality
as remembered by his friends and relatives. As well as conveying
his tastes and preferences, his attitudes, interests, patterns of
emotional response, strong convictions, and his sense of humour
or lack of it, his communications may be couched in a verbal
style characteristic of the deceased individual, e.g. using
favourite idioms or dialect expressions, or illustrating his points
by characteristic examples. We have seen that an individual's
identity cannot consist in his marked habits or quirks of
personality. Nevertheless these may provide good evidence of
the identity of a communicator, and some sitters have recorded
54 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

their strong impression, from such features, that they have

indeed been conversing with the surviving spirit of the deceased
friend or relative whom the communicator was claiming to be.
The absence of this kind of evidence does not necessarily
constitute very strong counter-evidence. We might, for example,
expect an individual's attitudes and opinions to alter as a result
of finding that he had survived his physical death, and in the
course of time we might expect many of his interests and tastes
to change considerably also. Even if his personality had under-
gone no change, comparatively few people have personalities
sufficiently marked or vivid to impress them, we must suppose
in this case telepathically, on the unconscious mind of a complete
stranger, here the medium. However, mediums do often profess
to be picking up something of the personality of the commu-
nicator, and where these do not yield particularly striking or
accurate pictures, it is natural for us to regard them as no more
than the expressions of the medium's fantasies about her alleged
communicator. Naive, wishful, or ideologically committed sitters
may often willingly accept extremely meagre and vague
portrayals of character as entirely convincing evidence of
identity. What this shows, I suggest, is that unless a personality
comes over with such great distinctiveness and vividness as to be
almost unmistakable by anyone who knew the deceased (a
condition which is not often satisfied), the element of subjectivity
involved in evaluating this kind of evidence of identity is too
great to justify us in relying very heavily on it. For outsiders, that
is for everyone other than those who knew the deceased in life,
the exercise boils down to an evaluation of the character of the
sitters, in particular their degree of good sense and capacity for
impartial judgement. In view of the great differences between
human beings in these respects, it is just not good enough for a
sitter to expect others to accept his assurance that he has been in
touch with some departed friend or relative, on the sole ground
that he is intimately familiar with the personality of the departed
and we did not even know the individual in question. We may
have no doubts about such a sitter's sincerity, but we may
legitimately doubt whether he is entitled to infer, on the scanty
evidence he has been presented with and which he now reports
to us, that the communicator was indeed the individual he
believed it to be. If the evidence of identity is rationally
 Problems of Post-Mortem Identity 55

unconvincing, we should not allow ourselves to be convinced by

it - and nor should he.
Of the qualities evinced by a communicator, we need to know:
is this quality (e.g. a form of speech) rare or common, possessed
or not possessed by the medium herself, easily or not easily
imitable, something requiring or not requiring intensive practice
or rehearsal, requiring or not requiring special training or
experience, requiring or not requiring for its exercise an
exceptionally high order of ability? The answers to these
questions may sometimes tell us at least that the communicator
is very unlikely to be the medium herself, or some aspect of her
trance personality. But even in the very best cases, e.g.
responsive xenoglossy, where the communicator seems to
understand a foreign language and to be able to give meaningful
replies to questions couched in that language, say modern Dutch
or classical Greek - and these cases are of course extremely rare -
it does not follow that the true communicator is the individual he
is claiming to be. He might, for instance, be the surviving spirit of
a Dutchman or a Greek scholar masquerading as our deceased
friend or relative. A different possibility needs to be borne in
mind with other types of distinctive skill. The impressive
drawings of the schoolboy Matthew Manning in the styles of
Bewick, Beardsley, and others, executed with amazing rapidity
and seemingly under a kind of compulsion, and the composi-
tions of the musically untrained housewife, Rosemary Brown,
uncannily in the styles of Liszt, Beethoven, and others, to which
pianists like John Lill and musicologists like Professor Ian Parrott
have borne testimony, do not, alas, furnish sufficient evidence of
their true originators. We can readily conceive that some human
beings have latent artistic or musical powers, which may be
triggered by their conviction that these powers emanate from a
higher source and which can astonish us by their very high
quality. And because in these fields it is relatively easy to
produce clever imitations of an artist's work, it is that much
harder for any critic, in the total absence of independent
evidence, to affirm that a given poem, painting, or symphony
is undoubtedly the work of a particular identifiable artist.
We can conceive that this or some other naturalistic hypotheses
may be the true explanation. However, this is by no means to say
that we are warranted in accepting one of these possible
56 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

explanations as an alternative to the spirit hypothesis in every

case. In cases which most strongly favour the spirit hypothesis,
character evidence of identity may be supported by memory
evidence or quasi-physical evidence; or of course the facts in
these areas may simply fail to yield any support; or indeed may
tend to undermine the belief that the communicator is a
particular deceased friend or relative, or any deceased person
whatsoever. This will always depend on the actual empirical
facts. All I have tried to show in this chapter is that the task of
assessing such identity claims is an intellectually viable one, and
therefore that the belief in a life after death is not decisively
checked at the outset by any inherent impossibility in this
essential task itself.
We must not leave this subject without touching on the
problems that we should face ourselves, should we ultimately
survive our bodily death, in our attempts to identify former
acquaintances who had predeceased us. In the light of every-
thing that has been said in the course of this chapter, I can foresee
no insuperable difficulties, no difficulties in principle, although
in practice there might be obstacles in the way of one
disembodied spirit seeking reasonably conclusive evidence that
another disembodied spirit was indeed the very person he
claimed to be. A discarnate son could recognize his father who
made telepathic contact by projecting an image of his former
body, appropriately apparelled, as he had habitually appeared to
his son when both were alive on earth. Such a figure, although
strictly hallucinatory, would in that case be a veridical
hallucination. The telepathic contact would almost certainly be
extended by behaviour and speech, both involving telepathi-
cally-induced but ex hypothesi veridical hallucinations, confirm-
ing the son's recognition. And by the same process father and
son could exchange recollections of their shared experiences,
until neither had any doubt that their former relationship was
being renewed.
Of course possibilities of misunderstanding would remain. But
unless there was misidentification, these would be neither
greater nor less than those which attend relationships which
have been severed for a time between individuals in this life.
And of course, where the construction of hallucinatory body
images and telepathically-relayed features of character and
 Problems of Post-Mortem Identity 57

memories formed the stuff of putative recognition, it would

always be the case that the role of father or son might be played
by some other impersonating spirit. Impersonation is not
impossible as between acquaintances who are both currently
alive in the flesh, where, for example, communication has to take
place by letters, telephone, or videoed messages, or even
occasionally when living people meet face to face. We may
readily believe that opportunities of impersonation would be
multiplied, and their detection made relatively more difficult,
where all the parties were discarnate. However, the means
whereby misidentifications are possible are not different in kind
from those which admit of these being corrected, with the use of
care and intelligence. There are no special problems inseparable
from processes of mutual identification as between discarnate
persons which do not tend to mark the identification of a
discarnate person by those of his acquaintances still in the flesh
who have to weigh up evidence of identity. We have seen that, in
principle, these are by no means insuperable. And we might
reasonably expect, as between persons who share discarnate
status, that the available evidence would in the nature of the case
be significantly more abundant and attended by significantly
fewer distractions and interruptions.
 3
The Mental and the Physical

We have seen that there are no insuperable difficulties about

picking out some disembodied spirit as being one and the same
individual as some identifiable human being now deceased.
Problems of post-mortem identification do not constitute a fatal,
or even a very serious, objection to the belief in a life after death.
A much more formidable objection, in the eyes of many
people, arises from the claim that there can actually exist 'spirits',
in the sense of functioning intelligences, without the existence of
any physical organism to which these are related. In particular it
is widely believed that in the complete absence of a living brain
and nervous system, there can occur no conscious activity of any
kind. If this belief is true, the final and irreversible cessation of
brain activity will spell the complete extinction of the conscious
human personality hitherto associated with the activity of that
brain. The death of the brain will be the death of the person.
Before we can either accept or reject this conclusion, we need
to understand how, precisely, the physical processes going on in
a living brain are related to the activities going on in the mind of
the individual who is the owner of the brain in question. There
are several different, mutually incompatible, accounts of the
fundamental nature of this relationship. All of them broadly
agree about what tends to happen in the brain, accepting the
well-attested findings of neurophysiologists in this domain; and
they broadly agree about the diverse activities which go on in
people's minds. It is not the place of philosophy to question the
empirical facts. However, the facts under discussion seem to
belong to different logical orders. And it is the responsibility of
philosophers to try to establish that these logical differences

59
60 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

between physical and mental facts are, or are not, as they seem,
and to consider the implications of each of these alternatives for
the available logical models of the mind-brain relationship.
Some of the available models strongly disfavour, or altogether
exclude, the possibility of a life after death (for example,
epiphenomenalism, or identity theories), while others (notably
interactionist dualism) are much more hospitable to the idea of
survival, leaving this as at least an open possibility.
First of all, then, why do many philosophers argue that we are
bound to distinguish logically between physical and mental
facts, and why do some of them go on to claim that this basic
conceptual distinction gives us coercive grounds for differentiat-
ing mental events and processes numerically from physical
events and processes, that is, for inferring an ontological or
existential duality from the premise of a conceptual duality? The
answer to the first question is fairly clear. In talking and thinking
about physical facts we necessarily use concepts which have no
place in our talking and thinking about mental facts, and vice
versa. Thus we can meaningfully describe one stone as heavier
than another, and we know how to set about proving this, but
such an assertion makes no literal sense when we try to compare
one thought or feeling with another thought or feeling. We can
describe someone's mind as alert or envious, but such statements
would be devoid of meaning if made about an apple or a
rainstorm. And so dualistic philosophers have often concluded
that what seem to be two sets of phenomena, physical and
mental, which we necessarily conceptualize in such irreducibly
different ways, must indeed be wholly different in kind: however
exactly physical brain processes may be correlated with some-
one's mental processes, they have claimed, the correlations must
hold in every case between literally two numerically different
processes, either of which is conceivable as going on in the
absence of the other.
Before we consider the claim that two qualitatively different
processes are therefore two numerically different processes, let us
briefly review the characteristics which we necessarily ascribe to
mental processes only, and which therefore do seem to differ-
entiate these qualitatively from any and all physical processes.
The central characteristic of every mental event, process, or
state is that it is actually or potentially conscious. Since Descartes,
 The Mental and the Physical 61

consciousness has been held to be the mark of the mental. We

need not deny that people have 'unconscious' memories,
attitudes, and desires, provided we do not take this absolutely
literally. If a deaf person does not even hear a voice which is
threatening him, the experience of Toeing threatened' does not
figure at all as part of the contents of his mind. However, if he
hears the threat, but 'unconsciously7, we shall correctly expect it
to modify his other beliefs, feelings and expectations, to influence
his behaviour in ways both he and we can detect if we are
sufficiently attentive, we shall expect him to recognize and avow
his experience if it is pointed out to him or at some future time
repeated, and so on. In other words, we do not need to deny that
being conscious is always a matter of degree, for we can be
conscious of something without marking it, focusing on it, or
giving it any special attention. Physical objects, on the contrary,
are not even potentially, marginally, or subliminally conscious.
The motorist whose car is stolen may be bewildered, angry,
resigned, or distraught. To attribute these or any other conscious
states to the stolen car would be nothing but a bad joke.
Hence the motorist knows what it feels like for him to be
unexpectedly deprived of his car. The car does not and cannot
know what it feels like for it to be driven by a stranger. The
motorist has a point of view on the episode, whereas the physical
object does not have a point of view of any kind, on this or
anything else which may happen to it. Moreover, from the
conscious being's point of view the world is perceived to be filled
with distinctive types of quality - often called qualia - which
never impinge on physical objects. Colours, noises, tastes, smells,
and other sensuous qualities, which are among the most
significant features of the world as experienced by us, have no
place in the spheres of action and reaction of physical objects,
which may be influenced by changes in the wavelengths of light
or sound striking them, or by changes in temperature, but which
do not and cannot respond to the brightness, sweetness, hotness,
coldness, or painfulness produced by these purely quantitative
changes. Chemically, the effects of wetness on my umbrella and
on my face may be very similar, certainly comparable; but my
umbrella has no knowledge of what it is to be wet, and nothing
happens in the umbrella which can be compared with my
experience of becoming wet. Unlike physical objects, the story of
62 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

my life has a dimension of 'interiority 7 , of subjectivity. There is no

dimension of subjectivity comprised within the history of any
physical object.
It is notoriously difficult to give an illuminating account of
consciousness and its modalities, apart from the objects of which
it is the consciousness. To the optician I can describe the chart of
letters or the illuminated panel which he presents to my vision; I
can describe the physiological accompaniments of my visual
experiences, e.g. eye strain; he can examine my physical eyes; but
he can thereby gain only indirect, inferential knowledge of my
visual experiences themselves, of my seeing, and nor can I
describe this to him (or to myself) other than by describing what I
see, as sharp, fuzzy, small, receding, and so on. My seeing is, as it
were, completely transparent. It is revealed to me only because of
what it reveals to me. Yet I easily distinguish between the things
which I see and my seeing of them. There is a crucial
phenomenological gap between my visual experiences and the
objects of my visual experiences.
Whenever I am seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking, dreaming or
having any other experience, this experience is necessarily
directed to something distinct from the experience. Every
conscious experience is an experience of something, directed to
something, about something. This is the so-called 'intentionality 7
of consciousness, often claimed to be distinctive of all and only
conscious states. 1 Consciousness always points to something
beyond itself, and nothing else can have this intrinsic property of
referring. The wet pavement does not refer to the cloudburst of a
few minutes ago; its wetness is a result of the cloudburst, but in
itself it does not signify 'recent cloudbursf, for it could equally
be the result of a burst drain; only if a conscious observer comes
on the scene can the physical wetness of the pavement be
interpreted, and attributed to a cause outside itself. In itself, it
just is what it is. Or take human artefacts. A signpost on which is
inscribed 'Leeds 25 miles' does not intrinsically direct the
traveller to Leeds. Regarded purely as a physical object it has
no literal meaning, and in itself it points in no direction, since it
has to have been devised, and understood to have been devised,
by conscious, sign-using beings with the purpose of guiding
travellers in the direction of the city. A sign shaped thus '->' with
'Exit' written underneath, has to be understood as pointing to the
 The Mental and the Physical 63

right: a different convention could easily be arranged, whereby

arrows indicated something to be found by moving in the
direction of their shafts rather than their heads. In itself, an
arrow-sign does not 'point7 in any direction. The meaning of any
sign, including the signs we use in ordinary speech and writing,
is conventional, and they derive their entire meanings from
consciousness not from the size, shape, or colour of the signs
regarded simply as physical objects.
Moreover, the object to which a conscious experience points
may not actually exist, or may not exist in the form in which it is
experienced. (This is technically called 'intentional inexistence').
Thus a desert traveller may seem to see an oasis, or a
hypochondriac believe himself to have a dreadful disease, in
circumstances which render the existence of the oasis, or the
occurrence of the disease, a sheer physical impossibility. The
non-existent oasis cannot provide physical refreshment and the
non-existent disease cannot eat away the hypochondriac's body.
In other words, illusions and delusions can have no direct
physical consequences. However, they can have direct mental
consequences, his belief in the oasis reviving the traveller's
flagging spirits and his dread of the disease plunging the
hypochondriac into despair; and the reviving spirits and the
despair themselves can obviously have direct and indirect
physical consequences, perhaps saving the life of the one by
his redoubled efforts and leading the other to commit suicide.
Hence there is falsehood in the realm of the mental, where things
may seem to be as in fact they are not, whereas in the realm of the
physical there are no non-existent objects and everything is
exactly what it is.
The mind can be influenced by what no longer exists, as when
we are moved by our memories, and by what does not yet exist,
as when we anticipate some state of affairs which stirs us. The
past is dead and the future unborn, but both can influence the
present if (and only if) they can filter into the world via our
minds.
It is only for the mind that there exist possibilities. In the
physical world it rains, or alternatively it does not rain. A human
being stays indoors, or reluctantly carries an umbrella, merely
because he believes that it may rain. A degree of uncertainty
marks all our awareness of the physical world. This is why we
64 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

can significantly think, 'Either it is raining or it is not raining',

even although we know that one term of this disjunction is
definitely not true. And this is why we can significantly think, 'If
it is raining, the pavement must be wef, even although we know
that in reality there can be no 'if' in the matter at all, since it must
be actually raining or not. This intrinsic uncertainty not only
permits the possibility of error but also allows the practice of
intentionally disseminating error, of deception, which has no
place in the purely physical realm. Nature does not err, and
cannot deceive.
An endemic error in the realm of the mental is vagueness. I look
at a figure without my glasses and its outlines seem fuzzy,
although I know that this particular figure is not fuzzy and that
nothing in the physical world can be fuzzy - only complex,
convoluted, divided, or broken, but nevertheless with every
point on its surface in its exact place and necessarily bearing an
absolutely precise physical relationship to each and every other
point. Nor can anything in the physical world be ambiguous or
incomplete in itself. Yet what we perceive may be ambiguous to
us, and we may be tantalized by our incomplete perceptions,
thoughts, and memories, or deceived by them.
Connected with these frailties of the mental are some of its
characteristic powers. We can easily imagine scenes and events
which have never occurred. Without imagination, without our
capacity to negate or deny things as they are, there could be no
practical inventiveness or artistic creativity. And we have the
power to apprehend abstractions, for example moral principles,
numbers, or two-dimensional geometrical figures which cannot
actually exist as objects in the three-dimensional physical world
but which are features of it which we can mentally extract, relate
to, and even use in our dealings with the physical world. Our
thinking can be logical or illogical, rational or irrational, but the
physical events, states, and objects to which our thinking is
directed remain simply and necessarily what they are. A
rainstorm is just a brute fact, neither logical nor illogical, rational
nor irrational. It is only our beliefs about and attitudes towards
this natural event which can be described as logical or illogical,
rational or irrational.
Another distinctive characteristic of minds is their capacity to
take note of their own states by introspection. If I feel uneasy, I
 The Mental and the Physical 65

can be aware of my feeling of uneasiness, by a direct and usually

effortless act of reflexion. And the T which is uneasy is
absolutely one and the same with the T which is aware of being
uneasy. This capacity is intrinsic to all consciousness, which is
always potentially self-conscious. However, no physical object
can turn in on itself in this way, remaining absolutely one with
itself while at the same time seeming to stand out from itself in
order to represent itself to itself. In this, consciousness differs
essentially from those machines which are designed to monitor
their own workings by incorporating a special part to undertake
this task, since if that part is removed or disabled the monitoring
task does not get done.
This brings us to another claimed feature of minds which is
supposed to distinguish them absolutely from all things physical.
Whereas every physical thing, however minute, is in fact
composite and therefore in principle divisible into still minuter
parts ad infinitum, it is claimed that each mind is essentially a
monad, an absolutely simple thing which therefore cannot even
be conceived as having parts into which it could ever be divided.
As we shall see in the next chapter, this alleged indivisibility of
the mind has been used as a premise in a classic argument for its
natural indestructibility. At present we can think of it as a way of
expressing the so-called 'unity of consciousness', whereby at any
given moment each of my conscious states - my thinking,
remembering, seeing, hearing, desiring, and so on - is necessarily
an element in a single consciousness which is 'my mind', into
which all my previous and subsequent conscious states are also
necessarily gathered and enfolded. Although I can think of
someone else being uneasy, on the same occasion, in exactly the
same way, and to exactly the same degree as myself, I cannot
possibly think of him as literally having 'my uneasiness', since
my mental states cannot be thought of as detachable from me.
However, any part of any physical object can be thought of as
existing although completely detached from the object to which
it at present belongs, and as being transferred to and incorpo-
rated as a part in some other physical object.
Because no other person can possibly have my uneasiness, or
any of my mental states, no other person can possibly introspect
my uneasiness, my memories, judgments, sensations, desires,
intentions, or any episode or feature of my mental life. If I am
66 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

thinking of a double-decker bus, another person may be able to

work out that this is probably what I am thinking of, from his
knowledge of my habits, plans, and interests, and of external
circumstances, for example a recent prominent news item about
double-decker buses. But his conclusion is necessarily inferential,
whereas I can know what I am thinking about by an act of direct
self-consciousness. I have uniquely privileged access to my
mental states, which can become immediate objects of my self-
awareness. The events occurring in someone's mind are
intrinsically and inviolably private, while all events taking place
in the material world are intrinsically public, that is, in principle
available for inspection by any one. 2 A brain surgeon can note
what is happening in my brain, but he depends on my sincere
and accurate reports as the basis of his beliefs about what is
happening in my mind.
The claim is often made that, because I have direct access to
my mental states, it is impossible that I should ever be mistaken
about them. I can erroneously judge that what is being presented
to me is an orange, for it may merely be a cunning wax replica:
but I cannot possibly be mistaken that what I am now seeing is
spherical and orange-coloured, and that it seems to me to be an
orange. Of course I can misdescribe the intentional object of my
seeing, for instance by using the wrong colour-term to refer to
the actual colour of the intentional object. And tomorrow, or in
five minutes' time, I can make mistakes about any or all features
of the intentional object of my present seeing. These purely
verbal and memory errors, however, do not and cannot under-
mine the incorrigibility of my judgments concerning the direct
objects of my contemporary seeing or of any other of my
contemporary mental states. Such incorrigible data are typically
held to be the data on which all other data need to be ultimately
founded and on which, therefore, the whole edifice of our
knowledge ultimately rests. Thus every judgment about the
brute physical world is consistently open to doubt. Only in
respect of what is directly presented to my consciousness can my
judgments be perfectly indubitable.
Although this claim about our mental states may well need to
be scaled down, I do not think it can be shown to be altogether
false. We have already seen the possibility of semantic errors and
memory errors. There may also be errors concerning the type of
 The Mental and the Physical 67

mental state which is in operation. For example, I may seem to be

seeing an orange at a time when I am actually dreaming or
hallucinating. While this indeed shows that all my judgments
about my particular mental states can in principle be mistaken,
even at the very moments when I am undergoing them, it fails to
cast doubt on the necessary truth of the general judgment, T am
at present conscious'. This is the nub of the Cartesian cogito.
Whenever I make this judgment, it is indubitably true, unlike the
most general judgment about material objects, 'There is at
present a physical world', which can always be consistently
doubted. Hence, if I survive the death of my body, this whole fact
will not be indubitable. (There are many mediumistic commu-
nications describing confused 'spirits' who refuse to accept that
they have died.) But what will be indubitable will be my
judgment, T am still conscious and therefore still exist'. For if it
seems to me that I am conscious, I am conscious. To know this is
perhaps not to know very much. But for a pilot whose last
memory was of his aircraft hurtling unstoppably to the ground
and bursting into flames around him, it would at least be to
know something.
Finally, it has been held since Descartes that a necessary
characteristic of any mental state is that it does not exist in space.
We cannot ascribe spatial properties to mental states, and they
cannot be assigned a spatial location. I cannot say of a feeling or a
memory that it is six inches wide or a yard in length, or that it is
cylindrical or cubical in shape. Of course the intentional object, if
physical, will have size, shape, and location. If I am outraged by
someone's particularly reckless driving, or remember my child-
hood home, what I am outraged by or remember has been taking
place on a particular road or once existed in a particular street in
a particular town, and occupies some measurable portion of
these localities. And of course the sensory or cerebral apparatus
by means of which I see things or think about them also has
spatial properties and spatial location. My eyes and brain are
where my head is. However, we have throughout been
distinguishing between my seeing or thinking, on the one hand,
as mental states, and on the other hand what we see and think
with or see and think about. If I am dreaming about Buckingham
Palace, then certainly the Palace is in London and my head is on
my pillow. But how could anyone possibly establish that my
68 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

activity of dreaming is taking place inside my head on the

pillow? What could count as unambiguous evidence for the truth
of such an assertion?
It may be argued that every stage of my dreaming is
accompanied by characteristic physical changes in my brain,
and that interference with my brain will be accompanied by
characteristic alterations in my dream pattern. Even if this is so, it
manifestly fails to show that the dream changes are occurring in
the same place as the brain changes. The phases of the moon may
be accompanied by changes in tidal patterns, but these two types
of processes do not occur in the same place. Both of these,
anyhow, are visible. But the activity of dreaming, unlike the
processes going on in my brain, is apprehensible only by myself,
the dreamer. Although I can easily imagine someone else's brain
processes, I cannot imagine myself examining another's dream
experiences - and certainly not by the physical procedures I
would need to use in examining his brain. The problem is not
just that we have as yet failed to discover where a person's
mental processes are going on, perhaps owing to inadequate
techniques. The problem is that there are no criteria for determin-
ing where they might be going on; we do not even know what
could count as discovering that someone's perceptions, mem-
ories, thinking, and dreaming were taking place in his head, or
anywhere else. Metaphorically, indeed, we can say that a man's
courageous decision was taken in his brain, because of the
physical changes taking place there at the time. By a similar
usage we could locate it in his heart, which was characteristically
racing, or in his adrenal gland, or the pit of his stomach, or
almost anywhere else where we can find characteristic accom-
paniments of his courageous decision.
It has been argued (e.g. by Jerome Shaffer3) that we would be
entitled to 'adopt a convention' whereby we might locate mental
states in those portions of the brain which are activated
whenever, and only when, we are in the mental states in
question. To try to rid ourselves of embarrassing problems by
linguistic stipulations is undoubtedly the quickest and easiest
way of seeming to solve them. Shaffer, however, frankly admits
that to adopt such a convention would be to change our concept
of a 'mental state' - and from this it follows that he has at best
offered a solution to a different problem, about a different concept,
 The Mental and the Physical 69

not a solution to the problem of how mental states (in the

ordinary, undoctored sense of 'mental states') can conceivably be
located. And it is, of course, debatable whether there are any
mental states in this new sense, since it looks as if some levels of
thinking, dreaming, and so on can take place even when
electroencephalographs indicate that all brain activity has
temporarily ceased ('flatliners'). When in a later chapter we
come to examine the significance of 'near-death experiences', we
shall see that a few of these are believed to have occurred during
a temporary total suspension of brain activity.
To summarize. Let us suppose that mental events, states, and
processes necessarily have all the features which have been set
out so far in this chapter. In that case, if we try to conceive of a
mind which continues to exist and function after the death of its
body, we shall necessarily be thinking of something which is to
some degree actually or potentially conscious; which has
subjectivity, a point of view on what happens to it; which has
intrinsic intentionality and thus can respond to what does not
exist but is merely imaginary; which can remember and
anticipate; which can entertain possibilities and employ abstrac-
tions; which can be creative; which can be deceived and is
usually in some measure confused but can operate in ways
capable of being rationally evaluated; whose different phases are
held together in a unity; which can turn upon itself reflexively in
introspection but whose states are inaccessible to direct observa-
tion by others; which cannot consistently doubt its own
existence; and which cannot meaningfully be located in space
or assigned spatial attributes. If there are disembodied spirits,
this can serve as a very general description of what it is like to be
a disembodied spirit. Supposing this description to be self-
consistent and intelligible (a supposition which some critics may
not grant), we are still far from knowing how probable it is that it
actually applies to anything. We are as yet far from establishing
that the mind is numerically or existentially distinct as well as
conceptually or phenomenologically distinguishable from the
body. Our analysis is by no means complete, and it might be that
the ingredients needed to render it complete include some which
make reference to the body, in particular to the brain, virtually
inescapable. The association between mind and brain might be
like the association between water and H 2 0: when there is no
70 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

more H 2 0 in the flask, there is no more water in the flask. Or it

might be like the association between a flame and a candle: when
the candle is completely burned down, the flame disappears.

The image of the candle and its flame is intended to express one
of the oldest and most popular versions of the relation between
brain and mind. This is epiphenomenalism, or mind-brain
dependence. According to epiphenomenalists, mental states and
processes are no more than a by-product of the workings of the
physical brain. The brain in its workings produces many bodily
changes, directly and indirectly, for example altering heartbeat
and raising or lowering blood pressure, which in turn can react
on the brain, as when high blood pressure causes a cerebral
haemorrhage. It also generates sensations, emotions, thoughts,
memories, choices and all the phenomena of consciousness, but
the difference is that these mental phenomena do not react
causally on the physical system which produces them. Hence
mental states are nothing but the completely passive reflections
of what is happening in the brain, or the causally inert shadows
of physical brain states. All the true action in our lives is initiated
in the brain. Our minds are throughout merely impotent
spectators. A man cannot be punched by his reflection in a
mirror, or trip over his own shadow.
The epiphenomenalist accepts that mental processes are
conceptually and phenomenologically different from brain
processes, and he also accepts that they are numerically and
existentially distinct. When I have thoughts about going to the
theatre, there are in addition various electrochemical events
occurring in my brain, and the epiphenomenalist acknowledges
that these constitute two existentially distinct trains of events
taking place, the brain events and my thoughts. Thus epipheno-
menalism must be considered a species of dualism. But it rules
out the characteristic element of interactionist dualism, for it
does not admit that mental states can in any way influence brain
states or indeed future mental states. My present thoughts, qua
thoughts, do not make any difference to what I will do, or even to
what I will think. The causal traffic moves in one direction only,
from the physical to the mental, because without the occurrence
of brain events there would not even be any mental events. Hence
 The Mental and the Physical 71

we may consider the theory as primarily a physicalist theory,

since it grants absolute primacy to the brain.
Now if epiphenomenalism were true, the only way in which a
person could survive the death of his present body would be if
that selfsame body, or at least its brain, were to reappear as a
living organism either on earth or in some other biologically
favourable environment. A replica body would not do, as this
would generate only a replica mind, perfectly though it might
replicate the mind of the deceased. Indeed 'the selfsame' body
might be qualitatively different from one's present body in a
number of respects, for example it might be more youthful. Our
present bodies have changed considerably during our lives, and
although the direction of change tends to be unvarying (old and
middle age succeeding youth), minor and temporary reversals of
the sequence are often brought about. There is nothing to debar
us from imagining that our present bodies might re-emerge to
become rapidly strengthened and enhanced - a goal in fact
already pursued by optimistic individuals of both sexes in
contemporary Western society - by a greatly advanced medical
science in a more generally benign environment.
Advocates of cryonics believe that human bodies which are
deep frozen at the moment of death can be preserved for
extremely long periods, and that advances in science may enable
them to be revived at some future time. If everything went to
plan, the unfreezing of their brains would result in the
reappearance of their former personalities, complete with
memories and retaining whatever mental powers they had
possessed in their lives up to the moment of their 'deaths'. Given
the materialist premise of total mind-brain dependence, the tract
of time during which their brains were in cold storage would be
a gap in their mental biographies which was an absolute void.
In that case are we entitled to consider that the personality
generated by the unfrozen brain, after an interval of perhaps
thousands of years, is the very same personality which suffered
death so long ago? Could Maurice Chevalier, who died in 1972,
really be revived in 3972 if his cryonically preserved brain were
then to be reactivated? Well, if that future 'Maurice Chevalier7
had most of the ostensible memories of the 1972 Maurice
Chevalier, and effortlessly rendered his songs in his inimitable
style, and in short had the immediately recognizable personality
72 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

of the 1972 Maurice Chevalier, we should, I think, be entitled,

indeed obliged, to receive him as the one and only Maurice
Chevalier and not just as his 3972 replica or successor. Thus his
personality would be rightly deemed to have overridden the
time-gap in its existence.
However, this would be because, on the premise of epiphe-
nomenalism, his personality depends always and absolutely on
the activity of his brain, which had persisted unimpaired across
the time-gap in his conscious existence. If epiphenomenalism
were true, no one's mind would ever have strict or absolute
identity, even during our ordinary ante-mortem life, since our
strictly unconnected flashes of 'continuous' consciousness would
really be no more than the moment-by-moment reflections of
changes occurring in our brains. They would only possess the
fragile continuity and unity of a film on the cinema screen,
always vulnerable to possible defects in the projector or to breaks
in the celluloid which is being unrolled. The real unity belongs to
the physical apparatus and its physical contents, not to the flow
of images on the screen.
Nevertheless, in the only sense of personal identity which
epiphenomenalism permits, we would have to accept the
identity of the cryonically preserved and reanimated Maurice
Chevalier. But now suppose - what is in fact almost universally
the case - that on death someone's brain disintegrates and
becomes dust, and is no longer available as a discrete object to be
reanimated. This is the background to the belief in bodily
resurrection traditionally held by Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
Here there would be a double time-gap, physical and mental. If
someone's brain turns to dust and if (according to epipheno-
menalism) his mind inevitably ceases to exist, does it any longer
make sense to suppose that this 'selfsame' individual might
reappear, 'resurrected' after such a void?
To this question I am inclined to agree with the kind of answer
given by Kai Nielsen, who finds nothing conceptually puzzling
about what he takes to be the monotheistic belief in such an
eventual resurrection4. He points out that the specks of dust into
which a man's brain has disintegrated still exist, although
scattered about and mixed up with a lot of other dust, and that it
does not exceed the competence of an omniscient and omnipo-
tent God to locate and reassemble them into a discrete object
 The Mental and the Physical 73

which we can then identify with the original brain which died
long ago and is now 'resurrected'. No doubt the Reverend James
Fordyce, minister of Cauldshaw in Buchan's Witch Wood, who
kept 'ilka tooth I have ever casf to go into his coffin with him so
that all his bodily parts might be together on Judgment Day,
acknowledged that this was 'just my fancy to keep all my dust in
one place' and that God could of course gather his 'remnants
from the uttermost parts of the earth'. Let us accept that the
Reverend Fordyce had, and only ever will have, the one self-
identical brain. Its existence overrides the time-gap in exactly the
same sense that a collector might buy a genuine Ming vase,
although it had been smashed into hundreds of bits many years
ago, provided that these bits had all been preserved and were
then put together with expert skill in exactly the same order they
formerly occupied.
Thus if the God of monotheism exists, belief in a general
physical resurrection seems to be coherent, according to
philosophers like Nielsen. However, Nielsen points out, there
is a huge difference between mere logical coherence and causal
possibility. This gap could be bridged only if we had good
grounds for believing in the God of monotheism. And since
Nielsen and many other philosophers consider that there are no
good grounds for believing in such a God, and that the very
concept of an infinite omnipotent individual is probably
incoherent, their conclusion is that the belief in a physical
resurrection is, even if coherent, emphatically not a belief anyone
can reasonably hold.
We have been looking at resurrection theories against the
background of epiphenomenalism, which is one of the physic-
alist theories available if we wholly reject the possibility of a
disembodied self, which Nielsen does. So does Penelhum, who
rejects the idea of resurrection unless its adherents smuggle in
'an impossible doctrine of intermediate bodiless existence'5.
Otherwise the idea breaks up on the reef of identity, for the
'resurrected' body could at most be a replica of the original body,
now defunct. We have seen, I think, that this is not the case. And
so far we have not found compelling reasons to dismiss the
possibility of a completely disembodied personal existence. This
concept would obviously negate our present epiphenomenalist
premise. It is perhaps worth noticing at this point that traditional
74 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

Christianity, of course rejecting epiphenomenalism, in fact does

assert an intermediate state of bodiless existence, in which all
souls subsist between physical death and bodily resurrection.
The Westminster Confession of Faith, for example, clearly stated
that 'the bodies of men after death return to dust, and see
corruption; but their souls (which neither die nor sleep), having
an immortal subsistence, immediately return to God who made
them' 6 . Roman Catholics believe that the just who depart this life
free from all debt of temporal punishment are at once admitted,
but not all in the same degree, to the Blessed Vision and love of
God; while other souls are dealt with according to their deserts,
either to be cleansed by purgatorial pains or to suffer eternal
punishment. For both Protestants and Catholics it is not until 'the
Last Day7 that these disembodied souls will reassume the bodies
which they had during their earthly lives.
Obviously there can be no such intermediate state of purely
psychic existence if epiphenomenalism, or some other physicalist
theory of the nature of mind, is philosophically correct. We shall
examine other physicalist theories shortly. But at present we
ought to note how philosophically weak epiphenomenalism is,
and how little claim it has to be believed, although superficially
plausible.
Thus it is specious to argue for epiphenomenalism on the
ground that brain diseases and injuries, striking at particular
brain centres, can and usually do diminish or distort the mental
functions associated with these; or that sufficiently severe injury
to the brain can extinguish consciousness and destroy a person's
mental powers totally; or (as the neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield
famously demonstrated 7 ) that electrical stimulation of the
cerebral cortex can cause patients to have conscious memory
'flashbacks' of their earlier experiences; or, in general, that there
is a very high correlation between people's brain states or
processes and their mental powers or activities, and between the
degree of development of their brains and their level of mental
development. All these claimed facts count equally in favour of
rival physicalist theories of the mind, for example identity
theories, which are monistic in character and hence quite
incompatible with a model which differentiates the mind
existentially as well as qualitatively from the physical brain,
only to make it absolutely dependent on the latter. The
 The Mental and the Physical 75

'argument7 that some kind of brain or at least neural formation is

a causally necessary condition of consciousness constitutes a
claim rather than an argument, because it begs the whole
question of the possibility of a disembodied consciousness.
Spiritualists, for example, focus on a range of evidence which
epiphenomenalists simply dismiss or ignore. And the stock claim
of all physicalists, that interaction between mind and brain is
unintelligible because of the ontological heterogeneity of a
spatial, physically endowed brain and a non-spatial, non-
physically endowed mind, obviously recoils doubly on the head
of the epiphenomenalist, who is trying to assert that a mind so
conceived is actually generated and held in being by the
operations of this completely physical brain.
Furthermore, the interactionist dualist does not need to accept
the metaphysical principle that there can be no causal interaction
between ontologically heterogeneous substances. He may prefer
to take an extreme empirical view of causality, for example a
suitably modified version of Hume's 'constant conjunction',
which would be ontologically neutral. In any case, the workings
of the physical brain, in its minuter processes, take place at a
submicroscopic level where they are subject, not to the laws of
classical physics, but rather to those of quantum physics. The
slightest intervention of a psychokinetic force would be enough
to switch the flow of physically undetermined or underdeter-
mined electrochemical current from one neural pathway into
another, to interrupt and redirect it8. Psychokinesis is here being
appealed to, not as a conceptual artefact introduced to plug a
fatal theoretical gap, but as a fairly well established empirical fact
which is manifestly relevant to our present issue. The Nobel
Prize-winning brain scientist, Sir John Eccles, has written that
'the structure of the brain suggests that it is the sort of machine
that a "ghost" might operate (where by 'ghost7 he means the
intrinsically disembodied self of interactionist dualism which
finds itself contingently incarnated in an organism with a brain
as its control mechanism).
When incarnate, the conscious self has to work in and through
the brain, not only to control bodily movements but also, and
more particularly, to expand and strengthen its own conscious-
ness. We may surmise that in itself the conscious self is very ill-
equipped to acquire knowledge of the physical world, although
76 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

it probably has some residual extra-sensory powers, albeit so

very feeble as to be hopelessly unreliable as a guide. Never-
theless the essential nature of consciousness, however weakly it
may be actualized, is to know. And it looks as if this intrinsic
capacity, this psychic potential, is very greatly enhanced and
magnified when it is working in collaboration with a brain,
nervous system, and sense organs. In other words, the brain can
augment the scope and accuracy of consciousness, but it does not
(as epiphenomenalists claim) summon it into being. First there
has to be a consciousness, before it can be amplified. A
microphone can amplify someone's weak voice only if he is
already using his voice. Thus it is not in the least surprising, but
exactly what an interactionist would expect and predict, that
there is a very high correlation between an individual's mental
powers and the degree of development of his physical brain10 -
just as there is a very high correlation between the audibility of a
public speaker's voice and the efficiency of his microphone. The
correlation between mental states and brain states is by no means
perfect, however, as it would necessarily be if epiphenomenalism
were true. Brain injuries and diseases do not lead to precise and
perfectly systematic deficiencies in the mental powers associated
with the brain centres affected; there is at most a strong
tendency, because there are actually two forces working to
produce the outcome, namely the conscious self and the brain-
instrument. And, as we have already seen, 11 it is very doubtful
whether non-fatal brain injuries, however severe, ever do
temporarily extinguish consciousness altogether.
The main reason that epiphenomenalism has largely been
given up by modern philosophers (although it is still often to be
found, not necessarily under that name, in writings by scientists
on the relation between brain and mind) is that its doctrine of the
absolute impotence of mental processes is so utterly implausible.
We are told that they are the causally inert by-products of the
workings of our most important organ, the brain. But how can
the evolution of insects, fish, birds, reptiles, mammals, and man
have resulted in an organ which characteristically produces a
completely functionless set of responses? And, moreover, a set of
responses which never did serve, or could have served, any
biological need or purpose of any species which was conscious in
any degree and would thus have no survival value whatsoever?
 The Mental and the Physical 77

We know, for example, that much of the behaviour of animals is

to be explained in terms of pain-avoidance or pleasure-seeking.
How can anyone seriously maintain that they would still have
engaged in these selfsame patterns of flight, reproduction,
aggression, and so on even if these patterns of behaviour had
never been preceded or followed by any felt experiences of pain
or pleasure? To most of us, the absurdity of the hypothesis is
virtually self-evident.
The fact is that epiphenomenalism is little more than a string of
metaphors, and confused metaphors at that. The relation of
conscious states to brain states is crucially unlike that of flame to
candle, reflection to mirror, echo to the surrounding hills,
shadow to the body casting the shadow, music to the musical
instrument producing it. In the case of all the latter pairs (and
any other pairs cited among the metaphors arrayed by
epiphenomenalists) both members of the pair are physical in
character. But the mind-brain relation is only held to be a
problem if the mind is deemed to be non-physical in character.
And in none of the epiphenomenalist's metaphors is the product
wholly without causal efficacy. The heat of the flame melts the
candle; the reflection of the sun from a mirror can set
combustible substances on fire; an echo can trigger an avalanche;
the ground cools under a shadow; the music from the piano may
cause window panes to rattle. No wonder the epiphenomenalist
fails hopelessly to find a metaphor which successfully captures
his theory of an absolutely inefficacious mind. There seems to be
nothing in nature which is an effect but which, miraculously, can
never itself figure as a cause.

We have considered epiphenomenalism at some length because

it has been historically important as a doctrine perceived as
ruling out the possibility of disembodied spirits, and because it
still holds sway over the minds of many non-philosophers, both
plain men and scientists, who find a belief in survival of death
completely incredible. However, in the last thirty years other
physicalist theories, which rule out survival even more firmly,
have become philosophically fashionable, and to these we must
now turn. I shall treat them rather more briefly. This is certainly
78 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

not because they deserve more cursory treatment on purely

philosophical grounds, but because, in my opinion, most of the
relevant difficulties encountered by epiphenomenalism are
encountered also by these philosophies. Some of these difficul-
ties, indeed, they escape. But they face other, and graver,
philosophical difficulties.
At the end of the first section of this chapter (on pp. 69-70) I
suggested that the association between mind and brain might be
like the association between water and H 2 0. Now, the presence
of H 2 0 in a flask does not generate or produce the water in the
flask. The relation between the H 2 0 and the water is not the
relation of a cause to its effect. The relation is that of identity. And
so the identity theorist is the kind of physicalist who maintains
that thinking, dreaming, remembering, perceiving and mental
activities in general just are the brain processes going on while
these mental activities are occurring.
The 'identity7 in question is not held to be a logical or
necessary identity, but a factual and contingent one. The identity
theorist is not claiming that mental terms like 'joy' mean the same
as neurophysiological expressions like 'resonances in the lateral
hypothalamus'. But neither does 'water7 mean the same as 'H 2 0'.
To tell someone that water is in fact a compound of two parts
hydrogen, one part oxygen, is not to utter a mere tautology. The
identity of water and H 2 0 was an empirical discovery not an a
priori truth, and we know it thanks to chemical analysis not
conceptual analysis. Similarly the supposed identification of 'joy7
with 'resonances in the lateral hypothalamus' has come about
thanks to empirical study of the brain and its workings.
Water (that is, the fluid with which we are all familiar, which
we drink, wash with, and swim in) might not have turned out to
be a compound of two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen.
Elsewhere in the universe, or on earth at some future time,
under completely different conditions, there might be water in
the familiar sense which had a quite different chemical
composition and there could occur the chemical compound
H 2 0 which did not quench our thirst, wash our faces, or support
us when swimming. We admit these as possibilities, but research
entitles us to say that in fact the water here on earth is H 2 0 and,
under essentially similar conditions, will turn out to be H 2 0
elsewhere and at any future time. Equally, the identity theorist
 The Mental and the Physical 79

readily acknowledges that there might be intelligent creatures

without brains, without anything remotely resembling brains or
neural structures, and indeed without any bodies at all. Only in
fact there are not. Logically we could survive our physical deaths
as disembodied spirits. There is no logical contradiction in this
belief. Only in fact we do not, and under all known relevant
conditions in fact we could not.
Now if mental states, e.g. joy, are identical with brain states,
e.g. resonance in the lateral hypothalamus, obviously brain states
must be identical with mental states. Identity theory is reduc-
tionist in character, but would it not be equally reasonable to
reduce the facts in the direction of mentalism rather than
physicalism? No, says the identity theorist, because by consider-
ing mental states as brain states, rather than vice versa, we are
connecting up our data in this domain with the vast body of data,
general truths, and explanatory principles across the whole
realm of physical science. Mental (or brain) states are only a
small sub-class of physical states in general: to lay emphasis on
their mentality would tend to divorce them from the rest of
physical nature, while to emphasize their physicality is to align
them with an immense range of other physical facts - in
biochemistry, electronics, etc. - from which we can hope to learn
fundamental truths about the neurophysiology of the brain's
workings, and therefore of the ways in which the mind works.
Identity theory has appeared in two versions, type-identity
theory and token-identity theory. According to the former, there
are types of thought and experience which are always identical
with certain types of brain process. For example, when I think of
the Battle of Trafalgar now or at any future time, the brain
process in which this thought consists is supposed to be of
exactly the same kind on each occasion that the thought occurs,
identical firings taking place at identical velocities and rates in
precisely the same brain area. And exactly the same process must
take place in the brain of anyone else who at any time thinks of
the Battle of Trafalgar. Neuroscientists, therefore, can seek the
laws bridging the two types of data, eventually enabling them to
deduce what someone is thinking and experiencing from their
knowledge of what is happening in his brain.
To this version of the theory there are at least two widespread
objections, one conceptual and the other empirical. First, it is
80 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

arguably impossible ever to specify exactly a type of thought; my

thought of Trafalgar is immersed in a fluctuating context of other
thoughts, preferences, intentions, expectations, desires, and so
on, which permeate it differently on different occasions and
make it impossible to pick out a homogeneous thought, to be
designated as 'my thought of the Battle of Trafalgar7. Secondly,
there are no empirical reasons to believe that this thought, even if
it could be pinpointed, always occurs in association with exactly
the same brain process taking place in precisely the same area of
my brain, far less exactly similar processes taking place in
precisely corresponding areas of the brains of other people who
are also thinking of Trafalgar. Indeed there are empirical reasons
for disbelieving such a generalization, since there are patients
who recover memories normally associated with specific areas of
their brains after these areas have been destroyed by injury or
disease.
Token-identity theory seems less implausible. Unlike type
theory, a token-identity theory concedes that thoughts and
experiences of the same type, e.g. thoughts of the Battle of
Trafalgar, need not all be brain states of the same type. The type/
token distinction is roughly the class/instance distinction: my
individual copy of the Critique of Pure Reason is a 'token' or
example of a certain type, viz. Kant's treatise called the Critique of
Pure Reason, of which there are very many tokens. So this version
of identity theory claims merely that individual instances or
tokens of the occurrence of a given type of thought or experience,
e.g. your and my past, present, and future thoughts of Trafalgar,
are not necessarily realized in physical brain states of the same
type but may be realized in quite different types of brain state.
Obviously this concession significantly weakens the attempted
identification of mental states and brain states, since it partly
disconnects the kinds of data which are claimed to be identical.
Two-way bridge laws connecting them are no longer possible.
This is exactly what an interactionist dualist would expect,
because mental states, as we have seen, 12 tend in varying degrees
to be imprecise and ambiguous, while every physical state,
including every brain state, is always exactly what it is. Hence
there can be no consistent mapping of the mental over the
physical. This is so even if token-identity theorists assert, as they
usually do, that every thought or experience is identical with
 The Mental and the Physical 81

some brain state or other, on which it 'supervenes'. By this they

mean that, if two people (or one person at different times) are
thinking of Trafalgar, their thoughts may be realized in any one
of a range of various brain states; but if this brain state or any
other member of this range occurs again then the thought of
Trafalgar will occur again, in the mind of either person (or in the
one mind at a later time). But what reason is there to believe this?
There is, as far as I know, no empirical evidence to show that the
same type of brain state is always associated with the same
thought or experience although not vice versa, and it is hard to
see how sufficient evidence could possibly be gained to give
colour to this claim. The claim has the smell of desperation about
it, as if it were a theoretical device adopted merely to save some
sort of general connection between the mental data and the
physical data. By the time this stage has been reached the two
kinds of data, far from being 'identical', have now been
fundamentally disconnected.
We have seen that there cannot really be 'correlations' between
data which cannot be pinpointed because they are inherently
fluid and imprecise, and data which are of their nature
absolutely precise and can be quantified and pinpointed exactly.
The existence of such correlations is in effect something which
physicalists merely feel ought to be asserted, because they
passionately wish them to exist. And because there is consider-
able overlapping between what is going on in our minds and
what is going on in our brains, the physicalist believes that he
can get away with reporting this fluctuating overlap as if it were
a tight set of perfect correlations. However, even if there were
genuine correlations, perfectly rigorous and exact, between
mental events and brain events, what could entitle us to infer
that these two sets of events were really only one set of events,
that there was complete numerical identity? As we have seen, 13
no one dreams of literally identifying the phases of the moon
with the terrestrial tides, since they occur in completely different
locations. But I have already, I think, drawn attention to very
strong arguments which tend to show that there is no way, other
than by conceptual stipulation, in which we can establish any
location whatsoever for the mental events, processes, and states
which occur in loose association with certain brain activities.14
Mental states and brain states usually overlap in time, but this
82 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

alone is obviously hopelessly inadequate as a rational basis for

asserting their numerical identity.

No one who was conversant with the scope and quality of the
evidence for extra-sensory perception could reasonably hope to
identify thoughts and experiences with brain changes, or to show
that they are merely the mental products or reflections of brain
changes. I cannot possibly begin to discuss this evidence here,
but shall merely state that it seems to most serious students to
justify us in accepting that telepathy, clairvoyance, and pre-
cognition are among the marginal capacities of men and other
animals. If telepathy consisted in some kind of physical radiation
between brains, telepathy tests should show a consistent decline
in scoring levels as the distance between the participants is
increased. Yet all investigates agree that there is no covariance
between distance and scoring level. (If the physicalist replied that
perhaps the brain possesses an automatic 'volume control' which
amplifies weaker signals, we can ask for his evidence for this
hypothesis, and of course we shall get no answer, for this reply
would simply be another unsupported theoretical artifice,
adopted ad hoc.) Furthermore, physical barriers do not affect
ESP, as the Russian physiologist Leonid Vasiliev discovered to
his dismay more than a generation ago when he conducted
experiments during which the participants were completely
enclosed in metal containers blocking out all electromagnetic
waves between one millimetre and one kilometre, Vasiliev
having admitted it to be highly improbable that ESP might be
due to electromagnetic waves outside this range. Yet the ESP
results, he found, were not thereby impaired.
Anyway, the only 'brain waves' identified or suggested by
neuroscientists are far too weak to carry telepathic messages.
According to W. Grey Walter, if we considered brain rhythms as
radio signals, 'they would fall below noise level within a few
millimetres from the surface of the head'. 15 Hans Berger, father
of electroencephalography, once suggested that in telepathy the
electrical energy in the sender's brain gets transformed into a
completely different kind of energy,16 which can be radiated to
any distance and pass through all barriers without the slightest
diminution and which, on reaching the receiver's brain, gets
 The Mental and the Physical 83

transformed back again into electrical energy, producing neural

patterns (i.e. mental states) corresponding to those of the sender.
In other words, this mysterious form of physical energy, for the
existence of which there is no actual evidence, can perform feats
which no other form of physical energy can possibly perform but
which, it seems, happen to coincide with the characteristic feats
of telepathy! Ignotum per ignotius. The same comment applies to
Ninian Marshall's 'hypothesis of resonance', according to which
any two substances exert on each other an 'eidopoic influence'
which tends to make them more alike - an influence which is
proportional to their degree of complexity.17 The human brain is
by far the most complex physical object in nature, and hence this
influence is from time to time detectable in the similar neural
patterns which get formed in two brains and which appear as
telepathy. Although no energy transfer is involved, the postu-
lated 'influence' is supposed to be completely physical. Perhaps
by now we need a third category besides the physical and the
mental: the fanciful. Once more a purely ad hoc theoretical
artefact, with no empirical support, is being fabricated solely in
an attempt to provide a conceptual stitch for a philosophy which
is visibly coming apart at the seams.
A still graver problem facing any physicalist, whether identity
theorist or epiphenomenalist, trying to account for ESP is that his
theory would need to square, not only with telepathy, but also
with clairvoyance. He would therefore have to postulate a form of
physical energy, of course completely unknown to physics,
which is emitted not only by brains but by all physical objects
(since any physical state of affairs can figure as an object of
successful clairvoyance). Moreover, the physical radiation
emitted by the target object would need to be invulnerable to
interference from all the other physical objects, emitting similar
radiation, which exist between the selected target and the
percipient's brain. Next, although this hypothetical radiation
conveys knowledge of the visible properties of the target objects,
e.g. shapes and colours, it would need to be essentially different
from light-waves, since it is not impeded by any intervening
barriers. Finally, although all physical objects emit this radiation,
we would need to postulate that only brains, and indeed only
brains in a certain state of attunement, were able to absorb and be
affected by it.
84 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

Such a form of physical energy may strike us as impossibly

magical, but it is at least formally conceivable. The same cannot
be said of physical theories of precognition, for they would
depend on the incoherent notion of backward causation'. How
can we conceive of a physical wave or ray which reaches a
human brain before it has begun to leave the physical object or
event which is precognized, indeed sometimes before the
physical object precognized has even begun to exist? In an
attempt to evade this obvious difficulty, some writers have tried
to explain the phenomena attributed to precognition in terms of
unconscious inference from knowledge of contemporary events,
thus in effect denying the occurrence of any truly precognitive
element. Adrian Dobbs, for example, suggested that surrounding
every actual physical situation there is a field of objective
probabilities or 'propensities' which influence the development
and eventual outcome of that situation and thus from which a
future situation will emerge. 18 If we now postulate that such fields
emit 'imaginary7 particles - he called these 'psitrons' - which can
travel outwards till they supply some human brain with a
'precasf of the future situation which will eventually come to be
actualized, Dobbs argued, we have the ingredients of a physical
theory of ostensible precognition. Let us ignore the crucial
difference between the many probable future situations and the
one future situation which will in fact be actualized. And let us
charitably ignore the fact that while there is a role for imaginary
numbers in pure mathematics, and for imaginary 'particles' in
the equations used by quantum physicists, particles which were
literally imaginary (i.e. non-existent) could have no effect on the
human brain or on any other actual physical object whatsoever.
Once again we are dealing with manufactured entities, for which
there is no independent evidence and which no one would
dream of postulating unless driven to it by a yawning gap in his
physicalist world-view. It is suspiciously like a purely verbal
attempt to solve a real problem, in the way that medieval natural
philosophers allegedly reported that opium sent people to sleep
because it had 'dormitive powers'. Why attribute precognition to
the action of 'psitrons'? Why not just call these imaginary
particles 'precognitrons' and have done with it?
Psychokinesis is another paranormal power which would
seem to defy completely any attempt to accommodate it within a
 The Mental and the Physical 85

physicalist model of the mind. Its operations are unaffected by

distance and unimpeded by physical barriers; and it operates
equally on all types of physical substance - iron, brass, wood,
plastic, glass, rubber, and animal and vegetable tissue.
Most philosophers turn a blind eye to these claimed
paranormal powers. If they are facts, as most serious students
of ESP and PK have come to accept, they drive a coach and
horses through all physicalist theories. Indeed, if any of them are
facts, however rare, however peripheral, they must have a
decisive significance in at least dispelling metaphysical materi-
alism as a comprehensive theory of human nature. One of the
most distinguished recent advocates of a materialist theory of
mind, D. M. Armstrong, to his credit has clearly recognized this.
'If there were no questions about paranormal phenomena to
consider7, he writes, 'there would seem to be little serious
obstacle to the complete identification of mental states with
physico-chemical states of the central nervous system'. 19 They
are 'the small black cloud' on the horizon. The materialist, he
points out, has 'an intellectual duty to consider very carefully the
alleged results of psychical research'.20
Given that no version of materialism, whether identity theory
or epiphenomenalism, could possibly accommodate paranormal
cognition and agency, why should interactionist dualism fare
any better? To this I would answer that the facts of ESP and PK
are exactly what such a dualist would expect. For the Cartesian,
the essence of the mind is to know, to reach out, grasp, and make
contact with things outside itself. For the Bergsonian, the body -
including the brain and sense-organs - is an instrument which
normally greatly helps but may also hinder this native power of
the mind, as a tap focuses the flow of water by restricting it.
Interactionist dualism is at least compatible with the existence of
ESP and PK, although of course it cannot 'explain' them in the
causal, mechanistic, and external sense of 'explanation' which
alone has currency among physicalists. No reductionist explana-
tion, no explanation of consciousness in terms of something
extrinsic to and essentially different from itself, the dualist can
argue, is necessary because in the nature of the case no such type
of explanation is in principle possible. As well try to explain why
red is red. Knowledge and agency are intrinsic to mind.
Consciousness and the having of intentions are the very stuff
86 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

of anything properly called 'mental'. Hence the occurrence of

ESP and PK is not what inherently stands in need of explanation.
What if anything stands in need of explanation is their
infrequency, weakness, and unreliability.
Diehard materialists may grant that, if paranormal cognition
and agency existed, they would be incompatible with materi-
alism; but, they will insist, the issue is purely hypothetical, since
these alleged powers do not and cannot in fact exist. Let us leave
them there, sheltering in their impregnable fortress, following
their safe and habitual policy of stout denial. For there is another,
entirely normal, mental power, which can hardly be denied but
which is equally destructive of the pretensions of physicalism. I
refer to our capacity to remember our past experiences.
The capacity to remember is obviously an absolutely funda-
mental mental power. If we could not remember anything, we
could not recognize any of the objects which loomed up before
our senses, that is, we could not truly perceive them; we could not
think or judge, because each time we would have lost our very
starting-point; for the same reason we could not even frame a
sentence, far less communicate meaningfully with others; we
would be hopelessly unable to orientate ourselves around the
world, or cope with any situation by which we were confronted;
and our sense of identity would have completely gone. If the
physicalist cannot give a convincing account of memory, his
physicalism is not just weakened, but fatally damaged.
The physicalist has an enticingly simple story to tell. It is a
story which strikes nearly all its unphilosophical hearers as new,
up to the minute, and probably expressing the fruits of the latest
research, even although it is in fact very ancient, perhaps going
back to the earliest dawning of human reflection on the
phenomenon of memory. In different versions it is found in
Hobbes, in St Thomas Aquinas, in Plato's Thaetetus, and was
perhaps an exciting novelty when first propounded by some
semi-naked nomad as the tribe sat around the camp fire. Briefly,
it runs like this. Every experience we undergo leaves behind it a
trace on our cognizing apparatus - in its contemporary
physicalist version, the brain - and as long as this trace remains
imprinted, as on wax, we can remember the original experience.
The next time a similar experience occurs, it tends to impress
itself on the same portion of the mind or brain, both deepening
 The Mental and the Physical 87

the original imprint (fixing it more firmly in memory) and, by

reactivating it, reproducing the original experience in the form of
an image, a 'memory image'. Our brains contain billions of these
traces, connected up with one another in vastly complicated
neural networks, so that it is not surprising that the trace left by
some experience can often be reactivated by an experience even
of a very different kind, which can reach the original trace by any
of a large diversity of different routes. The 'association of ideas'
can be quite remote in its linkages, but in the end the physical
stimulus must reach its destination for a 'recall' or 'reminder' to
occur.
Thus for the physicalist memories are literally stored in the
brain in the form of brain traces. These need not be viewed
statically, like fixed imprints on wax or like inscriptions on a
palimpsest, but may be thought of along the lines of electrical
circuits, dynamically interconnected. In either case, however, a
living physical brain is a sine qua non of memory. Limited and
temporary brain damage in certain areas is followed by partial
and temporary memory impairment. Severe permanent brain
damage in more extensive areas is followed by widespread and
permanent memory loss. Total terminal destruction of the brain,
then, must be followed by absolute and irreversible memory loss.
If all a person's memories are irretrievably lost on the dissolution
of his brain, personal survival of bodily death in any humanly
interesting sense would obviously be impossible, other than by a
divine miracle. There would be no functioning intelligence, no
reunions of loved ones, no purposive activity, nothing but at
most a descent into blank imbecility for everyone.
Fortunately there are powerful, perhaps irresistible, reasons to
reject this account of memory. It is surely wonderful that, despite
immense and prolonged scientific efforts, nothing corresponding
to these brain traces or 'engrams' has ever been found. After
thirty years' fruitless search for a discrete memory trace by the
progressive removal of brain tissue from rats, K.S. Lashley was
forced to conclude that memory traces could not be localized
anywhere in the brain. (Of course from this total failure he did
not conclude that no memory traces existed in the rat's brain, but
rather inferred that they must somehow exist diffused through-
out its entire brain - since apparently some trace theory was to
him an axiom self-evidently true.)21 The underlying assumption
88 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

of the trace theory is that reactivation of the supposed trace

reproduces, as a fainter image, the experience which originally
produced the trace - that reactivation of an effect tends to
reproduce its original cause. No doubt something of the kind
occurs with some humanly constructed recording devices -
photographic film, electronic tapes, and so on - provided the
'reactivation' is carried out by means of other specially
constructed instruments and certain conventional procedures
are followed. But nothing like this occurs in nature, outside the
sphere of human artifice. The ashes into which the blazing fire
has sunk can be 'reactivated' with a poker, but nothing can bring
back the original coals which a few hours ago were blazing away,
or even ghostly replicas of them. In nature the reactivation of an
effect does not tend to summon back its original cause.
Moreover, what form could these hypothetical brain traces
take? They could not be isomorphic with the experience
remembered, diagrammatic feature-by-feature counterparts of
the original experience, since when we remember something the
content of our memories is indefinitely polymorphous. Take my
memory of Othello murdering Desdemona. I may remember this
scene by way of an indefinitely large number of evoked images -
a page (perhaps imaginary) in a school textbook, a scene on a
stage in Stratford, voices from a wireless set, and so on
indefinitely - or indeed without any image at all being evoked.
If I returned to Stratford to see Paul Robeson playing Othello on
twenty occasions, this would certainly reinforce my memory of
the scene, but if I was sitting each time in different parts of the
theatre, the brain trace initially imposed would not have been
made sharper but less sharp, more tangled, more confused, as a
footprint nearly always gets obscurer when haphazardly over-
laid by twenty successive footprints even from the same foot. But
if the brain trace cannot represent the original experience by
isomorphically resembling it, neither can it represent the
remembered experience symbolically. A symbol, e.g. the word
'cat', need not resemble what is symbolized. It is part of a
language, a code. Codes are devised by rational, language-using
beings, and their semantic rules are laid down in sets of
conventions. No one (unless perhaps a God) has devised a code
by reference to which our experiences are enciphered in our
brains, and no one is able to show how these traces (even if they
 The Mental and the Physical 89

could be discovered) might be deciphered. Is it the same code for

different brains, human and animal, whose owners have shared
memories? Such questions are absurd, as is the theory which
gives rise to them. There is no such thing as a 'natural code', and
the brain is not a product of human design, like an archive or a
computer.22
Another problem facing the trace theory, or any mechanical
theory of memory, is the problem of retrieval. If asked, 'What is
the capital of Peru?', I correctly answer, 'Lima'. Out of the many
millions of items in my memory, how am I able to retrieve
'Lima7? Obviously not by chance, or guesswork. Possibly my
memory items are classified, one class consisting of capital cities.
But there are still over one hundred and twenty capital cities.
How do I alight on the correct one, first card out of the pack?
Again, obviously not by chance, or repeated guesswork. It is no
answer to say that the brain contains ancillary traces, which serve
as 'cues', like catalogue cards in a library, and I find the answer
by following the correct cue, for there would need to be as many
cues as there are items waiting to be retrieved. How do I alight
on the correct cue? According to trace theory I am supposed to be
guided by a mechanism, a blind because automatic mechanism,
which is supposed to explain my capacity to remember. It is
perhaps already obvious that invoking such a mechanism only
produces an infinite regress. The 'explanation' of how I can
remember that Lima is the capital of Peru turns out to be merely
the completely unhelpful assertion that my brain contains a
mechanism which somehow, inexplicably, remembers this fact.23
Q. How do I recognize my house? A. I carry about a picture
(which I recognize as the picture of my house!)
It is, then, logically impossible that memories should be
literally 'stored' in the brain. As we have already seen, 24 every
physical state, including every brain trace, has some absolutely
exact size, shape, position, pattern, and energy distribution,
which may be very complicated and difficult to chart but which
in itself is absolutely definite. Memories, by contrast, are
notoriously vague, indefinite, ambiguous, and vary greatly in
their degree of completeness from one time to another, some-
times becoming relatively more complete after a lapse of time,
contrary to everything we expect of physical traces. Memories
put us in touch with the past, and characteristically make explicit
90 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

or implicit reference to the past. I remember that I have seen

Othello performed at Stratford many years ago, and when I
remember a fact about the present, e.g. that Lima is the capital of
Peru, I am aware that I know this fact because I have learned it on
some past occasion. But no physical state of affairs intrinsically
makes reference to the past. There is nothing inherently
impossible about a sycamore tree always bearing decrepit
yellow-brownish leaves: it is only because we remember that a
few months ago these leaves were rich and green that we can say
that with autumn they have withered. And brain traces, if they
existed, would as such only be certain patterns we find in brains:
that they had been produced in a brain which once did not have
them, and that they were the results of previous experiences,
would be pieces of knowledge which necessarily presupposed
our capacity to remember. Finally, even if the reactivation of
brain traces caused images to arise in our minds, it is wildly false
to suppose that memories, even ostensible memories, consist
merely in the having of images. To be the content even of an
ostensible memory, my image of seeing Paul Robeson playing
Othello has to be affirmed by me as the image of something I
experienced years ago; and to be an actual memory, it has to be
correctly affirmed as a true image of this past event. I cannot
have memory images unless I can already recognize them as
being what they purport to be. Once again a trace theory of
memory necessarily presupposes the very capacity which it
pretends to explain.
However, can interactionist dualism provide a superior explana-
tion of memory? If by an 'explanation' we mean an answer to the
question, 'How does memory work?', and if what is wanted is a
story about how memory arises from something not memory, the
dualist is entitled to retort that any such story is bound to be false
and any such 'explanation' is bound to be circular, appealing to
facts which themselves depend on our capacity to remember.
The existence of our capacity to remember, he can plausibly
claim, is an irreducible fact about our minds. It is the very nature
of a continuing, self-identical consciousness that it should be
actually or potentially conscious of all the experiences which
have gone to make up its biography up to the present time. This
is an inherent part of what it is to be self-conscious. What needs
to be explained is not how we remember, but why we forget,
 The Mental and the Physical 91

especially how we often come to be unable to retrieve from our

memory the particular item we are searching for. While this is a
very real problem, it cannot be solved by appealing to checks and
barriers of kinds intrinsically different from consciousness itself,
for example neurophysiological barriers interposed between
someone's consciousness and his memories. There are no
shutters, to be raised by some neural key, between me and my
memories, all of which are directly accessible to my conscious-
ness. Perhaps my memories form too dense a crowd for me to
pick out the one I seek - just as I may fail to recognize a friend,
not because he is hidden from me by some screen or barrier, but
because (although he is directly perceptible by me) so is
everyone else in the crowd in whose sheer numbers he is
temporarily 'lost'.

From this point on I shall proceed on the assumption that

physicalist theories of the mind can now be regarded as having
been sufficiently refuted - and thus that this crucial antecedent
obstacle to the belief in a life after death has been removed. Of
course when I say 'sufficiently7 I do not mean that the issue has
now been finally and unequivocally settled in favour of
mentalism. There is still much room for argument and debate.
And we have not considered all the available physicalist theories.
However, theories like behaviourism and eliminative material-
ism can, I trust, be readily seen to fall foul of the numerous
objections with which I have assailed epiphenomenalism and the
identity theories, in addition to various well-known confusions
and anomalies of their own which I shall not trouble to recite.
When I claim that physicalist theories of the mind have been
'sufficiently refuted', what I mean is that they have been shown
to be on the whole quite highly improbable, and that we have
therefore been intellectually freed to examine the many different
kinds of evidence which bear on the possibility of a life after
death, since this can now be regarded as a genuinely open
possibility.
Of course, even if all physicalist theories are discounted, it
does not follow that only interactionist dualism remains as an
option for the believer. For example, psychophysical parallelism
and Berkeleian idealism are philosophically available. I shall not
92 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

consider these here, because neither of these theories can get off
the ground unless we first postulate a God to fill notorious gaps
within the theories themselves. The parallelism of Leibniz
requires a God who has pre-established the perfect harmony
between the physical and the mental (which are deemed to be
intrinsically incapable of interacting, on the ground of their
ontological diversity); and the idealism of Berkeley famously
requires a God to account for the continued existence of material
objects which are temporarily or permanently unperceived by
human or other percipients (since 'material objects' are supposed
to consist of nothing but groups of sense-data or 'ideas'). Perhaps
there is a God who forever operates in the ways conceived of by
Leibniz or Berkeley. But I do not think we should use the concept
of such a God as the necessary postulate for some special theory
of the relation between mind and body.
Hence by far the most plausible mentalist theory hospitable to
the belief in a life after death is some form of interactionist
dualism. At the end of the first section of this chapter (on p. 69),
having distinguished the mind conceptually and phenomenolo-
gically from the body, I said that this was not enough to establish
that mind and body were numerically and existentially distinct.
But now, after having examined the best attempts to identify the
two and noted the conspicuous inadequacy of these attempts, we
can I think reasonably conclude that the mental and the physical
form an existential as well as a conceptual duality. In short we are
minds, which have bodies. A person and his body work in close
partnership while his body lives, but the nature of the two
partners is radically different, and their ultimate destinies may
be radically different.
Naturally I accept that the world contains many a thing which
we can conceive of in different ways and describe in different
terms drawn from quite different vocabularies but which turns
out to be nevertheless just one thing, albeit differently conceived
and described. If in swallowing an aspirin I am swallowing
acetylsalicylic acid, I am not swallowing two things (as I would
be if I swallowed the aspirin with water) because aspirin is just
acetylsalicylic acid. There are not two heavenly bodies, the
evening star and the morning star, but rather the one heavenly
body, Venus, manifesting itself at different times. Temperature is
not a result of mean molecular kinetic energy, but just is mean
 The Mental and the Physical 93

molecular kinetic energy. The Duke of Argyll' and 'the owner of

Inveraray Castle' are not descriptions of two aristocrats but of
one and the same aristocrat. And so on.
There may, however, be facts which annul such contingent
identifications. If the evening star had never had a satellite but
the morning star had always had a satellite, they could not both
be manifestations of the same star. If the Duke of Argyll is
childless but the owner of Inveraray Castle has two healthy sons,
one and the same person cannot simultaneously satisfy both
descriptions. Two descriptions cannot apply to one and the same
thing if, when completed, the complete descriptions are
incompatible with each other. And we have seen good reasons
to conclude that there are correct descriptions of the mind which
are incompatible with correct descriptions of brain processes. 25
For instance, our minds can be directly influenced by things
which do not actually exist, giving rise to baseless hopes and
fears; but our brains can be directly affected only by things which
do actually exist, by gross physical things like knives or by
subtler physical things like electrical forces. Moreover, many
characteristics of the mental are not just different from and
opposed to many characteristics of the physical, as one empirical
characteristic ('childless') differs from and is opposed to another
('having children'). Many of the differences between mental and
physical characteristics are differences between characteristics
which belong to different categories of reality. For instance, mental
states have no spatial location, while all states of physical objects,
including of course brain states, are spatially located. It would
seem to follow plainly that, however intimately connected
mental states and brain states may be, they cannot both be states
of the same thing.
Some philosophers would reject this conclusion, arguing that
although there may be states which are necessarily distinct, both
conceptually and existentially, these may in some cases be states
of the same substance. Such philosophers would differentiate
between a dualism of characteristics and a dualism of the entities
possessing these characteristics, between 'property dualism' and
'substance dualism'. While they would agree that mental states
and characteristics cannot possibly be identified with brain states
and characteristics, they would attribute all of these to one and
the same underlying entity or substance, which might be the
94 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

body or more particularly the brain. I confess I am at a loss to

understand this notion of a single substance which can possess
mutually incompatible characteristics. Although a substance is
not indeed nothing apart from its characteristics (any more than a
circumference can be considered as nothing apart from the
circular area which it encloses), the whole character of the
substance, the kind of substance it is, is nevertheless given by its
characteristics. And a substance has to be some kind of substance.
It may be the kind of substance which characteristically occupies
and is located in space, like the body and the brain. But in that
case it must necessarily lack characteristics which, like mental
states, cannot meaningfully be ascribed volume, shape, or
location. Again, if all its states are in principle accessible to
direct observation by anyone, it cannot meaningfully be ascribed
states which are in principle inaccessible to direct observation by
others. It cannot be both intrinsically public and intrinsically
private. If it is a physical object, it cannot have characteristics
which no physical object can have.
Unless of course the brain is something more than a purely
physical object. Unless it is also a subject of states of conscious-
ness, the possessor of mental powers. In that case, from our point
of view there is little to choose between property dualism and
substance dualism. If our brains, qua purely physical objects, are
to perish on death, it remains an open question as to whether
they survive death qua subjects of states of consciousness, qua
minds. But if by 'brain' we are speaking as we normally do of a
purely physical object, one which is entirely, through-and-
through physical, then such a brain, the brain as we normally
understand it, cannot possibly have the characteristics of a mind.
If it is merely a physical brain, it cannot be and do what a mind is
and does. It therefore cannot think or choose or remember or
introspect or anticipate or refer or make mistakes or imagine or
have scruples of conscience or engage in any of the transactions
which are possible only to minds. Brains are not persons. To
view the human brain as if it were a human person is to view a
machine anthropomorphically. The next stage is to start talking
to the television set.
I shall, then, take interactionist dualism as providing the
nearest we can get to an accurate model of the mind-brain
relation. To many philosophers interactionist dualism means
 The Mental and the Physical 95

Cartesian dualism, evoking a kneejerk response of automatic

rejection. Now although Descartes may have got some basic
points seriously wrong, there is surely a great deal that he got
absolutely right. But in any case interactionist dualism need not
be wedded to Descartes' form of it. Non-Cartesian dualisms have
been developed in the twentieth century by Bergson, Husserl,
Price, Broad, Popper, and many others. The version of non-
Cartesian dualism which I am defending in the present chapter
perhaps owes more to Bergson than to any other philosopher. It
very easily accommodates, although it does not necessarily
invite, the belief in a life after death.
The interactionist dualist does not need to conceive of the
mind as if it were a fixed and unchanging substance, in itself
essentially static. (Admittedly this would anyway be a parody of
Cartesianism.) He can instead view the mind as a dynamic
continuant, a ceaseless flow of mental energy - just as physicists
who have given up the older concept of the physical world as
being made up of solid pieces of inert matter can instead
conceive of it as consisting of chains and patterns of physical
energy in constant transformation. Nor is there any reason why
the dualist should regard the mind only as a perfectly conscious,
coldly ratiocinating entity, and be troubled by the fact that room
has to be made for obscure feelings, emotions, and desires. The
human mind as we know it is very far from being a perfectly
rational calculating machine; its consciousness shades off into
almost total darkness at one end of the spectrum, as when we fall
asleep, and during our waking hours the centre of our attentive
consciousness is always accompanied by a fluctuating penumbra
of semi-conscious or subconscious perceptions, thoughts, and
memories which are shot through with feelings and desires;
probably none of our conscious states is perfectly conscious or
without some kind of emotional tonality. If these phenomen-
ological facts make it impossible to draw a hard-and-fast line
between human consciousness and the consciousness of non-
human animals, so be it. And if animals are not 'soulless', as
Descartes believed, but like humans have inner as well as outer
lives, it begins to be possible that animals, too, should in some
sense survive the destruction of their physical bodies. We shall
return to this controversial question in a later chapter. Here it
suffices to remark that anyone who believes that a catastrophi-
96 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

cally brain-damaged human infant, who dies after only a few

hours of earthly life, can move on to some sort of afterlife, needs
to find cogent reasons for denying this possibility to, say, a clever
and experienced sheepdog or to a fiercely maternal lioness.
For a non-Cartesian dualist the role of the brain is complex and
many-sided, combining the functions of, as it were, a Geiger
counter, a microphone, a radio or television receiver, and an
automated telephone switchboard. First, the physical activity
going on in the brain may simply be a sign that some kind of
mental activity is going on, brain waves in my temporal lobes
simply registering the fact that I am engaging in some kind of
sequential thought-process. In other words when the brain
'lights up', this is like the light outside a broadcasting studio
which, far from producing the programme now under way,
merely indicates that transmission has indeed begun.
Secondly, like a microphone or other amplifying device, the
brain may magnify a tiny current of consciousness which is
already flowing. In itself unaided, this primitive current of
consciousness may be extremely feeble, perhaps because, in a
living organism, it can normally count on the assistance yielded
by the brain and nervous system, raising it to a level where it
becomes a fully self-conscious, recognizable process of percep-
tion, recollection, or thought. This original trickle of dim
consciousness probably includes those weak capacities of extra-
sensory cognition which we think of as paranormal on the rare
occasions when we are able to detect them at work. On their own
they would be virtually useless for orientating ourselves within
our natural environment and coping with its diverse challenges.
On the other hand, without them, we may surmise, there would
be nothing for the brain and nervous system to plug into, to
broadcast and to magnify.
In the third place, the brain performs its task of amplifying
consciousness by focusing it. Now, to focus consciousness is to
restrict its field of activity by excluding many data and
concentrating on the data which remain. In memory, for
example, the brain is responsible for admitting only relevant
memories to full consciousness and for keeping out the great
majority of our memories by holding them down in our
subconscious memory store. Thus in driving round a busy
roundabout I need to remember promptly and precisely which
 The Mental and the Physical 97

exit I ought to take, and if my mind were instead playing over

the memory of a gripping film I saw last week, disaster could
ensue. When my brain is functioning efficiently as a utilitarian
machine, it is in Bergson's words 'the organ of attention to life7,26
smoothly promoting my material safety, health, and comfort,
and thereby serving the general purpose of physical evolution.
But when it is fatigued, or aged, or drugged, or starved of
oxygen, it fails to function efficiently as this kind of grid or filter,
it allows through too many interesting but practically useless
thoughts and, as we say, my mind begins to 'wander^. Just as
blinkers help to keep the horse's attention on the road ahead, by
suppressing potentially distracting signals from outside its
artificially constricted range of vision, so the brain's function is
not to generate consciousness, but to keep it tightly held to the
worldly tasks facing us.
Next, this non-Cartesian model of mind and brain both
licenses us to regard consciousness as the essential mark of the
mental and yet to admit that consciousness is a characteristic
which may be present in very high or extremely low degree. We
do not need to accept that the mind is ever absolutely
unconscious. Even in deep, dreamless sleep we are very dimly
aware of external stimuli - as when we shift our positions in bed
because of some passing discomfort or awaken because of an
unusual noise in the street which at some level, therefore, we
must actually have heard. Nurses are trained to talk to patients in
coma, and relatives are encouraged to play favourite pieces of
music to them, because again it is believed that at some sunken
level they may be capable of actually experiencing these
reassuring sounds. Hence our model entitles us to view much
of our mental life as going on subconsciously, provided we grant
to subconscious experiences and thoughts those features (e.g.
intentionality) which they share with our more fully-conscious
levels of mentation. In later chapters we shall have occasion to
note how often the ostensible evidence for a life after death
seems to arrive in the first place via our subconscious and has to
work its way upwards into our full consciousness, probably
getting distorted and embroidered on the way, and thus making
the job of interpreting and evaluating it all the more difficult. The
apparition 'seen' and 'heard' by a 'percipient7, for example, is an
image which has had to pass through his subconscious - and we
98 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

naturally have to ask ourselves whether it may in fact have

originated in its entirety from within his own subconscious, and
not at all from an independently existing spirit And the
subconscious fantasies of mediums obviously play a large part
in fabricating the post-mortem scenarios which they depict. The
question is, whether any element of these originates from the
surviving mind of a spirit 'communicator'.
Lastly, our non-Cartesian model of the mind-brain relation
devolves on the brain the whole of the task of connecting up
consciousness with the motor mechanisms of speech and action,
and so giving it currency in the material world. Far from
representing the entire contents of our minds, or even their entire
contents at a given moment, our brain states merely indicate
those mental states which are the early initiators of, or presently
involved in the preparations for, those neurophysiological
changes necessary to bring about bodily movements. To try to
read off what someone was thinking about by scanning his brain
states would be like a deaf man trying to follow an orchestral
performance by watching what the conductor was doing with his
baton, or like a deaf man trying to understand a performance of
King Lear by watching where the actors were standing and what
they were doing (or seemed to be doing). Our brain states reflect
only a small fraction of the text of our mental lives, namely that
fraction which is geared to living in the material world.
Obviously, then, the brain has a highly significant role with
regard to what perhaps I may call both our meditative
consciousness and our practical consciousness. If it is damaged
or atrophied, by injury, illness, or senility, both types of
consciousness may be gravely impaired, either by becoming
more and more disorganized or by becoming fainter and less
intense. The differences between the mental powers of normal
human beings and the members of other species are manifestly
attributable to the great differences of complexity between their
respective types of brain or other neural formation. And the
development of the brain between infancy and maturity is what
mainly accounts for the much greater mental powers of the adult.
(See supra, p. 76, esp. note 10.)
Nevertheless, the operations of the mind depend on two
factors, one instrumental and extrinsic, and the other intrinsic.
Because of a great multiplicity of contingent circumstances, one
 The Mental and the Physical 99

of these factors - the instrumental one, the physical brain - may

turn out to be nearly always by far the dominant one. But the
other factor - our intrinsic current of consciousness - is necessary
and may for some purposes be sufficient. During ordinary
biological life the two interact, usually in close partnership.
We have already seen {supra, p. 75) that this fact generates no
insoluble philosophical problems. Now if we ever ask, 'What is
the causal connection between a and b?', and expect and get an
answer in terms of some intermediary x, we thereby inevitably
acquire two further problems: viz. what is the causal connection
between a and x, and what is the causal connection between x
and b? As we unpack any causal chain in terms of connecting
links, we must expect at some points to arrive at links which
constitute the final limits of causal explanation because each is
directly and immediately connected to the next link, without the
interposition of yet another link. We then have to acknowledge
that as a brute fact, not further explicable, this kind of thing just
does cause that kind of thing. We cannot significantly ask 'how'
it does this. All we can do is accept that in fact it does. And at the
interface of mind and brain this is very probably the point we
have reached. For example, there is a psychological story about
why I choose to raise my arm, and there is a physiological story
about how my arm rises given the occurrence of various events
in my brain. The physiological story begins after the psycholo-
gical story ends. But at different points in each of these stories we
shall come across brute causal facts, and very probably we come
across such a brute fact in the connection between my choice and
the occurrence of the relevant brain events. One just does cause
the other.
If a critic asks how there can possibly be causal connections
between things which are ontologically heterogeneous, we can
retort: why should there not be? Given that brain changes and
mental events tend to be regularly associated with one another,
we have excellent evidence of their causal interaction. Admit-
tedly, since it does not occur in space, a mental event - my
decision to raise my arm - can precede the train of physical
changes which results in my arm rising, but it cannot literally be
adjacent to any member of this physical train. However, it can and
does typically represent to itself at least one (typically the last)
member of the physical train. And this mental representation of
100 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

the spatially located physical outcome of my decision furnishes

the exact analogue, in mind-body interaction, of spatial
adjacency in the concept of ordinary physical interactions. Since
my mind can represent the ultimate physical outcome of its
choice, it is unnecessary that it should also represent all the
stages automatically leading up to this outcome, which are
generally quite unknown to the person who voluntarily raises his
arm. It is enough that I can prefigure mentally my arm
movement, without in the least being able to prefigure the
changes in my motor cortex which eventually bring about this
gross physical result. Similarly, if I order a dish in a restaurant,
there is no need for me to visualize all the steps which have to be
taken in the kitchen for the preparation of this dish, and I may
remain blissfully ignorant of all the professional activities of the
cooks. Yet it is my ordering of this particular dish which
primarily explains its ultimate arrival at my table. And if the
visualizing of a state of affairs is regularly followed by that state
of affairs, other things being equal, this justifies us in imputing
the state of affairs in question to the act of visualizing in question.
This is largely what is meant by 'psychokinesis'. Whatever the
intermediary stages between my choice and its physical
realization, then, we can probably ascribe the action of mind
on body to the general category of psychokinesis.
One of the most frequently encountered objections to the belief
in a life after death, and seemingly one of the most forcible and
fundamental, is that we possess no adequate and self-consistent
model of the relation between mind and body which would
permit us plausibly to conceive of the mind continuing
independently after the destruction of the body. I hope that my
analysis in this chapter has robbed this objection of most of its
force. For I have tried to give an account of the mind-brain
relation which is not just abstractly possible but which, in
comparison with prevailing physicalist accounts, actually sup-
plies the most probable working model of mind and brain that is
philosophically available to us.
Of course, because of limitations of space, I have had to leave a
number of problems unresolved. For instance, why is it that each
mind possesses only one body and each body is animated by
only one mind? And where do individual minds spring from in
the first place? To such questions a complete philosophy of non-
 The Mental and the Physical 101

Cartesian dualism would have to suggest convincing answers. It

may be that the first question is based on a doubtful premise,
which would be denied by believers in reincarnation (who
maintain that on a vast time-scale a single mind may successively
possess a large number of bodies, each for a comparatively brief
period); and also by many spiritualists and others, who hold that
one and the same body can sometimes be under the control of
more than one mind, either simultaneously or successively (as in
cases of 'possession', or of 'multiple personality7): on these views
the normal one-one relation between an individual mind and an
individual body is not a necessary truth but at most a contingent
fact, which is capable of being overridden. And to the question of
whence the mind originates, a number of possible answers
suggest themselves, all highly speculative. There is 'traducian-
ism', the idea that the mind of the child derives directly from the
minds of its parents, as its body derives from the union of their
bodies; there is the theory that the child's embryonic mind
derives originally from its physical embryo, although thereafter
its existence and operations continue independently of, albeit in
partnership with, its physical body (just as our physical bodies
themselves begin in a state of total dependency on the mother,
although on birth this total dependency ceases); there is the view
that every mind is the result of a special act of creation by God;
there is the Bergsonian and Neoplatonic view that individual
souls emanate ultimately from a World-Soul, from whose
effulgent superabundance they 'overflow7 and 'descend' into
matter. But on these and other far-reaching metaphysical
speculations there is no need for me to comment here. For our
purposes it suffices that we do exist, that we have the nature we
do have, and that, however and wherever we may have
originated, given our present nature it is philosophically possible
that we should continue to exist after the death of our present
bodies.
 4
General Arguments for the
Immortality of the Soul

There are many general arguments, some of them very ancient,

which purport to show that the soul has a destiny beyond the
present life. The arguments I have in mind here are all in one
way or another a priori. Some of them are a priori in the most
formal sense, for example deductive inferences from the soul's
necessary indivisibility to its natural indestructibility. Others
tend to rest on some kind of a priori ethical principle, for
example Kant's argument that our duty to make ourselves
perfect entails that we must have an infinite time in which to
accomplish this duty. Others are logically based on religious
beliefs, for example the Christian belief that a perfectly loving
Creator would not suffer any of his human creatures to be
completely destroyed. And there are other arguments which are
certainly general and can perhaps be styled a priori, although in
a much looser sense, for example arguments like those to be
found in Mill and Butler which deny that any valid analogy may
be drawn between the soul and other things known to be
destructible. At least we can say that none of these types of
argument has the form of an inductive generalization in which
the assertion that a future life awaits all souls is grounded on
observed particular instances (say of apparitions of the dead or
mediumistic communications) which have allegedly shown that
various identifiable individuals can be plausibly claimed to have
passed after death into another state of existence. All of the
arguments I shall discuss make appeal to some general feature or
features of conscious selves and their situation, independently of

103
104 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

what we believe to have happened in the case of particular

individuals.
The arguments are nearly all designed to show that the soul's
post-mortem existence will be endless, that the soul is literally
immortal, or at any rate that we are entitled to believe that this is
so. But in one or two cases it will be evident that, whatever then-
authors' intentions, the arguments could at most show that the
soul will survive the death of the body for some unspecified
period of time.
First of all, however, let us note the grounds on which John
Stuart Mill maintained that we must remain essentially agnostic
about immortality.1 According to Mill, material bodies have only
a hypothetical existence, for they are simply assumptions
adopted by us to account for our sensations. 'Feeling and
thought are not merely different from what we call inanimate
matter, but are at the opposite pole of existence . . . Feeling and
thought are much more real than anything else; they are the only
things which we directly know to be real'.2 How can we possibly
argue that, because material objects or these 'contingent
possibilities of sensation sooner or later come to an end and
give place, it is implied in this, that the series of our feelings must
itself be broken off?'3 Analogical inference, he concludes, has
little or no validity from the one to the other. Thus, since there is
really a total absence of evidence on either side of the question,
on the issue of a possible future state 'the absence of evidence for
the affirmative does not, as in so many cases it does, create a
strong presumption in favour of the negative'.4
Bishop Butler's interpretation of this state of affairs is quite the
opposite of Mill's. He agrees with Mill that 'there can be no
probability collected from the reason of the thing' that death will
bring about the destruction of our powers of action or our
capacities of happiness and misery, since 'as we are greatly in the
dark, upon what the exercise of our living powers depends, so
we are wholly ignorant what the powers themselves depend
upon'. 5 There are certainly no grounds for believing that this
'unknown event, death' involves the destruction of our faculties
of action, perception, and reflection, for all we can know is that
'this event removes them from our view'. 6 But because 'there is
in every case a probability, that all things will continue as we
experience they are, in all respects',7 unless we have grounds for
 General Arguments for Immortality of the Soul 105

believing the contrary, we may argue from analogy with other

things in nature that there is a strong presumption in favour of
living agents continuing to think and act after their physical
dissolution. Indeed death, Butler suggests, may resemble a kind
of birth. There is an analogy, he claims, between our original
transition from the womb, the transformation of caterpillars into
butterflies, or birds breaking their way out of their shells and
entering into a fuller life, and the equally radical transition we
call death. By death we may be released into a higher, richer, and
significantly enlarged sphere of existence and activity.
This analogy is reinforced when we recognize further
disparities between body and mind. If we accept that conscious-
ness is a single and indivisible power, it is wholly unlike bodies,
which are compounded, and therefore discerptible. 'Men may
lose their limbs, their organs of sense, and even the greatest part
of these bodies and yet remain the same living agents'.8 Certainly
our capacity for sensation seems to depend on our possession of
physical sense-organs. But our capacities to remember, imagine,
reason, and reflect apparently do not. Mortal diseases which
progressively undermine our physical constitution can leave our
faculties of apprehension, our affections, our characters, our
sense of shame and honour completely unaffected, 'even to the
last gasp'. Why should we suppose that these faculties,
unimpaired right up to the brink of death, should then be
suddenly extinguished by an event of whose consequences we in
fact know nothing?
The reactions which Butler's arguments would elicit from
anyone sceptical about immortality are glaringly obvious. David
Hume, who admitted the legitimacy of analogical reasoning on
this topic, claimed that such reasoning must point in exactly the
opposite direction to that envisaged by Butler. 'Sleep, a very
small effect on the body, is attended with a temporary extinction,
at least a great confusion in the soul. The weakness of the body
and that of the mind in infancy are exactly proportioned; their
vigour in manhood, their sympathetic disorder in sickness, their
common gradual decay in old age. The step further seems
unavoidable; their common dissolution in death. The last
symptoms which the mind discovers, are disorder, weakness,
insensibility, and stupidity; the forerunners of its annihilation'.9
The argument that our ignorance of the nature of death gives
106 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

substance to the hope of surviving it is specious, if we employ

the kind of reasoning adopted by Butler. 'Judging by the usual
analogy of nature, no form can continue when transferred to a
condition of life very different from the original one in which it
was placed. Trees perish in the water, fishes in the air, animals in
the earth. Even so small a difference as that of climate is often
fatal. What reason then to imagine that an immense alteration,
such as is made on the soul by the dissolution of its body, and all
its organs of thought and sensation, can be effected without the
dissolution of the whole?' 10
In short, we can see that Butler's whole approach rests on his
dualistic, anti-materialistic premises about the relation of mind
and body. If these premises are discredited, so is any conclusion
necessarily based on them. In addition we know today that there
is one part of a human being's body that is quite often affected
adversely by progressive diseases which prove mortal, namely
the brain, the organ of 'reflection'. Our mental faculties will
probably survive the loss of a limb, or even all our limbs. But
diseases which reach the brain typically undermine many of our
mental capacities, and sometimes do so completely and
irreversibly. Unless an analysis like that attempted in Chapter
3 above is accepted as being valid, we are, I think, bound to
refuse validity to arguments like those of Butler.
Another type of argument we still occasionally meet appeals to
the alleged fact that at all times personal immortality has been
the general belief of the human race. Even if this were so in any
adequately precise sense of 'personal immortality7 (and this
might require us to ignore the beliefs of countless Hindus and
Buddhists, for example), why should we feel it reasonable to
adopt this specific belief of our forefathers without further ado
when we have no hesitation in subjecting most or all of their
other beliefs to searching criticism? The argument from tradition
or the general belief of the human race', says Mill, 'if we accept it
as a guide to our own belief, must be accepted entire'.11
Moreover, we should be interested not only in what our
predecessors have believed, but also and equally in the grounds
on which they came to hold these beliefs. And we often find that
in the light of knowledge available to us but not at the time to
them, these grounds, and the beliefs based on them, are no
longer rationally tenable.
 General Arguments for Immortality of the Soul 107

This last point does not apply in the same way to a variant of
the argument from tradition which we might call 'the argument
from consensus'. Thus in an extremely thorough poll of United
States adults in 1980-81, the Gallup organization discovered that
about two-thirds (67 per cent) of those questioned believed in a
life after death while just over a quarter (27 per cent) did not. 12
Yet if we ask whether Gallup found anything that might tend to
erode any significance we were inclined to attach to this very
considerable majority of contemporary believers, the answer
must be that assuredly they did. For two parallel surveys
conducted with representative samples of prominent scientists
and physicians showed that the proportions of believers in these
two highly educated groups were merely 16 per cent and 32 per
cent respectively.
However, sets of figures like these surely offer scant guidance
to anyone concerned to hold a rational belief one way or the
other. As I claimed in Chapter l, 13 the mere circumstance that
someone believes something has perhaps a slight degree of
evidential value, but surely its value is very slight indeed. A
superstition is still a superstition, however widely held. We need
to know, not only how many heads nod in agreement to some
proposition, but above all why the owners of these heads
consider themselves justified in accepting this proposition and
rejecting alternative propositions.
Although indeed we can usually have a rather higher degree
of confidence in beliefs distinctively held by the more knowl-
edgeable, we obviously need to be satisfied here that their
admittedly greater level of knowledge in fact extends to the
particular subject in which we are interested. When we
investigate, we may find, for instance, that Mill based his
rejection of the argument from tradition on his uncharacteristi-
cally dogmatic supposition that people's former widespread
experience of apparitions of the dead must have been no more
than the work of their fancy, in dreams, waking hallucinations,
and misinterpretation of their visual and auditory sensations,
because they had little or none of the knowledge we now
possess of the actual course of nature'.14 This last phrase eerily
reminds one of Hume's notorious declaration of the sceptical
attitude he would still adopt even if every historical record
affirmed that Queen Elizabeth had been reliably pronounced
108 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

dead on the first of January 1600, had been buried, and her
successor proclaimed, but that after a month she had reappeared,
resumed the throne, and reigned for another three years. No
quality or quantity of historical evidence could ever persuade
him to 'admit of so signal a violation of the laws of nature'.15 Mill
at least professed himself agnostic, not downright sceptical,
about the possibility of a life after death. But his agnosticism
seems to have been based on a total scepticism about the
evidence on both sides of the question. One inevitably wonders
whether so honest and clear an intelligence would have persisted
in this total scepticism about the evidence if Mill had been able to
study and weigh the detailed accounts of crisis-apparitions and
apparitions of the dead which were published a generation after
his death in the SPR's Report of the Census of Hallucinations (1894)
and in F. W. H. Myers' Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily
Death (1903). To pursue this speculation further, however, would
switch our attention towards particular varieties of concrete
factual claims of an empirical kind, and away from the purely
general arguments with which we are at present concerned.

Another batch of general arguments profess to draw out the

implications of certain allegedly central human desires, values,
aspirations, and moral principles. The simplest and crudest of
these arguments is again one mentioned, and quickly dismissed,
by Mill. 'We are told that the desire of immortality is one of our
instincts, and that there is no instinct which has not correspond-
ing to it a real object fitted to satisfy if. For example, we
experience hunger, and somewhere there is food. Perhaps there
is a little truth in the premises of this argument, if in a confused
form. But as Mill points out, the desire for immortality is nothing
but the desire for life, to a limitless extent. And does not each of
us in fact have some span of life? 'To suppose that the desire of
life guarantees to us personally the reality of life through all
eternity, is like supposing that the desire of food assures us that
we shall always have as much as we can eat through our whole
lives'. One might add that at any given time, for countless
numbers of people, the desire for food is only too compatible
with their in fact having little or nothing to eat. The argument is
scarcely worth noticing.
 General Arguments for Immortality of the Soul 109

More deservedly celebrated are two arguments to be found in

Plato. The first of these, developed in the Phaedo}7 in effect
claims that the soul is so lofty that it would be absurd to think of
it as doomed to share the fate of the body when the latter comes
to die. The soul's natural habitat is the world of the Forms, of the
invisible, unchanging, eternal essences and ideals which are the
source of all meaning and truth. Because it is inherently fitted to
dwell contemplatively with pure Equality, Beauty, Goodness,
and all the other timeless realities, it must partake of their divine
imperishability, and the souls of true lovers of wisdom' must in
this respect resemble the transcendent objects amid which they
lead their mental lives. The body is a prison from which physical
death is a release. T o pursue philosophy aright. . .is to study
how to die'. 18 The great majority of human beings, however, are
engrossed by fleshly pleasures and ambitions, and on death must
face a further spell on earth, perhaps reincarnated in human
form, or perhaps, after a period as shadowy earth-bound
phantoms, reincarnated in the shape of one or another of the
lower animals. Nevertheless the pearl of true immortality awaits
all those who have risen to a stature enabling them to grasp it.
In the Republic Plato offers another argument.19 Every existing
thing has a special and intrinsic nature, he asserts, and all things
also have their own peculiar evil by which alone they can
eventually be destroyed. For instance, grain is destroyed by
mildew, timber by rot, iron and copper by rust. Now what is the
peculiar evil which can beset and corrupt the human soul?
Obviously vice, in all its forms - injustice, intemperance,
cowardice and ignorance. These can undoubtedly harm our
character in many different ways. Yet we can clearly see that the
soul itself is never destroyed by its own depravity. 'So, since the
soul is not destroyed by any evil, either its own or another's,
clearly it must be a thing that exists for ever, and is consequently
immortal'.20
Neither of these arguments is very impressive. Even if we
grant that the soul, or at least its highest part, dwells
contemplatively within a world of immutable essences and
spiritual ideals, why should we conclude that it must share the
nature of the realities amid which it lives and be, like them,
invulnerable to change and destruction? Birds live in the air, fish
in the water, but neither type of creature resembles the element
110 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

amid which it lives. Our individual souls, the souls of Socrates

and Crito, are very different from abstractions like Equality,
Beauty, and Goodness. The idea of Soul-in-general might be said
to be 'changeless' and 'indestructible', like all universals, but the
souls of Socrates and Crito are particular entities which we can
easily conceive of as having come into being and at last passing
away. And even if we grant, as we must, that the soul is never
destroyed by its own vice alone, why should we not take this to
show that vice cannot truly be the distinctive evil of the soul?
Perhaps the soul's peculiar evil is oblivion, and when total
oblivion finally overtakes us we finally cease to be. Obviously,
crucial questions are being begged here by Plato.
The ethical argument for immortality presented by Immanuel
Kant, while certainly ingenious, is also commonly criticized as
question-begging. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant considered
that he had demolished the basis for every attempt to establish
immortality by speculative metaphysical reasoning.21 The legit-
imate operations of the understanding are confined to the world
of abstract relations, as in mathematics, and to the world of
sense, as in the natural sciences. Empirical psychology can
discover important truths about human personality as it
functions in the sensible world. However, when the metaphy-
sician tries to prove truths about the soul conceived as the
transcendent seat of consciousness beyond space and time, such
as that the soul is an indivisible unity, his endeavours can only
produce contradictions or paralogisms. Belief in immortality can
never be made theoretically certain, or even attain a theoretical
probability of any degree, however modest. Yet Kant firmly
believed that the soul was immortal. In his second great Critique,
the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant bases his belief on what he
holds are the inexorable demands of the moral law. 22 We know
that we are under a moral obligation, not merely to act rightly on
all occasions, but also to make ourselves perfect. A perfect moral
agent is one who has no inclination whatsoever to act wrongly,
one whose will is perfectly assimilated to the moral law, one who
never experiences temptation. Now if we have a duty to make
ourselves perfect, it must be possible for us to make ourselves
perfect (since 'oughf implies 'can'). And if something is possible,
the conditions which make it possible must necessarily obtain:
the conditions of its possibility must themselves be actual. We
 General Arguments for Immortality of the Soul 111

shall never be perfect until we have become purely rational and

the sensuous, impulsive, passive side of our nature is completely
eliminated. This would take us an infinite time to accomplish.
Since we are morally obliged to aim at this end result, the
condition which makes this meaningful striving possible must
necessarily be satisfied. An infinite time must therefore stretch
before us. We must be immortal.
An immediate response to this line of reasoning is that it
begins from the wrong end. If 'oughf implies 'can', we need to
know whether it is in fact possible for us to accomplish some
result before we can view the pursuit of this result as our moral
duty. If we cannot possibly achieve it, we do not have a moral
obligation to achieve it. An end which can be encompassed only
after an infinite time might very well seem to many of us to be an
end which cannot ever be encompassed at all. Kant indeed says
that God, who is not subject to time, can in a single intellectual
intuition grasp the entire career of rational beings and its
ultimate outcome. But how can he speak of God surveying a
career and its outcome when this career is described by him in
the very same sentence as being 'of endless duration'? And if a
moral duty by its very nature needs to grip the consciousness of
the moral agent who has to perform the duty, how can it serve if
God knows the outcome of the moral agent's endeavours but he
himself cannot even imagine it coming about by his efforts at
some future point? Perhaps C D . Broad was right in his
comment. The command to make ourselves perfect is not to be
taken literally. It is merely a rhetorical way of saying: "Never be
contented with your present level of moral achievemenf'.' 23
Perhaps what Kant means by saying that the immortality of the
soul is 'a postulate of pure practical reason' is that we never
ought to be deterred from doing what appears to be our duty by
the thought that our efforts may eventually fail of fruition, that
they may at last run into the sand. Perhaps he means that,
whether we are actually immortal or not, we ought always to
conduct ourselves as if we are immortal.
This attitude may strike us as essentially healthy. It recalls the
proposition of Spinoza: 'A free man thinks of nothing less than of
death, and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life'.24
Nevertheless a finite being who is conscious of his own finitude
cannot but be conscious of the fact that his life had a beginning
112 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

and must at some future time come to an end. He has to adopt

some attitude towards this fact, even if his attitude is that of
ignoring it, of refusing to acknowledge it or consider its
implications. Now, a philosophical pragmatist might argue that
in forming our attitude towards immortality, in trying to decide
whether to believe or disbelieve in it, we are entitled - perhaps
obliged - to give full weight to the probable consequences of our
decision for our own emotional wellbeing in the widest sense.
Although we do not want to risk falling into error by incautious
assent, presumably we do not want to lose the truth, as we easily
could, through overcaution. William James puts the pragmatists'
thesis.

Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide
an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine
option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual
grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, 'Do not decide,
but leave the question open', is itself a passional decision - just
like deciding yes or no - and is attended with the same risk of
losing the truth.25

In his Concluding Unscientific Postscript Kierkegaard, who is in

so many ways the opposite of the pragmatists, also writes of
holding to immortality, despite its objective uncertainty, with all
'the passion of the infinite'.26 Kierkegaard is disdainful of
objective proof, with its accompanying taint of doubt. Socrates,
he says, 'must not be accounted a doubter in comparison with
one of our modern thinkers with the three proofs'. Socrates does
not know. For instead he has chosen. It is the absolute quality of
his choice which, on his last day, gives him the courage to face
death. The "bit" of uncertainty that Socrates had helped him,
because he himself contributed the passion of the infinite; the
three proofs that the others have do not profit them at all,
because they are and remain dead to spirit and enthusiasm, and
their three proofs, in lieu of proving anything else, prove just
this'.
Another writer on the same wavelength as James and
Kierkegaard is Pascal.27 While his famous Wager is primarily
intended to open the way to belief in the Christian God, the hope
of immortality is clearly the focus of the argument, on the
 General Arguments for Immortality of the Soul 113

assumption that an infinity of perfect posthumous bliss will be

vouchsafed to all and only those who have come to believe in
God. Like James and Kierkegaard, Pascal rules out the possibility
of securing any definite evidence for this belief, which by the
light of reason is sheer 'folly7. Let us suppose that there is an
infinity of chances against the belief being true, and only one
chance in favour. If these are the odds, the rational gambler will
calculate the size of his possible gain - infinite in both quantity
and quality - against the pettiness of what he is being asked to
stake, namely this transitory life on earth with its meagre
pleasures often mixed in with a great deal of pain. And the
mathematics of gambling will instantly dictate that so paltry a
sum is supremely worth spending to have even a remote chance
of acquiring such an incomparable prize.
William James' first reaction to the Wager is that 'if we were
ourselves in the place of the Deity, we should probably take
particular pleasure in cutting off believers of this pattern from
their infinite reward', because it smacks far too much of
'mechanical calculation'.28 But he ends up by admitting that,
for someone whose passional tendencies are already running
strongly in that direction, 'Pascal's argument. . .then seems a
regular clincher'.29 For the pragmatist a belief is true if it works,
and in the case of a belief in God or immortality this means that
its truth consists in the contribution it makes to the emotional
health of the believer, since such a belief is essentially
disconnected from the world of empirical facts to which the
believer needs to conform on so many other questions.
Here we can put two questions to the pragmatist. First, does
belief in survival necessarily tend to make us more psychologi-
cally healthy, happier, more loving, and fairer in our dealings
with others? The sceptic may answer that it does not, that it can
tend to make us, for example, more robust towards our own
sufferings but less sympathetic towards the sufferings of others.
In any case, the moral equation is likely to work out differently
for different people. Secondly, is it not dogmatic to assert that the
belief in immortality is entirely disconnected from the world of
empirical facts so that it is a genuinely free option which 'cannot
by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds'? This is the
starting-point for the voluntarism of Pascal and Kierkegaard, and
we can perceive that once again the real question is being
114 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

begged. Certainly James himself came to see this. In his

'Postscripf to The Varieties of Religious Experience he expressed
'the highest respect for the patient labours of Messrs Myers,
Hodgson, and Hyslop' and conceded that he was 'somewhat
impressed by their favourable conclusions'. However, the
important point is that in that work, referring specifically to
immortality, James plainly states: 'It seems to me that it is
eminently a case for facts to testify7.30 Belief or disbelief in
immortality is not a completely free option, to be decided purely
on grounds of psychological efficacy or moral value. It is a
completely objective question, which must be tackled by
objective methods in an objective spirit.

Probably the most famous of all the arguments for the

immortality of the soul is the argument which starts from the
soul's claimed simplicity and concludes that what is inherently
simple or uncompounded cannot possibly be broken up into
parts and is therefore indestructible. The germ of this argument
is already to be found in Plato. 'We ought then to ask ourselves
some such question as this, to what kind of thing it appertains to
be thus affected, namely to be dispersed', says Socrates in the
Phaedo, and immediately proceeds to answer his own question by
asking another question: 'If there is anything not compounded,
does it not appertain to this alone, if to anything, not to be thus
affected?'31 The body is visible, and composite, and is eventually
destroyed. The soul is utterly unlike the body; it is invisible,
intangible, simple and unaffected by change, and is consequently
indestructible.
This argument, rather confusedly put by Plato, came to be
adopted by modern philosophers and for a long time had great
influence. For Descartes:

There is a vast difference between mind and body, in respect

that body, from its nature, is always divisible, and that mind is
entirely indivisible. For in truth, when I consider the mind,
that is, when I consider myself in so far only as I am a thinking
thing, I can distinguish in myself no parts, but I very clearly
discern that I am somewhat absolutely one and entire . . . But
quite the opposite holds in corporeal or extended things; for I
 General Arguments for Immortality of the Soul 115

cannot imagine any one of them (how small soever it may be),
which I cannot easily sunder in thought, and which, therefore,
I do not know to be divisible.32

This is why he had considered himself able to claim, in the

'Synopsis' of the Meditations, 'that the body may, indeed, without
difficulty perish, but that the mind is in its own nature
immortal'. Whereas matter-in-general is a true created sub-
stance and is therefore imperishable, short of divine intervention,
each individual human body is merely a collocation of particles
which can be and in the end in fact is broken up and its material
particles redistributed. By contrast every individual human mind
is in itself a true substance, an ens per se stans, which can be
destroyed only if annihilated by an act of God but is
indestructible by any natural process whatsoever.
Descartes claims to know that there is this ontological
difference between our minds and our bodies because he 'can
distinguish' no parts in his nuclear self, which he 'very clearly
discerns' is not compounded, while he 'can imagine' even the
minutest individual particle as being divided or at least
sundered 'in thought'. We may ask whether these intellectual
operations are really capable of establishing the ontological
duality which Descartes is claiming. To ask whether the clarity
and distinctness of a conception is an infallible guide to its true
application, and thus whether conceptual truths provide
sufficient warrant for ontological truths, would of course be to
put in question key elements in Descartes' whole rationalist
methodology. Although we cannot explore such issues here, we
certainly ought to note the necessary part which these metho-
dological principles play in helping Descartes to reach his
conclusions about the unique status of the human mind in
nature.
Because Descartes is speaking of the mind as a 'pure
substance', while acknowledging that 'all the accidents of the
mind' may be changed, Leibniz felt entitled to reject Descartes'
conception of immortality as useless and unable to afford us any
kind of consolation. 'As a substance the soul will then not be lost,
as, indeed, nothing is lost in nature'. But our minds will change
outwardly, as do our bodies, which are constantly replacing their
matter from new sources; and as the soul passes through
116 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

innumerable changes, it will have no recollection of its former

states, hence rendering all rewards and punishments irrelevant.
'What good, sir, would it do you to become King of China, on
condition that you forget what you have been? Would it not be
the same as if God, at the moment He destroyed you, were to
create a King in China?'34
Surely Leibniz here (perhaps for reasons connected with his
own special metaphysics) is being unjust to Descartes. For
Descartes, the substance which is the mind is essentially 'a
thinking thing', that is to say, 'a thing that doubts, understands,
affirms, denies, wills, refuses, that imagines also, and perceives'.
And of course the mind recollects. 'Assuredly it is not little, if all
these properties belong to my nature'.35 Memory, like percep-
tion, judgment, and choice, is not a 'parf or 'ingredient' of the
mind which can conceivably be detached from it - any more than
its colour is 'part' of a physical object which could be detached
from the coloured thing as pieces from its top or bottom can
undoubtedly be detached and made to exist separately. These
capacities of the mind are properties and are moreover integral to
the mind, inherent in it, constitutive of it. For Descartes, they are
properties essential to anything which can properly be termed a
'mind'.
Despite his criticism of the Cartesian version of the immortal-
ity of the soul, Leibniz himself adopts the proof from
indivisibility. In Leibniz's metaphysics the ultimate constituents
of the universe are 'monads', substances which are absolutely
simple and without parts, and which therefore cannot possibly
be physical in nature if all physical objects have, or necessarily
appear to have, extension in space, size and shape. The monads
thus partake of the character of the mental. The 'physical' objects
we seem to encounter are 'appearances', ultimately compounded
from aggregates of monads, which are 'the true atoms of nature'.
Although all monads may be styled 'souls', perhaps the word
'soul' is best reserved for those which have more distinct
perceptions, accompanied by memory, like animals, while only
the monads presiding over human bodies, possessing reason and
self-consciousness, can properly be styled rational souls or
'minds'. Nevertheless all monads are naturally imperishable,
since as 'atoms' or pure spiritual points they have no internal
parts which can be displaced nor do they present any surface
 General Arguments for Immortality of the Soul 117

whereby they can ever be affected by any cause outside

themselves. Because they cannot possibly be divided, 'there is
no fear of dissolution, and there is no conceivable way in which a
simple substance could perish in the course of nature'. They
must be naturally ingenerable as well as indestructible, for they
'can only begin and end all at once, that is to say they can only
begin by creation and end by annihilation, whereas what is
compound begins or ends by parts'.36
Another celebrated philosopher who argued from the soul's
simplicity to its immortality was Bishop Berkeley:

We have shown that the soul is indivisible, incorporeal,

unextended, and it is consequently incorruptible. Nothing can
be plainer than that the motions, changes, decays, and
dissolutions which we hourly see befall natural bodies (and
which is what we mean by the course of nature) cannot possibly
affect an active, simple, uncompounded substance: such a
being, therefore, is indissoluble by the force of nature, that is to
say, the soul of man is naturally immortal.37

This does not mean that the soul 'is absolutely incapable of
annihilation, even by the infinite power of the Creator, who first
gave it being. But only that it is not liable to be broken, or
dissolved, by the ordinary laws of nature or motion'.38
This famous argument from the indivisibility of the soul is
open to a number of seemingly fatal objections. First of all we
may question the premise. Indeed, if we grant that the soul is an
immaterial substance, it obviously cannot have material parts.
But why should it not be composed of spiritual or mental parts?
Plato himself often spoke of 'the three parts' of the soul, by which
he meant the lowest or sensory capacity of the soul, governed by
feelings and appetites, the intermediate or 'spirited' element of
the soul, governed by courage and a sense of honour, and the
highest or rational part, governed by wisdom and the love of
truth. Plato may have thought of these as levels of functioning,
rather than as strict 'parts' or 'ingredients'; and no doubt he
thought of immortality as a prize to be won and enjoyed only by
the rational part of the soul, when freed from its lower accretions;
however he would thereby appear to be acknowledging that
immortality is not in fact within the eventual reach of our full,
118 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

natural, self-conscious personalities but only available at best to

an aspect of these.
That a person's actual mental life is multiple, perpetually
changing, and often to a greater or lesser degree fragmented,
with numerous lapses and intermissions, seems to be a
psychological fact to which the daily experience of each one of
us apparently bears witness. Although in this context I cannot
avoid saying 'each one of us', does it follow from this that every
experience is necessarily gathered up into the mental biography
of some one or other single, separate human or animal mind; and
that underlying the overall flux and multiplicity there must be a
number of distinct individual selves, giving pattern and unity to
a succession of experiences which would otherwise be unrelated
and inchoate? Or is 'each one of us' merely a convenient
locution? If so, why is it so convenient, not to say unavoidable, in
our own and every other language? It certainly looks as if the
experiences of men and animals are all sorted out into distinct
packages, but if we examine these packages - or in the
vocabulary of David Hume, 'bundles' - we fail to find any
empirical link which holds the bundles together. (This problem
has already been touched on in Chapter 2 above.)39 Hence comes
the notion of a transempirical ego or nuclear self, a Cartesian or
neo-Cartesian immaterial substance which is held to be the fixed
and unchanging locus of one's diverse and changing experi-
ences. If we allowed this to be divisible, we should find ourselves
back with the problem from which we started.
Yet, as Kant argued,40 we may have no compelling reason to
posit one single continuous ego unifying our successive mental
states, rather than, say, a series of successive egos each of which,
in giving way to the next, passes on to it the cargo of
consciousness which it has taken over from its immediate
predecessor. Such a transempirical scenario is perfectly compa-
tible with all the known empirical facts about the empirical mind
and its changing contents. And in that case the self would be
serially or diachronically composite, and divisible, whether or
not it was laterally or synchronically composite and divisible. Its
succession of states could then be conceived of as just coming to
an end. To this suggestion, however, I think we may fairly
complain that Kant is presenting us here with a bare conceptual
possibility, leaving open to us the alternative conceptual
 General Arguments for Immortality of the Soul 119

possibility; and furthermore that the Kantian possibility would

still leave us with our problem about the continuing link between
successive mental states quite unresolved, and surmisably
unresolvable.
Let us provisionally grant that the soul, or nuclear self, must be
one simple immaterial substance, which is, therefore, indestruc-
tible by any process involving decomposition, dissolution, or
division. Even so, we might wonder whether all this suffices to
show that the soul is naturally immortal. For perhaps there are
other processes in nature, not involving a thing's disintegration
into its component parts, whereby the thing can be destroyed.
We should not argue that the soul must both be so very different
from material substances that it cannot have parts, and at the
same time be so very similar to material substances that it can be
destroyed only by dissolution into parts.
Although we admit that there might be these other destructive
processes in nature, we have as yet admitted nothing more than
that they are an abstract possibility. I for one cannot begin to fill
out this possibility imaginatively or intellectually. Of course I can
conceive of very many different ways in which natural processes
might destroy something - smashing, burning, melting, corrod-
ing, rotting, and so on and so on - but all of them in one form or
another involve the removal or redistribution, swift or slow, of
some or most of the parts of the thing smashed, burnt, melted,
corroded, rotted, or whatever. Apart from these I can also
conceive of something simply ceasing to exist. There is no formal
contradiction in supposing this to happen inexplicably. How-
ever, the total cessation of something which exists, without
cause, I do find well nigh incredible. Such an event would be
contrary to everything we believe can happen, naturally or
supernaturally. Ironically it was Schopenhauer who declared
that 'in fact the most solid ground for our imperishable nature is
the old aphorism: "Ex nihilo nihil fit, et in nihilum nihil potest
reverti." ' 41 Of course Schopenhauer was thinking of the type, the
species (or rather, the Matter-in-general underlying these),
whereas we are focusing on individual selves, which we are
regarding as true subsistent entities in their own right. And to
such selves the old aphorism surely applies. God indeed could
cause us to cease absolutely to exist by an instantaneous act of
the divine will. But otherwise it seems impossible that any
120 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

simple immaterial substance could exist in full being at one

moment and at the next fortuitously vanish, that it could just
groundlessly collapse into utter nothingness.
Kant's contemporary, Moses Mendelssohn, in his Phaedon
(1767), accepted that a simple substance which cannot be
destroyed by decomposition or dissolution might seem to be
vulnerable to straight annihilation or extinction. Therefore he
tried to provide an argument which would show that this
alternative too was closed. Roughly, his argument was that as
long as the soul exists, it exists in its entirety (being a simple
substance, whose existence is not a matter of degree); but that
when it has ceased to exist, it would be entirely nothing: between
the moment in which it exists and the moment when it had
ceased to exist there could thus be no time interval - and since
this would be an impossibility, there can be no time at which the
soul might cease to exist.
To this rather obscure argument Kant offered an answer which
is at least as obscure. A simple substance, Kant allows, could not
have 'extensive quantity7, because it would have no manifold of
parts external to one another. But it might have 'intensive
quantity7. That is to say, every soul might have only some
'degree of reality with respect to all its faculties'. And if one's
consciousness is a matter of degree, it might easily diminish in
intensity l)y an infinite number of smaller degrees' until it was
changed into nothing by this 'gradual remission of its powers',
by a kind of 'elanguescence'.42
I confess I am at a loss to see how Kant could have considered
this answer decisive, or even adequate, or even very relevant to
Mendelssohn's argument. Mendelssohn is assuming that extinc-
tion can come about only by stages, gradually, an assumption
which Kant appears here to share. This is why he rashly admits
that the process of diminishing intensity which would result in
the soul's eventual extinction must be carried through 'an infinite
number of degrees' before the soul could be thought of as having
ceased to exist. But how could a process requiring an infinite
number of successive steps ever be completed, no matter how
rapidly the steps might succeed one another? (If we accepted
Mendelssohn's assumption - and Kanf s, in this passage - it
would seem to follow that God himself could not possibly
annihilate any soul.) My misgivings about Mendelssohn's
 General Arguments for Immortality of the Soul 121

argument centre on this assumption that an infinite number of

discrete stages necessarily have to be passed through before the
terminus of any series can be reached. This assumption gives rise
to Zeno-type paradoxes, which Kant himself had claimed,
elsewhere in the Critique of Pure Reason, are a clear sign that all
metaphysical theorizing about the inherent nature of a transem-
pirical ego is doomed to fail.
Perhaps this is the point at which we should leave the
argument from indivisibility and its implications. There is
obviously a great deal in the argument, provided we concede
the premise that the root 'owner7 of all a person's experiences
must be a nuclear ego of some kind which is both immaterial and
absolutely simple. To many critics, however, this will seem to be
a huge and unjustified concession. Epiphenomenalists and
mind-brain identity theorists, for example, will assert that the
seat of each person's identity, in so far as he has a real identity, is
to be found in his brain and its functions, which are complex and
entirely physical and are therefore of course subject to eventual
disintegration and decay. We have already seen in Chapter 2
some of the difficulties in the way of attempts to establish
physicalist criteria of identity, and in Chapter 3 we saw the major
problems facing any theory which seeks to ground our mental
lives without residue in the purely physical processes of the
brain. Interactionist dualism, I have claimed, offers us the best
hope of resolving these and associated issues consistently and
with due regard to all the relevant psychological and physiolo-
gical facts. This does not mean that an interactionist dualist has
to accept some version of the argument from indivisibility, or
indeed to believe in survival of death at all. But it does mean, I
think, that (apart from total immaterialists like Leibniz and
Berkeley) the intellectual appeal of the argument is bound to be
restricted to those philosophers who already look on interac-
tionist dualism as yielding the essential truth about the relation
between the human mind and its body.

The last group of arguments on which I shall focus are those

which try to base the belief in immortality on a belief in certain
attributes of the God of theism. It would be fruitless for us to
122 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

enter into a discussion here of the general intellectual merits and

demerits of theism as a philosophy of the universe. These have
been very carefully examined in recent times by philosophers
like H.D. Lewis, John Hick, Antony Flew, Richard Swinburne
and John Mackie, to name only a few. All we can sensibly
attempt to do in the present limited context is to consider
whether, given that the claims of the theist might be true, they
would be able to supply us with good grounds for believing in
the immortality of our souls.
The beliefs of Jews, Christians and Muslims about the
posthumous destiny of the soul are by no means entirely
consistent with one another, and within the Christian religion
there can be significantly divergent viewpoints on the kind or
kinds of afterlife attainable and on the conditions under which
different souls may attain it. Much of the content of religious
belief is deemed to rest on revelation, and this obviously cannot
command any degree of rational assent beyond whatever degree
of assent we can rationally give to the claims made about the
actual source and origin of the revelation. Whatever God hath
revealed is certainly true: no doubt can be made of it. This is the
proper object of faith', says John Locke. 'But whether it be a divine
revelation or no, reason must judge'. 43 Clearly, no doubt can be
entertained regarding the truth of communications made to us
by our omniscient, perfectly good and therefore perfectly
veracious Creator, or by any of his authorized spokesmen. But
we may well entertain very grave doubts about whether this or
that communication is indeed a revelation coming from God, and
whether this or that human individual or group is indeed
authorized by God to speak for him. Hence it will be best for our
present purposes to concentrate on arguments which can be
understood and evaluated in their own right, independently of
any extrinsic, higher authority which religious believers may feel
moved to assign to them.
Theists often argue that we may be assured of immortality
because we are persons, endowed with self-consciousness,
rationality, and free will, whom a loving God would not allow
to lapse into extinction since as free, rational, self-conscious
beings we are distinctively fitted to enter into an intimate and
trustful relationship with our Creator. This premise is commonly
expressed in the form that God has made us 'in his own image'.
 General Arguments for Immortality of the Soul 123

However, such expressions are self-evidently not to be taken

very literally. At most we may accept that there is an essential
resemblance between our finite minds and the infinite mind of
our Creator. Any knowledge we can imperfectly possess is
perfectly possessed by God, albeit in a completely different
manner. Thus God's knowledge of the physical world - which is
after all his own creation - does not depend on sense-experience,
as ours normally does. At most there is a very strong analogy
between our mental operations and the workings of the mind of
God. And we must not pretend that this analogy absolutely fails
to hold between the mind of God and all his other creatures,
nonhuman or subhuman, which are also endowed with
mentality in varying degrees. The consciousness of a chimpan-
zee, a dog, or a whale no doubt differs greatly from our human
consciousness in range and quality. But there are no less striking
differences between the mind of an Albert Schweitzer and the
mind of a severely mentally handicapped human infant.
Although we can try to claim that the infant's mental processes,
at present inferior to those of a chimpanzee of the same age, have
special potentialities of development denied to the chimpanzee,
this claim rings hollow when we know that the infant is in fact
already dying and will never realize any of the special
potentialities we impute to him and that in any case, in light of
his severe mental handicap, he in fact never would attain to the
mental level of the chimpanzee. If the theist maintains that
eternal life awaits the dying, severely handicapped, human
infant, on the ground that he has the precious status of
'personhood', how can he consistently deny this status to the
intelligent chimpanzee or refuse to him the eternal life which the
theist is claiming to be inseparably linked to this status? Let us
accept that the criteria of personhood are self-consciousness,
rationality and free will. We must also accept that individual
creatures vary widely in the degree to which they satisfy these
criteria. While no doubt most nonhuman animals evince self-
consciousness, rationality, and free will only to a very low
degree, there are also many human beings who are self-
conscious, rational, and free only to a still lower degree. And
while all of them, nonhuman and human, no doubt reflect the
loving purposes of their Maker, it is surely arbitrary to claim that
none of the members of thefirstgroup, but all of the members of
124 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

the second group, are fitted to enter into an intimate and trustful
relationship with the God who created each one of them.
Next we need to ask why the deity should vouchsafe
immortality to any of his creatures, whether human or nonhu-
man, who are able, in some relevant degree, to enjoy communion
with him. Since God has all life, glory, goodness and blessedness
in and of himself, he is necessarily all-sufficient in and unto
himself and therefore stands in no need of communion with any
of the creatures he has made. He might have created each of us to
occupy a limited and transitory role in the overall scenario of the
cosmos he has built, in which alone he takes full delight. Perhaps
' 'tis all a chequer-board of Nights and Days where Destiny with
Men for Pieces plays, hither and thither moves, and mates, and
slays, and one by one back in the Closet lays'. No - if God will
not allow persons to lapse into nothingness, this can only be from
his love and mercy towards them. Every self-conscious creature,
and even those who are far removed from anything we can
appropriately call self-consciousness, like the spider which
scuttles away from imminent danger, seems to fear and avoid
extinction. If our hope of immortality rests on a belief in God's
mercy, we must surely conclude that his mercy will not be
restricted to those who are able to enjoy communion with him
but will also extend to every sentient being, however humble,
that stands in need of divine mercy. This classic theistic
argument, then, would logically result in an endless future life
not only awaiting 'persons', even when this concept is stretched
to embrace the higher animals like horses or dolphins, but also
awaiting every sentient creature, even still-born human infants
and even mice and flies. Perhaps this outcome ought to be
willingly accepted by theists. But it is fairly safe to say that it is
not one which they tend to anticipate, or traditionally welcome.
Another attribute commonly adduced by theists is divine
justice. God is the supreme Lawgiver and Judge, who will in the
end ensure that all wrongdoing is justly punished and that all
virtue receives its proper reward. During our present lives we
can see only too plainly that here on earth there is frequently an
enormous disproportion between happiness and desert. In this
world honest and generous people often lead lives marred by
suffering and deprivation, while greedy and cruel men may
derive great advantage apparently from their very hard-heart-
 General Arguments for Immortality of the Soul 125

edness and greed. Hence the rectification of all this unfairness

can be brought about only after our life here below has ended, in
some future state where God will ensure that all those who have
shown forth goodness of character and conduct will at last
receive the honour and blessedness which befit them.
This argument is quite different from the kind of reasoning we
earlier found in Kanf s ethical argument for the immortality of
the soul. For we are now presupposing that theism is objectively
true. Given this presupposition the argument from divine justice
does seem to me to be an exceptionally strong one, like the
argument from divine mercy (provided this is extended to all
sentient creatures). However, it can hardly be held to prove that
our life after death will be of literally endless duration. God's
redistribution of happiness according to desert could be
accomplished in a relatively short time, perhaps little more than
a typical terrestrial lifetime. And when justice has been enacted
and all scores have been finally settled, our subsequent fate will
then rest entirely on God's mercy.
Whether the argument from divine justice can be extended to
include sentient creatures other than human beings depends on
whether nonhuman animals can be correctly regarded as moral
agents, with moral deserts. I readily agree that it is fanciful to
consider wasps or snails as moral agents in any sense requiring
them to be treated according to principles of justice. But
concerning the 'higher' animals I am much less confident. There
are animals who have meaningful relationships with then-
human owners or masters, such as horses, dogs and cats, who
can display qualities of obedience, loyalty and affection, and
there are many wild animals noted for their qualities of
perseverance and courage. We must always remember that there
are some human beings whose moral capacities are very low
indeed.
Even if all nonhuman animals, high and low, were to be
excluded from the moral sphere and strictly regarded as beneath
considerations of justice, the argument from divine love and
mercy would still apply to them. Here perhaps I ought to say a
final word about animal immortality. To unreflective persons the
very concept of an afterlife for pekinese, sheep or budgerigars
may seem to constitute a reductio ad absurdum for any belief in a
life after death. However, for a theist to take up such an attitude
126 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

would be to forget that after all God has already seen fit to
incorporate these lowly beings in his actual plan of terrestrial
creation, that in so doing he has endowed them with some real if
primitive measure of mentality, and that we need to show good
reason why there cannot be a future for individuals with a very
low order of mentality in his overall plan of Creation as it is
going to develop. Hindus, Buddhists and other adherents of
nontheistic religions seem to find no intellectual difficulty in
accepting this possibility. Moreover, from a purely secular
standpoint we have to recognize that the continued existence
of elephants or mice after their physical deaths would merely
involve a continuance of their consciousness, perhaps including
a crude reminiscence of their former bodies and the perspectives,
expectations and attitudes to which they had become habituated
during their earthly lives; and we have to remember that anyway
the entirely natural processes of evolution have undeniably, as a
matter of hard fact, resulted in the existence of these creatures, on
the same planet as human beings, with our normally much
greater minds. There is nothing inherently absurd about the fact
that we at present live surrounded by small-minded creatures, of
whom we customarily take little notice. And if human minds can
survive into a wider universe, there is nothing absurd about the
thought that the minds of owls or wolves might also survive in
their different spheres in that wider universe. Whether a creature
is worthy to exist - whether it is admirable, beautiful or useful - is
one question. Whether a creature in fact exists, or is likely to
continue to exist in different circumstances, is an altogether
separate question. However trivial we may consider the
existence of a rabbit or a shark, we have to accept that the
universe in fact does contain many things which we regard as
trivial, quite worthless, and even very harmful. We need not
welcome this fact. Nevertheless we have no option but to put up
with it.
Many Christians have believed that the uniqueness of human
beings is shown by the fact that it was in a human being, Jesus of
Nazareth, that God became incarnate. And many have affirmed
that the resurrection of Jesus provides us with the sole
dependable ground for believing in a life after death. John Hick
has pointed out that it is only in relatively recent times that Jesus'
resurrection has come to be viewed as a primary ground for
 General Arguments for Immortality of the Soul 127

belief in a life to come, but Hick does accept that the resurrection
confirms and support this belief,44 although 'it is impossible for
us today to be sure in precisely what the resurrection event
consisted'.45
Although we cannot now know exactly what happened in
Palestine 2,000 years ago, let us accept that at least Jesus
demonstrated that he had in some way survived his crucifixion
and death. Any inferences we base on this must partly depend
on how we perceive the nature of the risen Jesus, who is
traditionally perceived as distinctively human as well as truly
divine. Distinctively human, we can ask, but why not distinc-
tively a Jew? Distinctively human, we can equally ask, but why
not distinctively a sentient being? If the former perception might
exclude inferences to the survival of death by non-Jews, that is by
the great majority of human beings who have ever lived, the
latter perception would permit inferences to the survival of death
by all nonhuman sentient creatures, past, present, and to come.
The difference between Jesus and a sparrow or lizard does not
need to be spelled out. But neither does his difference from an
American gangster or a dying brain-damaged infant. The
difference between Jesus and all creatures, whether human or
nonhuman, is that Jesus is regarded as inherently divine. This
Christian argument, then, begins from the premise that someone
who was absolutely unique in history, who was indeed God
incarnate, survived his death on the cross; and proceeds to the
conclusion that all non-divine creatures who resemble him in a
particular respect - that is, as human (but why not as Jewish? or
as sentient?) - will for that reason also survive their deaths. It
seems to me that any argument of this kind, based on the earthly
destiny of a figure postulated as absolutely unique because
divine, must be judged seriously defective if intended to show
that everyone who shares the humanity of Jesus (but who of
course has no share whatsoever in his divine status) will
necessarily join with him in a life beyond this one.
I have not mentioned the promises made by Jesus. Perhaps all I
need to say is that, if Jesus was veritably God, then obviously we
may rely unreservedly on these promises once we are sure that
we have correctly grasped what they mean.
Nor have I mentioned the contribution made to some religious
believers' conviction of a life after death by the very numerous
128 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

reports of saints and other holy figures who are known to have
died but who appear to and sometimes communicate with,
inspire, and comfort people here on earth many years, and often
many centuries, after their physical deaths. These reports - along
with reported visions of Jesus - need to be added to the reports
of secular apparitions which we shall consider in the next
chapter. Whatever may be their special religious interest, if they
are to be claimed as evidence for a general human survival of
death these claims obviously have to be assessed in the light of
the rational criteria for evaluating apparitional evidence in
general, which we shall duly be examining.

In this chapter we have briefly inspected a diversity of general

arguments favouring the belief in some kind of immortality. We
have seen that the quality of these arguments is very uneven, and
that they vary widely in their degree of cogency. Some of them,
for example the arguments of Plato at which we have looked,
seem to me to be extremely weak even when taken in their own
terms. Others seem to miss the real point of our objective doubts
concerning survival of death, for example the arguments from
morality and those based on pragmatic considerations. And to
others, for example the theistic arguments or the arguments from
analogy and from the indivisibility of the soul, it can be objected
that they beg important questions, taking for granted as they do
the truth of theism or the truth of interactionist dualism and a
certain view of the self.
However, if theism is presupposed, then the argument from
divine love and mercy does strike me as providing very
powerful grounds for belief in immortality, and the argument
from divine justice surely provides irresistible grounds for the
belief that we survive our deaths at least for some sufficient span
of time. Similarly, if we presuppose that some form of
interactionist dualism expresses the essential truth about the
relations between mind and brain, and that analysis shows the
unity of each conscious self to be absolute, then I think we have
to admit that Butler's argument from analogy is a fairly strong
one, and that the arguments from the indivisibility of the soul are
very strong indeed.
 General Arguments for Immortality of the Soul 129

Of course in trying to assess the degree of overall rational

cogency which these arguments finally evince, that is, the degree
of conviction they ought finally to carry in the eyes of any
rational being, we need to deduct from the degree of cogency
they enjoy within their sheltering religious and philosophical
contexts whatever degree of implausibility attaches in general to
these religious and philosophical frameworks themselves. Thus
if theism were judged to have a very low degree of cognitive
certainty in itself, arguments appealing to divine mercy and
justice would obviously have to be assigned a very low degree of
validity indeed. If the intrinsic cognitive probability of interac-
tionist dualism were deemed to be very low, any belief in
immortality which necessarily reflected dualist beliefs would
have to be assigned a lower degree of cognitive probability still.
Now, in Chapter 3 I tried to identify and evaluate the main
factors telling for and against interactionist dualism, and I
concluded that on the whole some form of non-Cartesian
dualism probably offered the best available account of the
relations between mind and brain. In the preceding chapter I had
examined problems of personal identity and found that there
were strong reasons for upholding the unity and continuity of
each individual's consciousness. I confess that I am by no means
fully persuaded by my own arguments in these chapters. I am
very far from claiming that my arguments have finally disposed
of materialist theories of the mind. Nevertheless in the light of
what I have argued I do consider that the currently prevailing
academic bias in favour of monistic materialism ought to be
regarded as significantly eroded, and that the high antecedent
improbability of the occurrence of paranormal phenomena, and
of data supporting belief in a life after death, is therefore
significantly reduced. (I am inclined to make similar judgments
about the overall status of theism as a framework for belief in a
life after death, although I have not had the space in which it
would have been possible to expound and defend these.)
Thus, returning to the arguments we have discussed in the
present chapter, I accept that we need to make some, and
possibly quite a large, deduction from what would otherwise be
their degree of cognitive value, on the ground that this heavily
depends on religious and philosophical frameworks which are to
some extent implausible. But I doubt whether this needs to be a
130 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

huge, far less a crippling, deduction. We are, I think, entitled to

regard some of these general arguments as having made a
definite if limited contribution to whatever measure of cognitive
probability we should attach to the belief in a mental life after
physical death.
 5
The Evidence from Psychical
Research

There are several important logical differences between the kinds

of general argument we examined in the last chapter and the
kinds of specific evidence for a life after death to which we must
now turn. We shall shortly be focusing on: (1) near-death
experiences; (2) apparitional experiences; (3) communications via
mediums; and (4) putative reincarnation cases. Evidence of these
empirical kinds can be obtained only by studying actual
occurrences, by 'fieldwork', or by means of reports from
fieldworkers, unlike the general arguments we have been
considering, which can be developed and elaborated by 'arm-
chair' activities of pure reflection and which have to be assessed
and criticized by the use of our rational faculties alone. Whereas
the general arguments draw exclusively on features supposedly
common to all conscious beings or to every situation in which
conscious beings find themselves, the empirical evidence on
which we shall now be focusing draws on a multiplicity of
ostensible facts, each involving one or at most a handful of
specific individuals, and it is on the basis of these diverse
ostensible facts that we may try to ground inductive inferences
concerning the possibility of survival of death. Thus, while the
general arguments move from generalizations about our present
condition to a claimed general truth about our future post-
mortem condition, the evidence from psychical research moves
from particular cases, by processes of classification and inter-
pretation, to a conclusion about our prospects which is then
deemed to be of general application.

131
132 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

We obviously cannot derive strict logical certainties from such

processes of empirical generalization. The most that we can
legitimately hope for is some overall measure of empirical
probability, in either direction. The relevant factual evidence
might yield very strong grounds, which ought to be coercive to
any rational being, for believing in some kind of personal
survival of bodily death. Or the evidence might turn out to be so
very weak, and so frequently suggestive of an alternative
interpretation, that any reasonable person would be bound, not
just to disregard it, but to consider it as markedly tending to
confirm the alternative possibility of personal extinction after
death. Or of course, as Alan Gauld concludes, it might be that the
known evidence, while strongly indicative of survival so far as it
goes, 'stands in proportion to what we do not know as a
bucketful does to the ocean'.1 The evidence might be very
favourable, but woefully sparse. In that case perhaps we ought to
suspend belief (and disbelief), as we should certainly need to do
if the probabilities were more or less exactly balanced either way.
Ultimately the facts on which we must draw consist of the
reports to be found in various printed sources, archives, or other
collections of documentary material, in letters, written declara-
tions, memoranda, and other forms of enduring testimony.
However, assuming that the reputable investigators who have
gathered in and sorted through these reports have done so for
the most part patiently and accurately, we are, I think, entitled to
regard their published versions of these reports as generally
trustworthy, that is, as fairly conveying to us what the original
percipients have deposed. In looking at published accounts of
apparitional experiences, for example, we are usually entitled to
regard these as descriptions, on the whole accurate, of
experiences which the human beings named in them claim to
have actually undergone. Naturally these claims need to be
judged and interpreted, if we are to arrive at a balanced and
correct view of the nature of their experiences. It is quite
erroneous to suppose that the best judge of what an experience
really means is the person who originally had the experience in
question. There are many reasons why this is often not the case,
although it is often hard to convince someone that he may have
fundamentally misinterpreted what he experienced as happen-
ing to him. Nevertheless it is people's reports of their experiences
 The Evidence from Psychical Research 133

which necessarily furnish the bedrock of data on which the critic

is able to go to work.
Even if the data available to us were sufficiently abundant and
of sufficiently high quality to give us very strong grounds for
believing in some kind of personal life after physical death, it is
often alleged that they could not possibly yield any grounds for
believing in immortality. To believe in survival of death certainly
falls very far short - some would say, infinitely short - of
believing that our life hereafter will be literally endless. To those
who fear immediate extinction after death, or who grieve
because they think that they will never again under any
circumstances be reunited with the loved ones they have lost,
the difference between immortality and some prospective
measure of posthumous survival may not seem to matter very
urgently. A reprieve may seem good enough, especially if this
reprieve is to remain valid indefinitely and anyway almost
certainly for quite a long time. I shall make only two comments
on this attitude, which strikes me as by and large pretty rational.
First, survival of death surely offers some ground, although
indeed not sufficient ground, for a belief in immortality.
Immortality presupposes the capacity for conscious existence
unsustained by our present physical organisms, and at least this
crucial element in the idea of immortality would be established if
it could be shown that our conscious existence continued for a
period after the dissolution of our present bodies. And secondly,
on the supposition that our conscious existence as individuals
might eventually cease some time after physical death, we might
by that time have good grounds for believing that our cessation
as individuals would be followed by absorption into some larger
whole whose glory would be enriched by the contribution of our
individuality. We might then look forward eagerly to this
consummation, even if we were fully conscious that it spelled
our own final disappearance as conscious selves in common with
all the other conscious selves who now mean so much to us. I am
not saying that this ultimate outcome is probable, only that it is a
conceivable destiny which in our admitted ignorance we are
entitled to entertain as possible.
Among sceptics who want to emphasize how conspicuously
lacking in evidential support the case for survival is, there are to
be found naive persons who sometimes make the supposedly
134 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

decisive comment: 'No one has ever come back to tell us whether
there is a life after death, or what it is like!' They regard this
comment as unambiguous and incontestable. It is in fact
eminently contestable, as the evidence we shall be reviewing
will amply demonstrate. Apparitions of the dead, for instance,
may well not be at all what they seem to be, but there is no
denying that at any rate they constitute prima facie evidence that
some individuals known to be deceased have briefly 'come back',
and to deny that it is even possible that apparitional experiences
may bear this interpretation is obviously to beg the contested
question at the very outset. And the comment is equally far from
being unambiguous. Are those who have been successfully
resuscitated when on the brink of physical death, and subse-
quently give a first-hand account of their ostensible experiences
at 'the borderland', to be counted as having 'returned from the
dead'? Is someone who is held to be the reincarnation of a
recently deceased human being to be regarded as one and the
same person who has now ostensibly come back as a new
individual? If the spirits of the dead ever communicate to us via
mediums, is this what their 'return' to us properly consists in?
Someone who had emigrated from Britain to Australia for good
would indeed not be considered to have literally 'come back' to
Britain merely because we could speak to him by telephone or
wireless, or see him on a British television screen. However, if
what we wanted was proof that he had survived the voyage and
descriptions of his present life in Australia, and these were
thereby supplied to us, it would be captious to complain that
they were forthcoming from someone who was no longer
domiciled in Britain. In any sense which is relevant to the belief
in a life after death, there is a body of evidence which suggests
that some individuals have apparently returned from the dead to
acquaint us with their new life in their new situation, and
evaluation of this evidence is therefore an appropriate task which
must not be shirked.

First of all, then, what are we to make of the distinctive

experiences which seem to cluster about many people shortly
before their deaths? The study of deathbed experiences goes back
 The Evidence from Psychical Research 135

quite a long way. In 1926 the physicist Sir William Barrett, one of
the original founders of the SPR, published a collection of cases
entitled Death-bed Visions. One might well expect that many
dying people would have purely subjective hallucinations, that
these would probably include hallucinations of various absent
relatives and friends who were meaningful to them, and that a
fair proportion of these would be of people who were already
dead. However, one might also expect that the dying would
naturally hallucinate the figures of many absent relatives and
friends who were in fact still alive but whose presence would
have met their emotional needs, especially if those who were
dying belonged to different age-groups and were not entirely
confined to the aged, whose emotional needs might of course
predominantly centre on individuals whom they knew to have
predeceased them. In fact Barrett found that all deathbed visions
involved only those relatives and friends who were already
dead. Of particular interest were those cases where the dying
person 'saw7 the figure of someone whom he or she believed to
be still alive but who at the time was actually dead. Thus there
was the famous case reported by Lady Barrett, an obstetrician, of
a young woman dying after her delivery who appeared to see,
not only her dead father, but also the figure of her sister, Vida,
whose death three weeks previously had been deliberately kept
from her because of her own serious ill health.2
However, later and more systematic studies have shown that
Barrett was wrong in his belief that all deathbed visions involve
only the figures of human beings who are dead. In 1959-60,
Karlis Osis, a professional parapsychologist, circulated a ques-
tionnaire to 10,000 US physicians and nurses and carefully
analysed the 640 responses he received from them, providing
details of their observations of 35,000 dying patients, including
1,300 examples of apparitional experiences? 190 of the respon-
dents were then interviewed in depth. He discovered that 18 per
cent of the apparitions seen were of living persons, 54 per cent of
deceased relations, and 28 per cent of religious figures (e.g. Jesus,
saints, angels). Lest these and other findings might have been
influenced by cultural factors such as the Judaeo-Christian
background of most US patients, Osis and a fellow-parapsychol-
ogist, Erlendur Haraldsson, later conducted a cross-cultural
survey both in America and in India.4 In the USA they sent
136 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

questionnaires to 2,500 physicians and 2,500 nurses, and received

1,004 replies. Since in India a postal survey was impracticable,
they conducted face-to-face interviews with 704 medical person-
nel. In total 877 cases were obtained. In America 17 per cent of
the apparitional figures were of living persons, 70 per cent of
dead relatives, and 13 per cent of religious figures. In India the
results were: 21 per cent living persons, 29 per cent dead
relatives, and 50 per cent religious figures (e.g. Krishna, Siva, and
'yamdoots' or emissaries from the god of death). Grouping the
apparitions of the dead with those of religious personages as
equally having an 'other-world' significance, they found that
these other-world apparitions composed 83 per cent of then-
American sample and 79 per cent of their Indian sample,
whereas apparitions of predominantly 'this-world' significance
were merely 17 and 21 per cent respectively.
These figures seem hugely significant. It is generally acknowl-
edged that a large proportion of apparitions seen by percipients
in normal health are completely unrecognized. For example, 72
per cent of all apparitional cases reported to Green and McCreery
were of unrecognized individuals, although of the recognized
apparitions two-thirds were of people known to be dead? That
is, recognized apparitions of the dead by Green and McCreery's
normally healthy percipients amounted to only about 18 per cent
of all apparitional cases, compared with something like 80 per
cent of the apparitions of the dead and of religious personages
seen by Osis and Haraldsson's terminally ill patients. And
although the harvest of 877 cases gathered by Osis and
Haraldsson may seem to be quite small, we need to remember
that in the population at large it is quite a small minority of
people - approximately one in ten - who ever see an apparition
at all, and that in most cases this apparitional experience will be
the only one they have in their entire lifetimes. 62 per cent of the
apparitional experiences of Osis and Haraldsson's terminally ill
patients were concentrated into the twenty-four hours before
their deaths, 20 per cent dying between one and six hours after
their experience, and 27 per cent of them dying within one hour.
The apparitions of the dead and of religious figures were
nearly always perceived as having come to escort the patient
across the threshold of death. Nearly all of the American patients
and two-thirds of the Indian patients seemed serenely willing to
 The Evidence from Psychical Research 137

accompany them and indeed were often elated at the prospect. In

the original American study not a single one of the apparitions of
living persons was perceived as having this escorting function.
Most by far of the visions were of people who appeared to be
present in the hospital room or ward, of which the patient
remained otherwise normally conscious. However, in 112 cases
the immediate environment seemed to give way to a vision of
another world, one bathed in light and of a beauty which evoked
exclamations of wonder and joy.
Osis and Haraldsson comment: 'Our study shows that dying
patients hallucinate people five times more often than environ-
ments and objects, while drug-induced hallucinations portray
things and places more often than people'.6 Anyway, their study
showed that only a small minority of the patients who had
deathbed visions had received morphine, demerol, or other pain-
killing drugs deemed hallucinogenic, and that those who had
received such medication showed no greater frequency of
afterlife visions than the other patients. Their conclusion was:
'Whatever these drugs did, they apparently did not generate
deathbed phenomena suggestive of an afterlife'. Similarly brain
disturbances caused by disease, injury or uremic poisoning
either decreased the afterlife-related phenomena or did not affect
them at all. Therefore, there is no acceptable evidence for the
notion that brain disturbances generate such phenomena'. 7
The investigators found that evidence of stress such as anxiety,
restlessness, and depression had no influence on the frequency of
other-world visions. They also failed to find any correlation
between other-worldly visions and patients' reported expecta-
tions either of dying or of recovering from their illness. They
discovered that, although in 17 per cent of their apparitional
cases clarity of consciousness was strongly impaired, in 40 per
cent of such cases it was fluctuating or only mildly impaired and
in 43 per cent of the cases there was normal clarity at the time of
the apparitional experience (unlike most of the visions of
environments, where clarity of consciousness was dramatically
reduced). And they discovered that apparitions of the dead seen
by younger patients included a higher proportion of relatives
from the previous generation (e.g. a deceased parent), while
those seen by older patients included a higher number of then-
deceased contemporaries (e.g. a spouse or a sibling).
138 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

Many other interesting facts emerged from the wealth of data

collected by Osis and Haraldsson. Thus they established that the
deathbed phenomena suggestive of a post-mortem existence
tended to be quite clear-cut and of comparatively short duration,
like ESP experiences outside the field of survival research,
whereas those phenomena which revolved round this-world
imagery and feelings tended to last significantly longer and also
to be more rambling. They came across a few cases of ostensible
psychokinetic effects occurring at the moment of death, for
instance a drinking glass which shattered into a thousand pieces
without apparent cause; it did not fall but simply 'exploded'.
They mention the case of an Irish milkman in his seventies whose
much loved sister Mary had, unknown to him, died in Ohio on
the Monday; he greeted her apparition on the Tuesday when he
himself died in a hospital in Connecticut. They encountered
examples of incoherent patients suffering from brain diseases or
schizophrenia who were described as having become their lucid,
normal selves shortly before death. In particular they noted the
great frequency with which the moods of dying patients became
elevated prior to their deaths - 85 per cent within twenty-four
hours, 54 per cent within one hour, and 41 per cent within the ten
minutes just before their deaths. These mood changes were
sometimes associated with patients' religious beliefs (28 per
cent), but were more commonly positive but nonreligious in kind
(59 per cent).
Susan Blackmore has questioned the reliability of the data
collected by Osis and Haraldsson. For example, she notes that
out of 5,000 questionnaires circulated only 20 per cent were
returned, hence apparently vitiating the representativeness of
their sample. 8 This objection of course applies only to the
American sample, which they had striven to make random by
'selecting every seventh intern from an alphabetized list'
compiled in five north-eastern states. Reasoning that respon-
dents who favoured belief in an afterlife might tend to respond to
the questionnaire more speedily than late respondents or those
who responded only after repeated requests, they re-examined
the data but found no relationship between speed in responding
and the phenomena reported. And they then conducted spot
checks of non-responders by telephone, which 'indicated that
their attitudes towards the phenomena were not substantially
 The Evidence from Psychical Research 139

different from those of the responders'. Blackmore omits to

mention these measures to identify possible respondent bias
which were taken by the investigators. Moreover, Osis and
Haraldsson remind us that in India they 'were able to solicit
responses from practically all the medical personnel' in the units,
mainly university teaching hospitals, they had selected in Uttar
Pradesh, India's most populous state.
The data on deathbed experiences collected by Barrett, Osis
and Haraldsson, and others are derived from observations by
physicians, nurses, or relatives of the speech, gestures, and
general behaviour of patients who, for the most part, died shortly
afterwards. Inevitably, therefore, they come to us at second hand.
But in the last twenty years medical specialists, psychiatrists, and
parapsychologists have given considerable attention to the
reports of people who have undergone crises in which they
have almost but not quite died, and who, on recovering, have
been able to give a first-hand account of what they experienced
during the few minutes when they hovered on the brink of
death. These people have had 'near-death experiences' (NDEs) in
what is now the more standard use of this expression. Their close
proximity to dying has come about more suddenly, and usually
more unexpectedly, than happens with the cancer sufferers and
other terminally ill patients studied by Osis and Haraldsson.
Often they have been accident victims or people undergoing
near-fatal cardiac arrests.
Although Elizabeth Kiibler-Ross had been encountering NDE
cases in her work with dying patients for two decades
previously, it was only in 1975 that the phenomena attracted
widespread attention, with the publication of Life After Life by
Raymond Moody, a young US physician.10 Since then numerous
studies have been added by cardiologists like Sabom and
Rawlings, psychiatrists like Noyes and Stevenson, psychologists
like Ring and Grey, and parapsychologists like Rogo and
Blackmore. Increasingly sophisticated resuscitation procedures
have undoubtedly saved the lives of many people whose crisis in
a heart attack or under surgery would formerly have resulted in
their deaths, and this has made it much more possible to obtain,
by sensitively conducted interviews, detailed accounts of what
these individuals have experienced when they seemed to be
already completely unconscious and at the point of death.
140 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

It may be asked: since these people did not in fact die, in what
sense were they 'at the point of death'? And since they were all in
fact alive at the times when they had the experiences they
narrate, how can their narratives possibly supply useful evidence
of what, if anything, happens to human beings after they do
actually come to die?
The simple and obvious answers to these questions are, I
suggest, the correct ones. The patients concerned were in a state
where their vital functions were giving clear signs of being on a
rapid course of collapse which, in the judgment of their medical
attendants, would almost certainly have ended, within a period
of minutes, in their final and irreversible cessation as living
individuals. Without medical intervention, they would have
been physically dead. It is in this sense that they were 'at the
point of death'. And we are, I think, entitled to presume that if
people have in fact reached any kind of limit, in this case the
limit of physical life, the experiences which they can recall
having when at or near this limit, and which purport to be
glimpses of what lies beyond the limit, at least deserve to be
taken seriously and to be subjected to rational evaluation.
What, then, are the characteristics of these experiences? Let me
divide them into (a) general characteristics, which are recalled as
having pervaded the entire sequence, and (b) serial characteristics,
which relate to different elements of the sequence in the order in
which they unfold.
(a) The general characteristics of NDEs are as follows. First,
they are 'ineffable', that is, the experiences are not fully or exactly
describable in language which does adequate justice to then-
depth and tonality. Secondly, they have a perceived quality of
'timelessness', as if all intuitive sense of the duration of the
experience had been lost or was irrelevant. Thirdly, they are
recollected as having been pervaded by a profound sense of
'reality7, leading the subjects to assert vehemently that then-
experiences were utterly unlike those of a dream or drug-
induced fantasy. Fourthly, the experience is almost invariably
interpreted as a 'death experience', that is, throughout the
experience the subjects believe that they have now died or are in
process of dying. Fifthly, the predominant feeling is one of peace,
calm, tranquillity. And sixthly, nearly all subjects describe the
NDE as if it took place outside their physical bodies, as
 The Evidence from Psychical Research 141

something experienced by their 'essential' disembodied selves

(although a few record that they seemed to have a surrogate
body, visible only to themselves).
(b) The full NDE has the following serial characteristics. In the
first stage, the intense physical pain and psychological distress
which the patient has been undergoing suddenly cease, and he
feels relaxed, safe, and trouble-free. He sees his physical body,
showing no signs of consciousness and lying where he had
suffered his collapse (in a hospital bed, say) as if his visual
consciousness is operating from a point in space some feet above
the level where his physical body is lying. He views what he
perceives to be his dying body with indifference, but sometimes
with pity or even revulsion. He notes what the people around it
are doing and can often hear what they are saying. He watches
the resuscitation team arrive and the efforts they make to revive
him. He often wishes they would desist. He may try to attract
their attention and fail. He finds that in his disembodied state he
can move about at will by a kind of 'floating', and he may float
out of the room to explore other parts of the building.
Throughout he will feel mentally alert and observant, and his
visual perceptions will seem to be extremely sharp and clear.
This first or 'autoscopic' stage of his NDE has taken place
entirely in the immediate natural environment where he seems to
see himself to be dying or already dead.
The succeeding stages take place in a non-natural environ-
ment, and are often grouped together as the 'transcendental'
phases of the NDE. The subject may now feel himself being
drawn into a region of darkness, which may be like a void or
often like a tunnel, along which he is rapidly drawn towards a
light which he can see at its end. He is unlikely to feel any fear.
When he emerges from the darkness, he may encounter a radiant
formless presence, sometimes referred to as a 'being of lighf, and
he may interpret this as the comforting presence of God, or Jesus,
or some other mighty spirit. This being may induce him to
engage in a review of the main things, admirable or regrettable,
which he has done or left undone in the life he believes himself to
be finally quitting, and which he now judges, as it were, in a kind
of immensely rapid panoramic playback. At this point the NDEer
finds that he has moved into a completely new environment, a
'heavenly7 environment of surpassing beauty. Here he may
142 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

encounter various figures, sometimes unidentified, sometimes

identified by him as religious personages, and sometimes
recognized as the figures of deceased relatives or friends, with
whom he may communicate in a non-verbal way. He seemingly
never encounters the figures of individuals who at the time are
alive on earth. At some stage he is confronted by a kind of
'barrier7, which may take the form of a gate, fence, river, or
anything indicative of a significant frontier which needs to be
crossed. And it is there that his NDE is about to come to an end.
For he will then seem to hear a voice, or receive some
authoritative non-verbal message, instructing him that he must
'go back' or that l\is time has not yet come'. He accepts this with
reluctance, and finds himself being tugged back at great speed
until he regains ordinary consciousness in his hospital bed and
once more in his physical body, racked by excruciating pain.
On recovering, he finds that other people in whom he confides
tend to react with incomprehension, embarrassed disbelief, or
even ridicule. However, he never forgets what he experienced
during his brush with death, and the memory of his experience
will change his whole attitude to life. He will become more open
and receptive towards others, and he has permanently lost all
fear of dying.
Now, should we judge that the NDE is a set of experiences
undergone by the human soul as it passes out of its physical
body and prepares to enter into its next, post-mortem state of
existence? Or should we regard the whole experience, from start
to finish, as a tissue of sheerly subjective hallucinations or
imaged fantasies by which the mind is speciously comforted just
before it is annihilated, like the pleasant shadows cast by the last
splutterings of a candle just before it goes out?
It is very highly improbable that the thousands of people who
report an NDE have all consciously or unconsciously invented
the entire thing, in its many circumstantial details. It is only
faintly less improbable that NDEers' detailed visual experiences
were entirely generated from what they may have heard
happening around them at the time. People in a semi-conscious
state do quite often retain much of their hearing of what is being
said in their vicinity. However, a few NDEs have occurred to
people at a time when they were completely alone. Moreover,
some patients who have experienced hearing when in a semi-
 The Evidence from Psychical Research 143

conscious state have then proceeded to have an NDE, and these

subjects have differentiated emphatically between the two kinds
of state. And in elective cardioversion, patients who can hear
although semi-conscious from valium generally report extreme
bodily pain. It is also absurdly improbable that NDEs should be
dreams, which are nearly always recalled as unreal and anyway
are indefinitely variable in their contents. We can further rule out
fantasies produced by patients' prior expectations, since in any
case most of them had no prior knowledge of the NDE
phenomenon and would indeed have been thoroughly cynical
about descriptions of it before they had their own experiences. In
fact in one or two instances the subjects (e.g. a Vietnam War
soldier) had been prepared for a totally different experience of
what it was like to die.
Psychiatrists have suggested that the autoscopic stage of the
NDE resembles the autoscopic hallucinations of the mentally ill.
However, the 'double' seen by someone mentally ill is perceived
by him as being an unreal and uncanny replica of the physical
body he knows he is actually inhabiting (i.e. his experience is the
very reverse of NDE autoscopy), and his emotions towards it are
fearful, hostile, and generally negative. Other psychiatrists have
compared the NDE with the 'depersonalized' reactions often
evinced by people in life-threatening situations, such as motoring
accidents, where they may view what is happening as if they were
detached spectators: time may seem to slow down, their thinking
may speed up, their perceptions may grow sharper, and they may
have a sense of deep peace. However, these reactions postulate
that a person is aware of the imminence of his death and they are
marked by a feeling that what is happening is unreal, whereas in
NDEs there is often a sudden loss of consciousness which gives
no warning of its prospectively fatal outcome and we have seen
that NDEs are accompanied by a vivid sense of the reality of the
experiences which are being undergone. Russell Noyes carefully
studied the depersonalization responses of individuals con-
fronted by the sudden apparent proximity of their own physical
death. But his studies focused on people who were consciously
aware that death was imminent. And when he found that a small
group of his subjects who were physically as well as psycholo-
gically in actual danger reported significantly different experi-
ences, he eliminated these from his analysis.
144 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

Chemical and physiological attempts to explain the NDE also

sound as if they were essentially directed to explaining some
different kind of experience. The favourite physicalist 'explana-
tions' are that it is a set of hallucinations which are drug-
induced, or are the results of the brain's release of endorphins, or
of temporal lobe seizure, or of hypoxia or hypercarbia. All these
conditions undoubtedly produce great alterations in people's
stream of experiences. The trouble is that these all tend to be
utterly unlike the experiences characteristic of the NDE. For
example, the pain relief when cancer patients are directly
injected with B-endorphin lasts for up to 73 hours, unlike the
total absence of pain and all other bodily sensations in the NDE,
which lasts only for the duration of the NDE itself, that is, for a
matter of minutes; B-endorphin induces somnolence, while the
NDEer remains alert; and it is compatible with the patient's
having bodily sensations of venipuncture and of light touch. The
experiences accompanying temporal lobe seizures include
perceptual illusions and distortions, grotesque and often hideous
hallucinations, a mixture of bizarre bodily sensations, 'forced' or
obsessively random thinking, and feelings of loneliness, fear, and
despair. The structure and contents of drug-induced hallucina-
tions are indefinitely variable and idiosyncratic. Moreover, drugs
can actually inhibit the NDE, as when one patient, who was in
the middle of having an autoscopic NDE, was given a drug
injection, whereupon everything became cloudy and dark. Other
patients, who had undergone both drug-induced hallucinations
and NDEs, sharply differentiated between the two types of
experience. And anyway many NDEs occur although no
medicinal hallucinatory agent has been administered to the
patient.
Brain hypoxia and hypercarbia are equally unconvincing as
explanations of the NDE. Thus persons suffering a reduction in
the oxygen supply to their brains evince a progressive impair-
ment of their capacities to attend, concentrate, reason, and
remember, and in general their cognitive abilities become
increasingly lethargic, muddled, and confused. And while the
administration of high doses of carbon dioxide does indeed alter
consciousness in some ways which resemble the NDE (e.g. a
sense of bodily detachment, perception of a bright light, feelings
of cosmic bliss, ineffability, a revival of memories, or telepathic
 The Evidence from Psychical Research 145

communion with an anonymous religious presence), in other

ways it generates experiences which are quite incompatible with
the typical NDE - for example, perception of brightly coloured
geometrical figures and complex patterns, animation of fanta-
sized objects such as musical notes floating by, mental compul-
sion to solve mathematical puzzles or enigmas, polyopic vision,
or frightening perceptions of 'shapeless and objectless horror'.11
We must, I think, conclude that naturalistic attempts to align
the NDE with subjective hallucinations produced by known
natural causes have so far failed to establish their case. But what
positive evidence is there that the NDEer is experiencing
something which is objectively real, especially when he moves
into the 'transcendental' stages of the sequence, which are not
open to direct verification?
First of all, the experiences of the transcendental stage must be
deemed to have acquired some support from the experiences of
the initial, 'autoscopic' stage, which are directly verifiable. These
closely resemble the experiences reported by those people in
normal health who claim to have had 'out-of-the-body experi-
ences' (OBEs), probably one in seven or eight of the population.
Of course, OBEs too may be a form of subjective hallucination.
Although we are bound to give some weight to OBEers' firm
assertions that their experiences during the OBE are vivid and
realistic, we are also bound to note that their claims about what
they 'see' when 'out of the body' are usually unsubstantiated,
and that when it has been possible to conduct experiments with
well-known OBEers for the purpose of verifying their perceptual
claims these have usually failed to yield significant results.
Nevertheless there have been a sprinkling of OBE experiments
which have yielded mixed but significant and broadly positive
results, and there have been more spontaneous cases in which
ostensible perceptions of the OBEers' near (and remote)
environments appear to have been adequately verified. 12
Perhaps the evidence for OBE perception is overall just good
enough, albeit sadly imperfect, to afford some kind of general
confirmation that the veridicality of the autoscopic experiences in
the NDE is at least intrinsically possible.
However, the autoscopic experiences in the NDE are some-
times themselves directly verifiable. And it must be said that,
while reported details of surgical or resuscitation procedures are
146 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

often vague, they seem seldom or never to contain manifest

errors. Indeed in quite a large minority of cases they are
surprisingly accurate, especially when we remember that they
often involve reference to unfamiliar medical techniques and that
the NDEer claims to be anyway much preoccupied with the
general strangeness of his new situation. They contain specific
details of medical personnel at the scene, including descriptions
of individuals never seen before, of their garb, their equipment,
their movements, exits and entrances, and physical details of the
place where the NDE is occurring - positions of doors and
windows, colours of curtains, floor tiling, and so on. Sometimes
they include observations of family members or friends who
have unexpectedly arrived at the hospital and are anxiously
waiting outside the room in which the patient is undergoing his
crisis. Occasionally the NDEer recollects details of objects and
places which he has had no opportunity of normally observing -
for example, a patient who claimed to remember spotting a
strange tennis shoe stuck on the ledge of a third-floor room
which was almost invisible from within that room when a
hospital social worker was eventually persuaded to look for it
and retrieve it.13
In the second place, the evidence for any unusual type of event
which different witnesses claim to have separately perceived
becomes stronger, the greater the number, quality, and diversity of
the witnesses. By this test the 'transcendental' stages of the NDE
seem to receive a fairly high measure of confirmation as being
experiences of something objectively real. The patients inter-
viewed by Sabom who had suffered near-death crises reported
NDEs in 42 per cent of cases; another American cardiologist,
Fred Schoonmaker, who interviewed 2,300 survivors of near-
death crises, found that 78 per cent of them recalled NDEs; other
surveys have yielded other results, but in general it is obvious
that there is a very large proportion of human beings who have
been close to death and who can and do testify to the NDE
phenomenon. They are completely mixed in respect of age, sex,
socio-economic status, educational level, and religious affiliation
or lack of it. And their accounts of their experiences are
remarkably full, clear, detailed, consistent, and balanced.
Thirdly, when a diverse body of responsible witnesses can
independently provide unbiased testimony for the occurrence of
 The Evidence from Psychical Research 147

some complex event, this necessarily enhances the probability

that the event to which they are testifying actually occurred as
they claim to have perceived it, provided that their testimony is
broadly convergent. Now, Kenneth Ring and others have
discovered that the different stages through which the whole
NDE progresses are reported with different levels of frequency,
the earlier stages being more frequently reported than the
intermediate stages, and the last ('eschatological') stages being
reported the least frequently of all.14 His findings have been
borne out by Sabom and others. What this suggests, of course, is
that the full NDE is essentially a single structured sequence of
experiences which all NDEers are following but which they may
or may not complete, depending on the point at which they are
successfully resuscitated.
However, what about the very many survivors of near-death
crises who can recall no kind of experiences resembling an NDE,
and indeed who fail to recall having had any experiences
whatsoever during their period of physical unconsciousness?
Perhaps they in fact underwent experiences, which they are
subsequently just failing to recall because the experiences have
been inhibited. (But why, if these experiences are inherently
reassuring?) Or perhaps their state when approaching death was
one of total oblivion. This would not of itself invalidate the
experiences of those who have themselves had NDEs, any more
than the unanimous testimony of witnesses who claim to have
perceived some unusual and complex physical event is of itself
invalidated by the testimony of other witnesses who claim to
have perceived nothing unusual despite having been similarly
situated. Nevertheless the failure by many people to have any
such experiences must to some extent undermine the claims to
objectivity made on behalf of those who have themselves had the
experiences under consideration, unless a convincing explana-
tion of the somewhat common failure to recall an NDE is
forthcoming. We also need a convincing explanation of the
comparative absence of disagreeable, nightmarish or 'hellish'
NDEs. But it seems quite probable that recall of these 'negative
NDEs' would be subject to inhibition for fairly obvious reasons,
e.g. the threat such recollections would pose to survivors' images
of their own inner worth. There do exist records of some rather
harrowing near-death experiences. However, later re-examina-
148 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

tions of these 'negative NDEers' have shown that they have a

marked tendency to forget their deeply unpleasant experiences,
or perhaps repress them from conscious recollection.
The fourth and last type of evidence which might indirectly
corroborate the claims made on behalf of the NDE is the
physiological evidence. The most impressive evidence would be
if the lines on the EEG Chart were to stop recording any
rhythmic patterns and become steadily flat. This would show
that the brain was no longer generating electrical impulses and
hence that the NDE could not plausibly be ascribed to ongoing
brain activity.16 Of course, understandably when doctors are
struggling to save someone's life, there is often no available
record of the levels of patients' brain activity during the period of
their NDEs. Sometimes, however, brain activity is routinely
monitored, for example in surgical situations. In 1979 a Denver
cardiologist, Dr Fred Schoonmaker, reported that out of a total of
1,400 NDE cases collected by him since 1961 there were 55
examples of subjects whose EEGs were temporarily flat.17
Unfortunately Schoonmaker's promised book on his research
has never appeared.
Robert Almeder has argued that a very, very low EEG, when
taken along with all the other evidence, would be enough to
provide one of the criteria for an absolutely ideal example of a
genuine OBE.18 There seems to be a tiny handful of cases in
which this weaker requirement for voluntary OBEs has perhaps
been met in laboratory situations. 19 But Almeder sensibly
suggests that even this weaker requirement is unnecessary if
what we are seeking is not strict 'proof but merely a 'rational
warrant' for the belief that genuine OBEs do occur. And if one of
the brain's functions is to record rather than 'generate' the
changes in our mental states, we should, I think, be prepared to
find that there continued to be some residual electrical activity
going on in the still-living brain of anyone who was going
through both the autoscopic and the transcendental stages of the
near-death experience.
My overall conclusion is that, in our present state of knowl-
edge, neither deathbed visions nor near-death experiences, nor
both types of evidence when taken together, can furnish us with
nearly sufficient grounds for the belief in personal survival of
bodily death. Despite the admirable work of Osis and Har-
 The Evidence from Psychical Research 149

aldsson, Moody, Sabom and others, there remain too many

unresolved ambiguities and lacunae in their findings. Perhaps
future research will eliminate most of these. But then again,
perhaps not. Future research may show that this whole area is
fraught with still more formidable difficulties to be faced by
anyone seeking strong evidence for a life after death.
Nevertheless the issue is no longer where it was before all this
evidence came to light. The probability of survival is somewhat
greater (or its improbability somewhat less). Belief in the mind's
complete destruction at physical death has suffered a blow, not
perhaps a very shattering one, but a blow by which it is to some
extent shaken. It is no longer so easy to acquiesce in the
conventional destructionist view of dying - namely that the
mind inevitably becomes more and more blurred, thought
processes more and more confused, perceptions more and more
indistinct, emotional responses feebler and feebler, and con-
sciousness of external influences fainter and fainter until it finally
ceases altogether. Possibly the most suggestive finding of our
examination of the experiences of the dying is the huge
preponderance of apparitions of the dead in deathbed visions,
and the seemingly total absence of apparitions of the living in the
recollections of those who have had near-death experiences.
Accordingly it is to the subject of apparitions perceived by
people in normal health that we shall now turn.

In what follows I shall treat apparitional experiences as if they

are basically a species of hallucinatory experiences. I know that
some writers regard them as actual perceptions of the 'astral' or
'etheric' figures of the human beings, living or deceased, who
thereby announce their literal presence to those who undergo
these experiences. Others more cautiously speculate that they
may originate from an objective position in space which some
consciousness has so modified that the body habitually asso-
ciated with this 'invasive' consciousness becomes perceptible to
those physically near the spatial position in question, which has
been turned into a 'phantasmogenetic centre'.20 However,
believers in the external objectivity of apparitional figures seem
unable to explain, without recourse to supplementary hypoth-
eses, how the etheric doubles of human and animal figures can
150 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

appear complete with accoutrements like clothes, sticks, pipes,

and other appurtenances which no one supposes to have astral
counterparts; or why, if they are spatially objective, then-
presence can hardly ever be captured by cameras or other
recording devices; or why most of those who are declared to be
in close physical proximity to the apparitional figures never-
theless signally fail to experience their presence. Yet perceptions
of apparitional figures are undoubtedly events which occur in
the minds of those who perceive them. I shall accordingly treat
them as being in this sense subjective.
Although apparitional experiences may be regarded as
basically hallucinatory, they need to be sharply distinguished
from the hallucinations suffered by chronic drunkards, drug
addicts, schizophrenics or others who are generally considered
to have a definite mental disturbance of some kind. Such
pathological hallucinations tend to recur frequently throughout
the course of the mental illness which generates them; then-
content is heavily auditory, e.g. voices urging the patient to take
drastic and sometimes violent action, and is often of a grotesque
and frightening character which pretty obviously reflects the
distinctive nature of the patient's illness; the content of
pathological hallucinations conveys no information not already
possessed by the patient; and their content is completely private
to the individual who is suffering them. In contrast, apparitional
experiences are usually isolated single episodes in someone's life
(although rarely, in the comparatively few cases of person-
centred 'hauntings', the same apparitional figure may be
perceived on several occasions); their content is predominantly
visual, and where the apparitional figure seems to speak, its
speech is typically brief and not very realistic; its appearance and
behaviour tend to be commonplace and, except in some 'crisis
cases', unremarkable; the appearance, gestures, or speech of the
apparition sometimes conveys information not previously
possessed by the percipient; when there are several people
physically present in the place where the figure appears, there is
a good chance, perhaps one in three, that the apparition will be
perceived by two or more of those present; and those who have
apparitional experiences, probably at least one in ten of the
population at some time or other, are nearly always in normal
physical and mental health.
 The Evidence from Psychical Research 151

We saw earlier21 that apparitional figures typically resemble

the figures of living human individuals, so much so that they are
frequently mistaken for real people who are thought to be
physically present. They look solid, obscure light and cast
shadows, their dresses may rustle, and so on. Only it soon
becomes evident that no one is actually there. It is natural to
suppose that they may have been the products of sensory
illusion, created by tricks of the light or unfamiliar perspectives.
'In the night, imagining some fear, how easy is a bush suppos'd a
bear!' The trouble is that most apparitional figures - 68 per cent
in the Green-McCreery survey - are seen at an estimated
distance of less than six feet from the percipient, usually in good
light, and mostly in or near the percipient's own home. I might
confuse my wife with a strange woman glimpsed across a crowd
at a busy railway station. I could hardly confuse her with a
standard lamp at which I was steadily looking in our sitting-
room in broad daylight.
It might be useful at this stage for me to offer some
representative examples of apparitional experiences.

1. Busy in her kitchen, a housewife sees a tall, grey-haired

woman looking in from the hall. She is in a shabby dark
dress and enveloped in a heavy stiff long apron. Suddenly
the stranger begins to disappear, from the head downwards
to her thin legs and big shoes.23
2. A woman's 83-year-old mother has gone early to bed. As she
leaves her sitting-room, the woman sees her mother standing
just outside in the hall. The dog's hackles rise. The figure
vanishes, and on going at once to her mother's room the
woman finds her peacefully asleep.24
3. A young woman has just finished her morning cup of tea.
She turns to take her cup and saucer to the kitchen, and sees
the figure of her grandfather smoking his pipe on her settee.
He had died thirteen years before.25
4. A travelling salesman is in his hotel room at midday,
smoking a cigar and writing up his order book. He suddenly
becomes aware of someone by his side. It is his sister, who
died nine years previously. He notices a bright red scratch on
her face. Later his mother confesses that she had inadver-
tently marred the girl's features when tending her corpse;
152 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

had obliterated the scratch with powder, etc.; and had never
told anyone about the incident.
5. A woman is lying in bed waiting to feed her baby, with her
husband asleep beside her. Suddenly she sees a tall man, in
the uniform of a naval officer, leaning on the foot rail of the
bed. She rouses her husband, who also sees the figure. The
apparition addresses a few words to the husband in a
reproachful tone before turning away and disappearing into
the wall. He then informs his wife that the figure was that of
his father, dead for fifteen years. Later she learns that seeing
the apparition had deterred her husband from taking
financial advice which would have proved ruinous. 27
6. Passing a colleague on the landing of a factory office stairs, a
worker is surprised when his 'Good morning7 elicits only a
strained stare. On returning home he learns that the man had
fallen on a dwarf-fence post the previous evening and had
died in hospital that morning of peritonitis.28
7. On a winter's afternoon a young airman is sitting in his
quarters reading and smoking, when the door opens and a
close friend of his looks in and greets him cheerfully. Later
that day he discovers that his friend had been killed,
approximately at the time his apparitional figure was seen,
when his aircraft had crashed in dense fog. 29

Now, the question with which we must be concerned is this.

Having ruled out psychopathology and sensory illusion as the
causes of most apparitional experiences, how are we to explain
their distinctive features, especially with regard to apparitions of
the dead or dying? In particular, how are the latter to be assessed
as evidence for the belief in a life after death?
First of all, we need to bear in mind the fact that most
apparitions are and remain unrecognized. Example 1 above
illustrates this. This is of course consistent with these experiences
being completely subjective isolated hallucinatory episodes,
although against this view must be set all the counter-evidence
which we have already noted, perhaps the chief of which is that
the experiences are quite often shared by others who happen to
be present, and therefore in these cases are at least intersubjec-
tive. We also need to bear in mind that quite a large number of
those apparitions which are recognized turn out to be the figures
 The Evidence from Psychical Research 153

of human beings who are alive and well when their apparitions
are perceived.
Nevertheless recognized apparitions of the dead and dying
form a substantial sub-class of apparitions in general. In Green
and McCreery's survey, where 72 per cent of all apparitions were
unrecognized, 'about two-thirds of all the recognized apparitions
reported to us were of people or animals whom the subject knew
to be dead 7 . 30 The incidence of apparitions of the dying is even
more strikinely significant. In the SPR's great Census of
Hallucinations an apparition of the dying was defined as one
which occurred within 24 hours of the death of the person whose
apparition was perceived. Taking the annual death rate for
England and Wales as given in the Registrar-General's Report for
1890, namely 19.5 per thousand, the authors calculated on this
basis that an apparition of an identifiable individual within 24
hours of his death might be perceived by chance-coincidence in 1
case out of 19,000. In fact out of the 1,300 cases they collected, 30
were cases of apparitions of the dying, that is, a proportion of
about 1 in 43. This is equivalent to about 440 in 19,000, or 440
times what might have occurred by chance alone. As Tyrrell
points out, this very high proportion is still more impressive
when a number of other relevant factors are taken into full
account (e.g. collective percipience, demonstrable effects on the
percipients, and the number of times which were actually very
much within the 24 hours limit).32
The criteria we ought to adopt for assessing the overall
importance of apparitions of the dead and dying for the belief in
a life after death are, I suggest, as follows.

(a) The frequency with which they occur. Let us recall that most
surveys show that roughly one in ten of the population
reports having perceived an apparitional figure, whether
recognized or unrecognized, at some period of their lives. 33
Now it is not unreasonable to conjecture that if two-thirds of
recognized apparitions represent individuals who are dead,
a similar proportion may hold among those apparitions, the
majority, which go unrecognized. After all, however
extensive our acquaintance, there are always vastly more
people whom we do not personally know, and never will
know, than those whom we do know and can recognize. But
154 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

this would mean that, of the nearly sixty million people

presently inhabiting the United Kingdom, perhaps four
million have already seen the apparition of someone who is
dead. This figure would need to be at least doubled, given
that most people who respond to questionnaires are of
average age and therefore still have half of their lives to run,
and given also that the experiences of young children tend
to be excluded by those who compile questionnaires, if we
are to form a realistic estimate of the number of people now
alive who have had, or ever will have, an apparitional
experience of a person who is in fact dead on at least one
occasion during their lives. Nor is there any reason to
suppose that in other countries throughout the world the
proportions, and hence the surmisable absolute figures,
would be significantly different. In other words, there are
probably several hundred million people now alive in the
world who have already seen, or one day eventually will
see, the apparition of some individual who is in fact dead at
the time of their experience. Even if this estimate,
admittedly conjectural, is greatly scaled down, it still leaves
us with a huge figure for contemporary apparitional
experiences which involve the dead,
(b) The reliability of the testimony. In any field of inquiry where
our conclusions have to be massively grounded on human
testimony, the overall reliability of witness accounts
assumes paramount importance. It is surely reasonable to
conjecture that at least some of the reports of apparitional
experiences will have been deliberately falsified by those
who claim to have had them, and that an indefinite number
of others will contain unintentional falsehoods attributable
to errors of memory. However, offsetting these possibilities
or probabilities we need to give due weight to the following
considerations:
i. Many of the percipients have been personally interviewed
by the investigators, who would certainly have excluded
their reports if they had entertained serious suspicions of
the percipients' integrity or powers of recollection. There is
no obvious rational motive (notoriety, financial gain, etc.)
for inflicting specious narratives on the investigators, who
have nothing of these kinds to offer. Many percipients
 The Evidence from Psychical Research 155

recounted their experience to others (friends, family,

colleagues, etc.) at the time of the experience, and these
third parties have been willing and able to corroborate this
fact. Moreover, we do need to differentiate between
peripheral errors of memory, by which any eye-witness
account of any event can be to some extent contaminated
without undermining its general credibility, and the
complete misremembering of relevant central features of
the event, which would of course suffice to vitiate the
testimony as acceptable evidence. But sometimes these
central features were put on record at the time, e.g. in letters
or diaries. And anyway it is not enough for the critic merely
to make the sweeping assertion, 'People misremember'.
Most by far of what we think we remember actually
happened as we remember it: otherwise our heavy reliance
on memory in ordinary life would be inexplicable. No doubt
excitement or distress, and the passage of time, can affect
our memories of past events, but not necessarily by
distorting them. The relevant central features of a striking
episode, or of one which we frequently recapitulate
mentally and describe, can for these reasons become more
firmly fixed in our memory.
In a sizable proportion of cases the apparition is perceived
by two or more people simultaneously. Where their
accounts of their experiences concur, as they nearly always
do, it is obvious that the evidential value of each account is
significantly strengthened by the support of the others.
Throughout a large diversity of reports made by people of
different age, sex, nationality, cultural background, and
antecedent beliefs, we find an impressive concordance with
regard to the appearance and demeanour of the apparitions
they claim to have perceived. On the one hand they imitate
actual human figures, for they seem to stand out in space,
they look solid, their appearance alters as they move away
or turn aside from the percipient, they obscure the light, are
reflected in mirrors, and so forth. On the other hand they are
markedly dissimilar to actual human figures, since they
appear and disappear in unusual ways, often suddenly,
they cannot be grasped by the percipient, they do not
produce any physical effects although they may seem to do
 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

so, they are more often than not invisible and inaudible to
others who are present, they often seem to walk or glide
through walls and closed doors, and so on. This combina-
tion of apparently physical and manifestly non-physical
characteristics makes the apparitions studied by psychical
research markedly imlike the 'ghosts' created by writers of
fiction or depicted on the cinema screen. Where a huge
number of independent witnesses testify to the occurrence
of a type of phenomenon, and we find that their separate
descriptions conspicuously tally in respect of a large
number of central features which they would have been
highly unlikely to anticipate, this clearly tends to be very
strong evidence that the type of phenomenon which they
are describing has in fact occurred pretty much as they have
described it.
The reports of apparitional experiences frequently teem
with circumstantial detail. For example, in Example 1 above
the apparitional figure is described as having an aquiline
nose, grey hair, and pale grey or blue eyes, and as wearing a
big waterproof apron. She looked with surprise at the
kitchen unit and gas stove. In Example 2 the apparition of
the mother was in her nightdress with the little shawl
around her shoulders that she always wore in bed. In
Example 3 the grandfather appeared wearing a medium
grey suit, white shirt, black tie, socks, and shoes, and the
percipient could see the smoke coming from his pipe as he
smiled at her with a contented expression. She noticed that
the time on the clock was nearly 10.10 a.m. In Example 4 the
salesman saw a little breast-pin and a comb in the hair of his
sister's figure, the lower half of which was hidden by the
table on which he had been writing. In Example 5 the report
is accompanied by a map of the layout of the bedroom, and
the deceased father is described as wearing a cap with a
projecting peak. As the apparition passed the lamp, the
room was thrown into shadow. In Example 7 the percipient,
Lieutenant Larkin, saw his friend, Lieutenant McConnel,
half in and half out of the room, holding the door knob in
his hand. He was in full flying clothes and was wearing his
customary naval cap, which he had retained from his earlier
days in the RNAS and which only two other men (of
 The Evidence from Psychical Research 157

unmistakably different appearance) were entitled to wear

on the station at that time. Now these and other circum-
stantial details, with which most reports are full, do tend to
give the reports the ring of truth. They do strongly suggest
that the people who are claiming to have had the
experiences they describe did in fact have such experiences.
(c) The degree of awareness which they exhibit. Many apparitions
seem to be aware of the physical environment within which
they appear. Thus in Example 1 above the manifesting
woman looked with surprise at the modern kitchen
equipment, and in Example 5 the deceased father seemed
to be aware of the bed foot-rail on which he was leaning.
The same seems to be true of many 'haunting' apparitions.
Apparitional figures also often show awareness of the living
individuals to whom they are appearing, e.g. in Examples 3,
5 and 7 above, and to whom they may try to communicate,
as in Examples 5 and 7. However, there is no doubt that
many apparitions behave like automata or somnambulists.
Haunting apparitions, in particular, commonly follow a set
routine which seems unvarying, and tend to show scant
awareness of their living observers. Myers and others have
speculated that, where apparitions of the dead comport
themselves in this automatic or somnambulistic fashion, this
may transpire because of post-mortem dreamlike states
during which they may broodingly 'return' to former
earthly scenes which remain meaningful to them and in
which they may transiently 'appear' to someone who
happens to be there at the time.
(d) The degree to which they evince a purpose. It could of course be
claimed that all apparitions of the dead have the intrinsic
purpose of providing evidence for survival. In that case,
however, we must regard their endeavours as being largely
futile, since so often the figures that appear are and remain
unrecognized. On the hypothesis of survival, indeed, we
can speculate as to why the dead apparently tend to
manifest themselves to complete strangers. For example, it
may be that most apparitions are place-centred rather than
person-centred, and that they are, as it were, involuntary
extrusions from the consciousness of the departed, who are
dreamily 'revisiting' remembered earthly locations which
158 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

retain some meaning for them and where occasionally some

living human being of heightened sensitivity chances to be
present. But anyway in quite a large minority of cases there
is an obvious surmisable purpose, for instance in Example 5
above, where the apparition of the father seems to have
come to remonstrate with his son. And the history of
psychical research offers numerous cases (e.g. the Chaffin
Will case, 34 to mention only the most highly celebrated)
which are well attested and which provide very clear
indications of a definite and usually benign purpose behind
the efforts of the apparitional figure to manifest itself to
some living individual,
(e) The accuracy of the information they seem to convey. Most
apparitions, it must be said, convey no verifiable informa-
tion of which the percipient is not already in possession.
However, it does fairly often happen that they convey new
information which only later the percipient learns to have
been correct, for example apparitions of the dying. In
Example 6 above it was later on the same day that the
worker heard of his colleague's death resulting from his
accident. In Example 7 Lieutenant Larkin heard of McCon-
nel's fatal crash only when he overheard fellow officers
discussing it in a Lincoln hotel that evening. And appari-
tions of the long dead may by their features, dress,
behaviour, or speech communicate information which is
new to the percipient. Consider the bright red scratch
noticed by the salesman in Example 4. Or consider the naval
uniform worn by the apparition in Example 5: the wife, who
was first to perceive the figure, had never met her father-in-
law in life and never thought of him as a naval officer, as he
had retired early from the Navy before her husband was
even born.

In light of the above facts we are left, I suggest, with three

possible types of explanation. First of all, there is the purely
naturalistic hypothesis. According to this, apparitions of the
dead are entirely subjective episodes to be explained in terms of
cultural factors and abnormal psychology. Any information
seemingly derived from them is in fact attributable either to
chance coincidence, e.g. a hallucination occurring round about
 The Evidence from Psychical Research 159

the time when the hallucinated individual happened to die; or to

mistakes in the reports, e.g. the salesman in fact knew about his
mother's inadvertent scratching of her dead daughter's face but
had forgotten; or to unconscious inference on the part of
percipients perhaps arising from understandable anxieties, e.g.
the surmisable misgivings of Lieutenant Larkin about his friend's
flight producing a hallucinatory experience of McConnel's
apparently safe return. The only comments I shall make on
these explanations are that they hopelessly fail to account for the
frequency of death coincidences, and that they would require
us to have a cavalier and dogmatic disregard of what witnesses
have deposed about the relevant times of their experiences and
about their then knowledge and general states of mind.
Secondly, there is the non-survivalist paranormal hypothesis.
According to this, apparitional experiences are produced by
telepathic communication between the percipient and some
presently living mind. In the case of apparitions of the dying, the
communication must originate at a time when the agent is still in
fact alive albeit in imminent danger of death, even although it
does not terminate in the mind of the percipient until some short
time after the agent has actually died. With apparitions of the
long dead, the image of the dead person must be telepathically
generated by some currently living third party, for instance the
salesman7s mother in Example 4 or the husband in Example 5,
both of whom were in possession of the information conveyed by
the apparitions of the sister and the father-in-law.
This non-survivalist explanation depends on the possibility of
telepathic interaction between living minds on a scale and with
an accuracy for which there is little or no parallel outside the
domain of apparitional experiences. However, it may be pointed
out that there are many apparitions, for example apparitions of
the living as in Example 2 above, where telepathy from living
human beings may already have to be postulated; and also, in
particular, that telepathyfroma dead person would equally need
to be on a similar scale and level of accuracy. However,
apparitions of the dead involve more than the telepathic
reception of new information. There is also the convincing
appearance of the moving, acting, and lifelike figure of the dead
person (his apparition in fact) which needs to be accounted for,
frequently displaying as it does an awareness of its environment
160 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

and of the percipients. There are indeed a few cases of out-of-the-

body experiences in which some other person at some other
place seems to see the OBEer's projected figure. But to the best of
my knowledge there is little if any independent evidence for the
ability of one living human being to induce (either by telepathy
or by OBE projection) the image of a third party, whether living or
dead, to arise before the mind of another living human being.
The third and, I suggest on balance, the most adequate
interpretation of apparitions of the dead is that they are in fact
what they are commonly taken to be, namely the fleeting
appearance of figures which closely resemble departed persons
as they formerly were when alive in the body and which now
express the continued activity of these persons as surviving
minds. They may appear to living individuals who once knew
them and can now recognize them, or they may appear in places
with which they were once familiar to complete strangers who
happen to be present in these places and who, perhaps
temporarily, have a heightened sensitivity to telepathic influ-
ences. The status of these apparitions is mental, literally
hallucinatory, but on the survivalist hypothesis they are veridical
hallucinations which express the actual memories, feelings, and
sometimes the conscious intentions of persons still in some sense
alive though now physically deceased.
This survivalist explanation is not forced upon us, but it is, I
think, what the discoverable facts about apparitional experiences
of the dead strongly indicate to us as the most plausible
interpretation. Hence my overall conclusion is that this entire
class of experiences, mixed in evidential value though it
undoubtedly is, nevertheless provides us with a sufficient
abundance of credible testimony, often vouched for by more
than one witness and often conveying information not otherwise
accessible to the percipients by normal means, to justify the belief
in a life after death, while still far from requiring such a belief, on
the part of reasonable judges. At least this would be the probable
overall conclusion to which they point, were it not the case (as it
clearly is) that we have to deduct from the probability of this
conclusion, when based solely on apparitional experiences of the
dead and dying as a separate and distinct class of events, the
quite large degree of antecedent improbability attaching to the
belief in discarnate post-mortem existence in general.
 The Evidence from Psychical Research 161

We must now turn to the most famous and controversial type of

evidence for a life after death, namely the evidence ostensibly
supplied by mediums, who typically relay to living human beings
various communications which allegedly originate from the
surviving minds of deceased persons. There are almost as many
species of mediums as there are, say, species of poets or
dramatists. Thus there are amateur, professional, and semi-
professional mediums; there are mental mediums and physical
mediums; among the former there are trance mediums and non-
trance clairvoyant or clairaudient mediums, and among the latter
there are mediums who produce raps, movements of tables and of
other inanimate physical objects, and those who produce partial
or full-form materializations of human figures claimed to be the
'ectoplasmic' bodies of deceased human personalities; there are
mediums who profess to receive messages from the dead via an
intermediate spirit personality, their 'guide' or 'control', and there
are others through whom the dead profess to speak directly, in
propria persona; most mediums deliver their messages by speech,
but some ('automatists') by writing spirit-dictated scripts, in a
handwriting occasionally claimed to resemble that of the known
deceased communicators when alive; some mediums demon-
strate in spiritualist churches or at large public meetings, others sit
regularly with a small circle of sympathetic believers, and others
give sittings to private individuals, while many operate in all of
these ways; and there are sundry other forms of mediumship, too
numerous to mention.
In what follows I shall ignore the phenomena which are
claimed to be at the heart of physical mediumship, and I shall
mainly ignore the physical features which are often present to
some extent in mental mediumship (e.g. the movements of
planchettes). Instead I shall concentrate on the content and style
of the communications received via mental mediums. I have
already36 outlined the principles we should use in trying to
evaluate these communications as evidence for the identity of the
ostensible communicators, that is, as evidence for the continued
post-mortem existence of known deceased persons. Perhaps I
ought now to give examples to illustrate the kinds of material to
which these principles may need to be applied.
First of all there are communications embodying information
which is already known to, or subsequently verifiable by, the
162 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

sitter but which seems to be quite outside any knowledge

available to the medium by natural means. Of course this
information needs to be fairly specific and factual, not just the
vague consolatory or edifying sub-rhetoric which is too often put
forth by poor mediums. These flounderers are in practice the
great majority of men and women who call themselves
'mediums', just as the great majority of those who like to think
of themselves as 'poets' only ever succeed in producing pathetic
doggerel. Nevertheless there are undoubtedly a small number of
true poets; and there are a small number of good mediums, who
from time to time produce seriously interesting results. It
obviously needs to be established that the seemingly evidential
information which the latter are able to produce has not been
fraudulently acquired; that it has not been consciously or
unconsciously deducible from the appearance or reactions of
the sitter, or from unguarded comments he has made; and that it
is sufficiently specific to render extremely improbable the
possibility that it has all resulted from chance coincidence. There
is an abundance of mediumistic communications which meet
these requirements.
Take, for instance, the items of information relayed by Mrs
Piper of Boston to Professor J. H. Hyslop, ostensibly emanating
from his deceased father. These included the names of family
members, references to private conversations between father and
son, to many special incidents, to family matters, to physical
idiosyncrasies of the father, to his intimate personal possessions,
style of dress, and habits, and they contained favourite pieces of
advice, all worded in ways typical of his deceased father's modes
of speech. 37 Mrs Piper was intensively studied for many years by
Dr Richard Hodgson, secretary of the American SPR. For a time
she and her husband were watched by private detectives, and
her sitters were brought to her anonymously by Hodgson, who
supervised all her sittings, but she was never discovered in any
deliberate attempt to cheat. One of her communicators purported
to be George Pellew, a young lawyer who had died suddenly in
New York. From 150 anonymous sitters over a period of several
years, 'Pellew7 recognized 30 who had been acquainted with him
in his lifetime, without making a single mistake. He reminded
them of experiences he had shared with them (some of which
they had themselves forgotten about) and carried on a fluent
 The Evidence from Psychical Research 163

conversation with them, answering their questions and making

apt observations on subjects of common concern with an
intelligence and humour which they found impressively char-
acteristic of their dead friend.38
Mrs Piper was brought over to England, where she was
cautiously investigated by Professor Oliver Lodge. At one sitting
her control spoke of Lodge's deceased Uncle Jerry, who
ostensibly recalled a number of incidents from his own boyhood
- killing a cat in Smith's Field, owning a long peculiar skin like a
snake-skin, and swimming in a creek where he and his brothers
had run the risk of being drowned. Lodge's still-living Uncle
Robert remembered the snake-skin but denied killing the cat.
However, a third living uncle, Frank, remembered both the cat
and Smith's Field and also gave full details of the creek
incident.39
After his death Dr Hodgson ostensibly turned up as a new
control of Mrs Piper. Among many other facts this 'Hodgson'
was able to tell sitters of recent remarks they had made in private
conversations which, in his discarnate form, he had 'overheard'.
For example, he reminded Professor W. R. Newbold of a talk he
had had the previous week with William James, during which
James had commented that the late Hodgson had been 'very
secretive and careful'. Although at the sitting Newbold failed to
remember William James having made any such comment at this
private talk, 'Hodgson' persisted that he had indeed heard it
being made, and on being consulted William James himself
clearly remembered having made this precise comment.40
The businessman Arthur Findlay attended his first ever seance
with the direct voice medium, John Sloan. The seance was held in
a part of Glasgow where Findlay was a stranger, he had never
met the medium, and everyone attending the seance was
unknown to him. After a time he heard a voice claiming to be
that of his late father, Robert Downie Findlay. His father
apologized for having refused to take him into the family
business as a young man and explained that his former partner,
David Kidston, now deceased, also wanted to talk about this
matter. A different voice, claiming to be that of Kidston, then
admitted that it was he who had opposed the young Arthur's
entry into their office fourteen years earlier, because at the time
he had judged, wrongly, that the business could not support an
164 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

extra partner: 1 am glad to get that off my chest at lasf. All this
Findlay knew of his own knowledge to be true.41
The London medium, Mrs Leonard, gave a sitting to an
anonymous sitter, Mrs Hugh Talbot. Her control passed on a
message from the late Mr Talbot, requesting his wife to look for a
relevant passage in a book which was 'not printed' but lias
writing on'. Mrs Talbot thought a red log book might be meant,
but the control said 'No, it was darker and would she please look
on page 12 or 13'. 'It has a diagram of languages in the front. . .
Indo-European, Aryan, Semitic languages. . .a table of Arabian,
Semitic languages'. On returning home, Mrs. Talbot could hardly
be persuaded to look for such a book. But right at the back of the
top book-shelf she found with astonishment a shabby black
leather notebook of her husband's. Pasted into this was a table of
all the languages mentioned, and on page 13 was an extract
copied out from an old book entitled Post-Mortem, describing the
blissful situation of the author after death.42
When Mrs Winifred Coombe-Tennant died in 1956, she was
remembered as a well-to-do, influential, energetic public woman
who among much else had been the first British woman delegate
to the League of Nations Assembly. Only a very few people
knew that in fact she had also been for many years a medium,
under the pseudonym of 'Mrs Willetf, who had given private
sittings to the former Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, his
distinguished brother Gerald, Sir Oliver Lodge, and various
other eminent men and women. After her death, and while her
mediumship was still a closely guarded secret, W. H. Salter of the
SPR asked another medium, Geraldine Cummins, to try to get in
touch with the deceased mother of a Major Coombe-Tennant. In
the small cottage in Ireland where she was staying, Miss
Cummins, an automatist, prepared herself in solitude to write
any scripts which might be dictated by this unknown spirit. The
entire story of her scripts, with an analytical foreword by C. D.
Broad, has been published as Swan on a Black Sea.43
These scripts immediately began to pour forth a wealth of
material which Miss Cummins soon felt sure was emanating
from the spirit of the late 'Mrs Willetf. The forty scripts, written
over a period of two-and-a-half years, gave many details of Mrs
Coombe-Tennanfs early married life, of her family and her
husband's family, of her associates and their activities, of the
 The Evidence from Psychical Research 165

changing relationships between them which she had observed

and of the changes which her own attitudes had undergone
during her later life as a result of events which had happened to
her. Her formidable personality - disciplined, independent,
magisterial in tone, but wryly humorous and capable of intense
and sometimes remorseful feeling - dominates the scripts and
gives them much of their dramatic interest. Her reminiscences of
individuals, mostly long dead, are accompanied by what purport
to be accounts of their present post-mortem interests and
ongoing activities. Nearly all the huge amount of verifiable
information was corroborated from the memories of a few living
people or from various printed sources which contained relevant
material. But only a close reading of the scripts themselves can
possibly convey their striking verisimilitude. Many critics have
judged that together they constitute the best evidence which has
ever come via a single medium for the identity of a particular
deceased communicator.
In 1970 the Reverend David Kennedy, a Church of Scotland
minister, lost his wife Ann. He then proceeded to have sittings
with various mediums, particularly the noted Scottish medium,
Albert Best. Over the next two years he received a huge stream of
messages from 'Ann', many of which seemed to show close
knowledge of his current situation and activities, almost as if his
late wife was present with him at many points of his daily life
and was trying to help him to cope. Thus late one Sunday
afternoon, having returned home after conducting two long and
exhausting services, he stretched out on the sofa to rest before his
evening service at 6.30, but fell deeply asleep. He was awakened
by the telephone at 6. It was a medium he had recently consulted
in another town, a Mrs. Findlater, who knew his name but had
had to find his address and telephone number from directory
enquiries. She had been strongly impressed by 'Ann' to
telephone her husband and tell him, 'Get out now and use the
old notes', although Mrs Findlater had no idea of what this
meant. Still half asleep, Mr Kennedy just had time to grab the
notes of an old sermon, rush into his car, and get to his church in
time for the evening service.44
On another occasion he was dressing in formal black for a
funeral service when to his horror he discovered that he had no
clean stiff clerical collars left in the drawer where he usually kept
166 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

them. Again the telephone rang. It was Albert Best, who said that
he was being impressed by Ann to let her husband know that 'if
you look in the bottom drawer of the chest of drawers, in the
right hand corner under some shirts, you will find three clean
collars'.45 Mr Kennedy looked and there were the three collars.
Albert Best went on to say that Ann was reminding her husband
to send to the laundry the twenty-three soiled collars which he
had already accumulated in a special box where he kept them.
When he counted the soiled collars, the minister found that there
were twenty-three in all.
Mr Kennedy records many such incidents, as for example
when in the 1970 General Election for the first time he voted
Conservative and was humorously reprimanded by Ann, a
lifelong socialist, via the entranced Albert Best; or when he was
told by Albert Best that Ann was talking about £42, just four
hours after he had drawn exactly £42 from his bank account.46 At
any hour of the day the medium might feel that he was being
contacted by Ann and would quickly let her husband know of
the feelings, experiences, and memories which he believed she
was trying to impress upon him. Many of these concerned odd
events in her early life of which her husband knew nothing until
he made inquiries of her mother and sister, who until then had
themselves almost forgotten about them. One example was when
Ann (via Albert Best) had joked about ballet shoes, which then
recalled to her sister an occasion when Ann had unsuccessfully
tried to 'point her toes' in her young sister's tiny ballet shoes by
holding the ribbons in her hands. Another message referred to a
joke in her family 'about milk in relation to Bill' (Ann's brother,
killed as an air-gunner in 1944). On being questioned, Ann's
mother at last remembered how one summer Bill had naively
applied milk to his hair as an inexpensive substitute for
brilliantine - until it eventually became rancid and he was
acutely embarrassed by its smell. 47
The history of mediumship contains very, very many
examples of communications which are at least equal in
evidential value to those I have cited. Thus the series of sittings
in which communication was apparently established between
the gifted, highly intelligent, and cultured medium, Eileen
Garrett, and Flight Lieutenant Irwin, commander of the ill-fated
airship R101 which had crashed in France shortly before, has
 The Evidence from Psychical Research 167

been studied at great length by John G. Fuller. The statements

made by Irwin' to Major Villiers of the Ministry of Civil Aviation
yielded many highly specific and dauntingly technical details of
the airship and its flight which were verified by the subsequent
official investigation; a few details could be neither confirmed
nor rejected; but in no cases were they found to be erroneous.
Clearly, in the space at my disposal I have been able to mention
only a very few instances of impressively successful medium-
ship. And I have necessarily had to omit many of the
circumstantial details which, although inessential, nevertheless
add greatly to the general force and convincingness of the
communications as received.
However, there are two or three variations from the normal
pattern of mediumship which perhaps we ought to note. First,
there are 'proxy sittings', in which someone acts as sitter on
behalf of a third party, the 'true' sitter, who is quite unknown to
the medium and also a complete stranger to the proxy. This
absent principal may try to facilitate communication by supply-
ing some carefully limited information (a name, an identifying
phrase) or some token object like a ring or watch, or by
concentrating on the deceased person with whom he wishes to
establish contact or silently appealing to him before the sitting.
One group of such sittings was arranged by Professor E. R.
Dodds on behalf of a Mrs Lewis, who wanted a communication
from her father, a Mr Macaulay, who in life had been a water
engineer.49 The proxy was the Reverent C. Drayton Thomas and
the medium was Mrs Leonard, who was therefore at two
removes from the true sitter. Through her control, the medium
described Mr. Macaulay's tool chest, working instruments,
mathematical formulae, and drawing office, and referred to
'someone called Godfrey . . . a great link with old times'. Mr
Macaulay's most trusted clerk had been a William Godfrey. His
pet name for his daughter, 'Puggy7, was given. He spoke of his
damaged hand, specially wanted the medium to mention baths,
and gave the names of some people who had shared a
particularly happy time with him and his family, including one
of whom the control said, 'It might be Reece but it sounds like
Riss'. Mr Macaulay's anxiety about wasting bathwater had been
a family joke, as had his schoolboy son's hero-worship of an
older boy called Rees: the son had drawn attention to the spelling
168 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

of his friend's name so often that his young sisters used to chant
'Not Reece, but Riss' to tease him, until their father put a stop to
them. Out of 124 items of information given, 51 were classified as
definitely correct, 12 as good, 32 as fair, 2 as poor, 22 as doubtful,
and 5 as definitely wrong.
Secondly, there are 'drop-in communicators', that is, commu-
nicators who are apparently unknown to the medium and to the
sitters, but who seem to arrive uninvited at a sitting which is
trying to make contact with some quite different deceased person
or persons. 'Irwin', for example, first communicated at a seance
at which an investigator was attempting to get in touch with the
spirit of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Often these interruptions occur
without the communicators supplying any credible evidence of
their identity. Sometimes, however, they make statements about
themselves which can be subsequently verified and which
appear to be outside the knowledge of anyone present. During
and after World War Two a small circle in Cambridge met
regularly to use a ouija board, and received communications
from more than two hundred deceased persons, mostly friends
and relations of the circle members. Although they had a number
of drop-in communicators, these cases were left unverified until
Dr Alan Gauld investigated them many years later. Between 1950
and 1952 one such communicator, 'Harry Stockbridge', spelled
out several items of information about himself. According to
these Stockbridge had been a 2nd Lieutenant attached to the
Northumberland Fusiliers, although mention was also made of
the Tyneside Scottish; he had died on July 14 1916; he had 'hung
out' in Leicester, where there was a record; he had been tall,
dark, and thin, with large brown eyes; and his mother was also
dead. With great patience, and in the face of considerable
difficulties, Gauld set out to check these various items and at last
found them all to be precisely correct. To discover this he had to
consult obituary notices in two Leicester newspapers of the time
and two obscure works of military history, all of which, however,
he found to contain relevant inaccuracies; to obtain a death
certificate and confirmation from the records of the War Office
Library, which showed that before his death 2nd Lieutenant
Stockbridge had been transferred to a Tyneside Scottish
battalion; to examine a photograph preserved in the archives of
his old school; to consult his surviving brothers; and to find his
 The Evidence from Psychical Research 169

name on a War Memorial in his old school in Leicester, where he

had been born. His mother had died prior to the communica-
tions. (Gauld's research was in fact substantially more involved
than I have been able to indicate here.)50
Lastly, there are 'cross-correspondences'. These occur when
the information supplied by a medium corresponds closely to
information supplied independently by another medium who is
giving a sitting elsewhere (or perhaps to information transmitted
by distant individuals who are sitting in the absence of any
medium). On May 26 1916 Lionel and Norah Lodge had
arranged to have a sitting with Mrs Leonard in London about
noon, in an attempt to contact their brother Raymond, killed in
Flanders in 1915. In Birmingham, Alec Lodge suddenly fetched
his sisters Honor and Rosalynde to try for an impromptu
correspondence test that lunchtime at Mariemont, Sir Oliver
Lodge's official university residence. They knew of Lionel and
Norah's simultaneous sitting, although naturally the latter had
no knowledge of the test which was being carried out at
Mariemont. There Alec and his two sisters were asking Raymond
to get Mrs Leonard's control to utter the test word, 'Honolulu',
which had figured in a once-popular music-hall song. Mean-
while in London 'Raymond' was discussing various family and
other matters with Lionel and Norah. At last, however, towards
the end of the sitting, the Leonard-control abruptly changed the
subject and told Norah that Raymond 'wanted to know whether
you could play Hulu-Honolulu'. She added that he was 'rolling
with laughter'.51
By far the most famous cross-correspondences formed a
complex and interrelated series of communications which began
in 1901 and continued till 1932. They involved numerous
mediums, chiefly Mrs A. W. Verrall, a Cambridge classicist,
her daughter Helen, Mrs Piper of Boston, 'Mrs Willetf, and 'Mrs
Holland', the pseudonym of Rudyard Kipling's sister, Mrs Alice
Fleming, then living in India. The ostensible communicators
were, among others, the three early leaders of the SPR - Edmund
Gurney, Henry Sidgwick, and Frederick Myers - who had died
in 1888, 1900, and 1901 respectively. Study of these Cross-
Correspondences has been extremely difficult, not only because
they are so voluminous in quantity, but above all because of their
often abstruse content. They contain numerous recondite allu-
170 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

sions to Greek and Latin texts, to historical, mythological, and

philosophical topics, to English poetry, and to artistic and
literary themes of the Italian Renaissance and other periods.
These allusions occur infragmentaryform in the many separate
scripts written by the different automatists and, when perused
on their own, may seem quite meaningless; but when put
together with other fragments from one or more of the other
automatists, they emerge as having a pretty definite meaning.
For example, scripts written by three of the automatists
between 1901 and 1912 were interspersed with cryptic references
to the Palm Maiden, May Blossom, the Blessed Damozel, and
Berenice, to a candle and candlestick, a lock of hair, something
purple, a metal box, and a periwinkle. Then in 1916 a fourth
medium, Mrs Willett, wrote a long script for Arthur Balfour, in
which there were references to symbols mentioned in the earlier
scripts and a line, slightly misquoted, from Elizabeth Barrett
Browning: 'And if God will I shall but love thee better after
death7. Like this one, some of the earlier scripts had been signed
M., and in one case Mary L. What none of the automatists knew
was that many years before the young Arthur Balfour had fallen
in love with Mary Lyttelton, to whom he had spoken of his deep
feelings, which he felt sure were reciprocated; but that before he
had had the opportunity to make a formal proposal, she had
fallen ill of typhus and died on Palm Sunday, 1875. Balfour never
married. But every year until his death, unless prevented by
affairs of state, he passed Palm Sunday alone with her sister in
remembrance of Mary (whom her family had called May). He
now told his brother for the first time that after her death he had
been given a lock of Mary's beautiful hair, and that he had had
made for it a silver box lined with purple and engraved with
periwinkle and other spring flowers. Mary had been photo-
graphed holding a candle at the foot of a staircase. Even in
heaven the Blessed Damozel yearned for her lover. And of course
Berenice sacrificed her hair to the gods for her husband's safe
return from war. These scripts and their interpretation were not
published till I960.52
The 'Palm Sunday Case' is typical in respect of the kind of
symbols employed, the obliqueness of the references to pertinent
objects and events, the number of automatists participating, and
the length of time which elapsed between the first scripts and
 The Evidence from Psychical Research 171

their ultimate verification. However, because the communicator

was 'Mary Lyttelton', it is untypical of the whole series of Cross-
Correspondences, which were ostensibly directed by a small and
learned group of discarnate minds, principally Frederick Myers,
but all of them men who on earth had been deeply interested in
the problem of survival. Many of the scripts were signed by
'Myers7, who with his deceased colleagues explicitly claimed that
they were being devised as an ingenious experiment to prove the
reality of a conscious life after physical death. If the series as a
whole was indeed masterminded by these distinguished classical
scholars and philosophers for this purpose, perhaps their efforts
were too subtle and ingenious, for there is no doubt that the
erudition of their detailed content, which is much greater than I
have been able to indicate here, has tended to deter many
investigators; and the complexity of the intellectual jigsaws into
which a large number of elusive items have to be fitted has
fostered the speculation that the apparently meaningful results
have in fact all been produced by the elaborate methods used to
construe the diverse items by the few living researchers who
have devoted their sophisticated intelligences to studying the
enormous mass of scripts.53
The strikingly successful mediumistic communications which I
have been describing could easily be paralleled by many others
in the history of mental mediumship. And when we recall that,
compared with other, less humanly relevant fields of scientific
investigation (research into cosmetics or detergents, for exam-
ple), psychical research has had to operate with woefully meagre
resources and mainly part-time if dedicated and skilled
personnel, it is reasonable to conjecture that the large body of
interesting and evidential cases which have been thoroughly
examined and eventually published may be quite a small
proportion of those which have actually occurred. However,
we also need to remember that these highly suggestive cases
tend to be drawn from the work of a relatively small number of
gifted mediums. Moreover, even the most celebrated mediums
frequently produce no significant results, or results which are
seriously erroneous. For instance, in 1909 the 'Hodgson' who at
that time purported to control Mrs Piper produced a spirit called
'Bessie Beals' during experimental sittings with the psychologist
Dr Stanley Hall; 'Bessie Beals' professed to be Hall's deceased
172 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

niece and by her third appearance was relaying apparent

memories to him; but Hall had no such niece and from start to
finish she was entirely fictitious, presumably fabricated by Mrs
Piper's unconscious. Another of Mrs Piper's communicators was
'George Eliof, who claimed to have met Adam Bede in the spirit
world. On the day after the then still living Dr Hodgson had been
reading Lockharfs Life of Scott, 'Sir Walter Scotf turned up and,
among much other dubious information about the solar system,
stated that there were monkeys in the sun. 54 In sittings with Mrs
Blanche Cooper, Dr S. G. Soal was introduced to a 'John
Ferguson', who claimed to have been a brother of Soal's former
schoolfriend, James Ferguson. Before each sitting Soal speculated
about this John Ferguson and found that his guesses after one
sitting were relayed by the medium as facts at the next. This
continued for several weeks, until Soal discovered that there had
never in fact been a John Ferguson connected with Highland
Avenue, Brentwood and buried in the South Necropolis at
Glasgow on March 3 1912.55
I have already commented on the importance of memories as
evidence for the identity of discarnate communicators.56 Here let
me simply repeat that, while memory lapses and errors must
obviously count as evidence against any identity claimed, then-
precise strength as negative evidence will vary widely and will
depend on the content of what is forgotten or misremembered
and also on the circumstances in which it comes to be forgotten or
misremembered. If I clearly remember the name of someone I
met briefly on holiday thirty years ago, this constitutes good
evidence that we did meet in the past; whereas if I forget or
misremember his name, or indeed fail to remember ever having
met him anywhere, no one would be surprised at such a memory
lapse after such a period of time. It would be quite different if on
that holiday he had saved me from drowning, but if our
acquaintance had merely been that on a couple of occasions we
met over a drink in the bar, the probability of my recalling him
would surely be very much less than the probability of my
completely forgetting him or confusing him with someone else.
And even when an item is one that I am in general unlikely to
forget, such as my postcode or car registration number, we know
that distractions, excitement, harassment, fatigue, illness, the
influence of drink or drugs, and hundreds of other factors can
 The Evidence from Psychical Research 173

cause someone to forget or misremember something which

ordinarily he can recall with the greatest of ease. It is therefore by
no means far-fetched to suppose that a disembodied spirit, if
such there be, should often find himself unable to provide
smoothly and promptly the kind of information we expect from
him, since we may readily suppose that such a spirit would
probably have to enter into an unusual mental state for the very
purpose of communicating via a medium, who after all is herself
in a state of deep or mild dissociation throughout most of her
sitting.
Furthermore there is the huge gap, which we must never
underestimate, which has to be crossed if communication is to
take place between the discarnate and those still in the flesh. We
may presume that the unconscious mind of the medium filters,
edits, abridges, transposes, interprets, and in so doing necessa-
rily to a greater or less degree distorts any information, however
accurate in its first origin, which emanates from the discarnate
mind of the communicator. In order to seize and construe this
information as best she can, she will tend to supplement and
ornament the information from her own knowledge, beliefs, and
attitudes, of course also unconsciously. These surmised facts
about the mechanics of mediumship must not be used as an
excuse for worthless communications. But if we adopt the spirit
hypothesis provisionally in order to test it critically, we may well
find ourselves marvelling that so many nuggets of verifiable
information contrive to get through amid the welter of
accompanying dross.
Of course, when we have ruled out all normal explanations of
the highly specific information which seems to be quite often
forthcoming from the best mediums, we have still not estab-
lished that it comes ultimately from the surviving minds of
deceased persons. Once we have ruled out reporting errors,
either unintentional or deliberate, mediumistic manipulation,
either unconscious or fraudulent, and explanations like cryp-
tomnesia or the operation of spurious coincidence as on the
whole implausible, we still have to consider explanations in
terms of paranormal cognition. No doubt some degree of
telepathic interaction between the minds of the medium and
her sitters may often occur. However, some of the cases we have
examined (and very many similar cases) would seem to render
174 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

direct medium-sitter telepathy deeply improbable, quite apart

from the swiftness and accuracy of the information produced,
which far exceeds anything known in cases of telepathy between
living minds. With mediums like Geraldine Cummins and her
ostensible communicator Mrs Coombe-Tennant, we would need
to postulate telepathy between spatially and socially remote
living minds, combined with the use of clairvoyant powers to an
extent for which there is little or no evidence outside the sphere
of mental mediumship. And to this 'super-ESP' we should need
to add a capacity on the part of the medium to impersonate
dramatically and convincingly - and still of course quite
unconsciously - the qualities of character, styles of locution,
and general demeanour of someone she has never met and of
whom she has no normal knowledge.
My tentative conclusion is that at their best the phenomena of
mental mediumship, despite their many and often startling
deficiencies, do furnish on the whole by far the most persuasive
single type of evidence in favour of personal survival of bodily
death. This is primarily because of the sheer quantity of the
evidence and the high quality of so much of it. Additionally, the
way in which this evidence is collected must give it a degree of
strength rather greater than most of the other types of evidence
we have considered. Unlike a near-death experience or an
apparitional episode, a mediumistic sitting is quite prolonged
and its activities can be extended throughout a series of sittings;
any results gained can be and sometimes are repeated, with
different mediums and other sitters, whereas NDEs and
apparitions are usually once-only occurrences; unlike these, a
mediumistic sitting is an intrinsically public event; it is witnessed
by observers who are undoubtedly in complete possession of
their normal faculties; and its contents can be recorded on the
spot by ordinary methods of objective reporting. For some critics
these advantages are partly offset by the presence of a deeply
interested party, the medium, who often has a professional
(though not necessarily even a small financial) interest in
producing good results. However, many strongly suggestive
results have been obtained in the absence of anyone habitually
practising as a medium; the practising mediums we have
considered include a number who have been at most experi-
enced 'amateurs' (e.g. Mrs Verrall, Mrs Willet); and the
 The Evidence from Psychical Research 175

credentials of those mediums who have been mildly 'profes-

sional' (e.g. Mrs Piper, Mrs Leonard) have naturally been
subjected to careful scrutiny by the independent researchers
who have set out to investigate their powers. Some suspicion is
in order. But in the circumstances intense and rigid suspicion
would be paranoiac.
Among other common criticisms of mediumship is the alleged
'banality7 of the communications. This can hardly be asserted
about, for example, the messages received via Mrs Garrett about
the fate of the R101 or the scholarly communications from Myers
and his colleagues. But even with regard to the ostensible
communications from Professor Hyslop's father or the wife of
the Reverend David Kennedy, the accusation seems inept. To
qualify as evidence, the contents of communications have to be
highly specific, and for most people this means narrowly
personal. Anyway to provide good evidence of survival is surely
always an undertaking of a high order of human and intellectual
importance in general. And to try to convince those one has left
behind that death is no barrier to love and concern is an equally
admirable undertaking.
There remain many questions to be answered. For example,
why are so many communications so tantalizingly oblique and
allusive - with references to Palm Maidens, Berenice, periwin-
kles, and so forth - instead of offering downright statements of
plain fact and definite professions of clear identity? And why,
out of the countless millions of recently deceased human beings,
do successful endeavours to communicate seem to be confined to
so comparatively few? Nevertheless, after all these real difficul-
ties are taken fully into account, we are left, I suggest, with a
body of hard evidence which is impressive and cannot be
dismissed. My final conclusion on the phenomena of mental
mediumship, when taken as a distinct class of experiences, must
be that considered separately and on their own they supply us with
quite enough good evidence to render the belief in a life after
death on balance somewhat more probable than not. Naturally
we have then to deduct the quite high degree of antecedent
improbability which attaches to the belief in discarnate post-
mortem existence in general. But even after having made this
deduction, we are still left, I think, with a body of facts which,
although by no means coercive, at least make the belief in some
176 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

kind of personal survival of bodily death a substantially open

possibility which rational beings can now legitimately adopt.

We must now examine, very briefly, the kind of evidence for

survival which is supplied by cases of ostensible reincarnation.
Belief in reincarnation, which is very widespread, usually figures
as an element in a general religious creed, notably Hinduism and
Buddhism. Some writers have claimed to find traces of the belief
among the Jews, in the Gospels, and in the teachings of certain of
the early Fathers of the Church, conspicuously Origen. Although
in ancient times associated with a number of philosophers,
religious teachers, and their schools, from the Pythagoreans to
the Neo-Platonists, the belief in reincarnation has on the whole
not found favour among modern Western thinkers, with a few
notable exceptions, for example the distinguished twentieth-
century metaphysician McTaggart. There are many forms of the
doctrine. In most of them it is possible for a human being after
death to be 'reborn' as a nonhuman animal, and vice versa, and
in some it is held to be possible for a creature who has lived on
earth to be reincarnated in some non-terrestrial sphere. Nearly
every form of the doctrine is connected with belief in a process of
cosmic justice, whereby our good or evil fortunes in our present
life are supposed to reflect, by a purely natural sequence of cause
and effect, all the good or evil dispositions in our character which
have accumulated from the sum of desires and actions we have
displayed throughout our previous lives, particularly the most
recent. There can be backsliding, but there can also be progress.
However, our progress is bound to be gradual. There can be no
sudden and cataclysmic changes in anyone's destiny or suspen-
sion of the laws which necessarily control it.
Although in some versions of the doctrine the intervals
between one life and the next are thought to be of great duration,
possibly to be measured in centuries, in most versions the
interval is thought of as quite short, perhaps even only a few
days or weeks. The important logical point is that some interval
there must be. The transition from one life to another, from one
defunct body to the physical beginnings of the next body, may be
very rapid but it cannot be literally instantaneous. And during
 The Evidence from Psychical Research 177

this interval the soul (or whatever it is which 'reincarnates') must

continue to exist in complete separation from its ordinary
biological body. In this sense, therefore, survival of death into
some other sphere, albeit temporarily, is a logically necessary
condition of reincarnation. We might survive into a new life
either wholly disembodied or in some surrogate, non-biological
'body7, without ever subsequently reincarnating. But we could
not possibly reincarnate here on earth or elsewhere without
having first survived physical death and entered into some non-
physical state of being, however temporarily.
Here we shall not concern ourselves with such grounds for the
belief in reincarnation as may be drawn from the traditional
teachings or sacred texts associated with any system of religion.
Grounds which are themselves based on tradition or revelation
can at most yield a degree of cognitive probability which is no
higher than that enjoyed by the tradition or revelation in
question, and may be very much lower. We shall instead focus
primarily on certain types of claimed empirical fact which are
considered to offer direct support for the reincarnation hypoth-
esis viewed as an objective account of what happens to people
after they die.
Some types of fact we can, I suggest, quickly exclude as largely
irrelevant. There are as yet no very satisfactory explanations of
the 'deja vu' experience, which most people at some time have
had, but it can scarcely count as evidence that the situation which
now strikes us as so intensely familiar, although we know that
we have never in fact been in this situation before, is therefore
one which we probably encountered in a former life. If I find
myself on the threshold of a strange house which nevertheless
impresses me as being wonderfully familiar in all its details, this
impression that 'I have been here before' is evidentially pretty
worthless unless I am able to supplement it with further
unprompted information which I can inexplicably provide about
the as yet unexplored interior of the house and which turns out
to be in the main surprisingly correct. To the best of my
knowledge there is no good evidence that this kind of thing ever
happens.
A similar judgment must be made when a flow of connected
images of 'medieval France', 'ancient Egypt', or some other past
location occurs in someone's mind and is taken by him to be
178 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

actual memories of incidents in a previous existence. This may

happen when he is awake or when he is asleep and dreaming,
and he may be deeply impressed by the vividness and realism of
these image-sequences, by the fact that they are involuntary and
beyond his conscious control, by the haunting familiarity of the
scenes which they depict, and perhaps by the fact that the same
panorama of situations and events recurs again and again. There
is no reason why these image-sequences should not be attributed
entirely to the individual's exceptional powers of fancy or his
tendency to have obsessively fascinating dreams, unless they
yield verifiable historical and geographical information which it
is extremely unlikely he could have acquired by perfectly normal
means in the course of his present life. Only in a very few cases,
such as the 'memories' professed by some of Dr Arthur
Guirdham's patients and friends of their past lives as Cathars
in thirteenth-century France, is there any show of even
attempting to satisfy this obvious requirement.
Another type of evidence often cited on behalf of the
reincarnation hypothesis is the occurrence of infant prodigies.
It is claimed that the astonishing skill evinced by some very
young children in such fields as mathematics, musical composi-
tion, and the learning of foreign languages indicates that their
great knowledge of these fields must have been acquired in a
previous existence. But this takes no account of the fact that the
advanced skills which they display are always exercised within
subjects which involve only the manipulation of symbols, and
never within subjects which demand the acquisition of definite
knowledge of hard matters of fact. The slave boy in Plato's Meno
was asked about a theorem in pure geometry, not about the
events of the Trojan War. The sensationally adroit manipulation
of symbols may well be attributable to extraordinary native
aptitude. But there are no four-year-olds who show high
expertise in subjects like history, chemistry, or medicine.
The types of reincarnation evidence which have gained more
serious attention in recent times are, first, the 'far life memories'
induced by hypnotic regression and, secondly, the spontaneous
recall by young children of details of their ostensible former
lives. Under hypnosis many individuals seemingly relive
incidents which they could only have experienced at some time
anterior to their actual birth. They often provide their own
 The Evidence from Psychical Research 179

former names and those of their relatives and close associates in,
say, early Victorian England, dates and specific place names, and
they make reference to bygone happenings of obscure local
significance, to items of furniture and other utensils in the home
or at work, and to habits of eating, drinking, dress, and conduct
typical of the period to which their ostensible memories relate.
The hypnotized subjecf s voice may change, and he or she may
use little-known locutions expressed with appropriate accents
and in a dialect completely alien to their normal speech habits
but strongly reminiscent of those which prevailed in another
place at an earlier time. The subject seems throughout to identify
completely with the archaic personality which is now expressing
itself to the onlookers.57
When the objective factual statements vouchsafed under
hypnosis are subsequently investigated, many of them turn out
to be unverifiable for a number of obvious reasons, for instance a
total lack of documentary or other historical and biographical
evidence. But when they are capable of being verified, they are
not infrequently discovered to be true in almost every particular.
Does it follow that they emanate from memories of a former life
which have been reawakened by the effects of hypnosis?
In one sense, of course, they are no more than connected
image-sequences. As such, they could be fantasies elicited by the
request of the hypnotist to revert to the experiences of a former
life. This alone, however, would not account for the detailed
knowledge shown of the conditions under which a deceased
personality once lived, which are often far beyond any knowl-
edge possessed by the hypnotist. Yet it is very difficult to
establish that this knowledge could not have been acquired by
the subject by normal means, unconsciously or semi-consciously,
perhaps while listening without specifically attending to a
programme on the car wireless, flicking over the pages of a
magazine at the hairdresser's, overhearing snatches of a
conversation in a restaurant or bar, or in some other way which
has now been forgotten. Although cryptomnesia on this scale is
always a highly improbable explanation, it is antecedently much
less improbable than the recollection of fragments of a past life.
In a few instances, re-hypnotization of the original subject does
seem to have elicited definite recall of the occasion on which the
subliminal reading of a text, say, has furnished him with the
180 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

astonishing knowledge of past events or archaic locutions which

he then proceeded to regurgitate when first subjected to hypnotic
regression.58 However, in other cases re-hypnotization has
totally failed to elicit any normal source of the knowledge
originally displayed. It is, of course, in theory possible that the
knowledge shown has been acquired by the exercise of retro-
cognitive ESP during the hypnotic trance (although this would
not explain the intense identification of the hypnotized subject
with the deceased individual whose personality he is expres-
sing). And it is also theoretically possible that while in a hypnotic
trance the hypnotized subject is in effect functioning as a kind of
medium who is temporarily 'possessed' by a long dead
personality successfully communicating through him.
The second type of serious evidence to which I must refer
consists in spontaneous utterances by very young children
(usually between two and four years old) who, as soon as they
become capable of conversational speech, begin to claim that
they really belong to a different family and have a different
identity. They will give the name of this previous family, the
proper names of its members, and the name of the deceased
person (a former adult) with whom they are asserting continuity.
They will describe their alleged former home and its location,
and will relate special incidents of their life there and then-
former tastes and habits, for example their previous style of dress
and eating preferences. They retain these unsolicited 'memories',
sometimes despite attempts of their parents to suppress them,
until they are about seven or eight years of age, and occasionally
older. Gradually, however, they tend to disappear.
Many cases of this type have been investigated by Dr Ian
Stevenson, who became Carlson Professor of Psychiatry at the
University of Virginia Medical School. By extensive travel in the
United States, Canada, Alaska, Europe, Turkey, the Lebanon,
India, Sri Lanka and elsewhere he and his collaborators have
collected thousands of such cases since 1960, and he has
published several score of the most impressive of them in
monographs, scholarly articles, and a series of volumes begin-
ning with Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation in 1966.59 His
rigorous research methods, his careful checking and re-checking
of the statements made by everyone involved, his critical attitude
to the data he has gathered, his readiness to consider possible
 The Evidence from Psychical Research 181

objections, and his painstaking analyses of each case, have all

earned much respect from his academic peers, who may have
little or no belief in reincarnation but have considerable
admiration for the quality of his attempts to make this whole
question a genuine subject of objective scientific inquiry.
Stevenson himself believes that the evidence he has assembled
falls far short of proof, but hopes that further research may turn
out to strengthen reincarnation as a working hypothesis.
Many of the 'previous personalities' claimed by Stevenson's
subjects had met violent or other early deaths. The manner of
their deaths was sometimes reflected in obsessive anxieties later
manifested by the young child, and occasionally in birthmarks
found to correspond closely with the injuries which had caused
the death of the previous personality. In a few instances the
child's mother, when expectant, had had an 'announcing dream',
in which she received information about the identity of her
future child. It is true that the majority of Stevenson's cases are
drawn from areas of the world where the dominant culture
favours belief in reincarnation. However, there are numerous
possible explanations of this, which he discusses. He naturally
also discusses the possibility of fraud on the part of the children's
contemporary family, and for a variety of convincing reasons
concludes that in particular cases it has been most improbable
and that as a general theory explaining his body of cases as a
whole it must be deemed very improbable indeed. The new child
is likely to have been born within a few miles of the deceased
personality's home, but there are many exceptions to this and in
some cases the distance extends to hundreds of miles. In a
country like India, where communications may be difficult, such
difficulties are often significant.
Approximately ninety per cent of the 'memories' produced by
Stevenson's child-subjects turn out to be factually correct. When
taken to revisit their former home, they often point out changes
in the house and its vicinity which have been made since they
last lived there. A girl of eight may spontaneously pick out
various former relatives, neighbours, friends, and servants, even
when attempts are made to mislead her, and correctly identify
the relationship between these individuals and the deceased
personality whom she is claiming to be. Often she resumes with
evident naturalness the attitudes towards a previous husband,
182 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

brothers and sisters, and her former children (now young grown-
ups) which the deceased personality characteristically had
dining her earlier lifetime, despite being herself actually a young
child at the time of this 'reunion'. Frequently these members of
her previous family accept this as completely appropriate and
accept her as their reincarnated wife, sister, or mother. Some-
times she displays skills, for example of conjoined dances and
songs in Bengali (although now she speaks only Hindi) which
she ostensibly learned during her previous incarnation.
Throughout she behaves, and seems to think and feel, as if her
identity with the deceased personality is virtually complete.
Now if we exclude fraud, misreporting and coincidence as
general explanations, the only naturalistic explanation with
which we are left is cryptomnesia, which can scarcely begin to
account for a young child's detailed knowledge of obscure
episodes which happened years ago in another family in another
town, with whose members he or she is not acquainted and
concerning whom he or she has had no opportunity of acquiring
any information. We therefore have to consider paranormal
explanations. The knowledge and skill displayed might in theory
have been acquired by ESP, either retrocognitively from the past
behaviour and characteristics of the deceased individual or by
recent or current telepathy from the memories retained by that
individual's surviving relatives and friends. But once again I
have to point out that there is no independent evidence for the
occurrence of ESP of this level on such a scale with regard to
propositional knowledge, nor with regard to the acquisition of
skills of any level on any scale. The 'super-ESP' hypothesis must
be judged a non-starter.
We cannot entirely rule out the possibility that the young child
might be functioning as a kind of medium, through whom a
discarnate spirit is communicating over a period of years.
However, a medium (who anyway is nearly always an adult of
mature age) typically serves as a vehicle of communication for a
large variety of discarnate spirits and when in her ordinary state
of mind does not profess to be literally one and the same person
as any of them. There is also the possibility that the young child
is 'possessed' or 'obsessed' by the deceased individual whose
personality purports to be expressing itself through him, and that
after a considerable period of time the child's natural personality
 The Evidence from Psychical Research 183

regains complete ascendancy over his own proper body and

mind. These two hypothetical states of 'possession' and 'obses-
sion' are carefully differentiated by Alan Gauld,60 and there
seems to be a small amount of quite good evidence that they do
from time to time occur in other contexts.
What, then, are we to make of this putative evidence for
reincarnation as a theory of survival? The facts will not just go
away. We have to make the best sense of them that we can. Of
course there are a number of very general questions which need
to be answered. Does everyone reincarnate? If not, why not? If
so, how many times? Does the process ever come to an end? To
these questions all I feel moved to say is that such hard evidence
as is available at most shows that some individuals may have
reincarnated, leaving us in total ignorance about everyone else;
as to why all these others have perhaps not reincarnated we can
only conjecture that in an extremely complex universe there may
be different laws governing the destinies of different individuals
according to their different historical, physical, and psychologi-
cal conditions (for example, their deepest wishes, fears,
strengths, and inadequacies, and their present levels of evolve-
ment); these may also affect the frequency of any reincarnations
they undergo; and they may eventually bring the whole process
to an end, either in final extinction or in some permanently non-
physical state, possibly in some kind of union with other selves
or with some religious or metaphysical Absolute. But admittedly
these are, and can be, no more than conjectures.
Some critics assume that the huge growth in the human
population creates an intractable problem for the theory of
reincarnation. However, this assumption ignores both the
possibility that the souls of higher animals may reincarnate as
human infants and the claim that individuals may reincarnate
not here on earth but in some other, non-terrestrial sphere.
Then there are questions about the dynamics whereby the
mind of a deceased individual can in some way get transferred to
another organism which is about to be born with a completely
new and genetically unconnected brain and nervous system.
Reincarnationist theories abound with metaphors like 'attune-
menf, 'resonance', 'harmony', and so on, which are not very
helpful or illuminating. And of course questions about the
dynamics of transition enshrine more basic questions about what
184 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

it is that is supposed to move from one locus of biological

existence to another, without the use of any genetic bridge to
span the gap. This can hardly be just a collection of memories
and dispositions subsisting on their own, unless there is some
integument to prevent them from bursting asunder and floating
apart, for otherwise they would have no coherence as a distinct
and empirically recognizable 'collection'. It would seem that
some sort of nuclear ego or transempirical self needs to be
postulated, although religious believers in reincarnation have
traditionally opposed such a concept. But by this stage I am
touching on issues which have already been discussed in earlier
chapters of this book. Here I can only say that unless some form
of interactionist dualism, whether Cartesian or non-Cartesian, is
presupposed as a model for understanding the relation between
incarnate minds and their living bodies, the entire notion of the
'reincarnation' of a deceased individual would seem to risk
collapse into meaninglessness.
My final conclusion is that, while the theory of reincarnation is
of course subject to the numerous philosophical and scientific
objections which must affect every idea of survival of physical
death, most of these objections do not apply to the theory of
reincarnation with significantly greater force than to more
straightforward theories of completely discarnate personal
survival. (A possible exception concerns problems of personal
identity, which are perhaps more acute when a deceased
individual is supposed to be identifiable with some presently
living individual, with no clear line of continuity between the
two.) However, to prefer the theory of reincarnation over other
theories of discarnate survival on the sole ground that physical
existence is more intelligible than non-physical existence would
be confused, as I have already argued,6 since the concept of
transition from one form of physical existence to another entails
the concept of some intervening state of non-physical existence.
There is not necessarily any incompatibility between the idea of
reincarnation and the idea of a discarnate life after death. Indeed
the very opposite is the case. The reminiscences of past lives
elicited under hypnosis and the 'memories' of a recent life
spontaneously forthcoming from Stevenson's child-subjects
could theoretically emanate from 'spirits' who now exist in
some set of intermediate, purely psychical conditions. The only
 The Evidence from Psychical Research 185

incompatibility is between reincarnation and a permanently non-

physical post-mortem state which ensues immediately after
death.

We have now, I think, subjected the main types of empirical

evidence supporting the belief in a life after death to critical
examination. There are other types of empirical evidence which I
have chosen to ignore - for example, the phenomena of physical
mediumship, poltergeist occurrences, cases of apparent 'spirit
possession', accounts by mystics and occultists like Swedenborg
or Whiteman of their 'astral travels', and the much disputed
'electronic voice phenomenon' - chiefly because the facts in these
controversial areas are so difficult to establish and therefore even
tentative inferences based upon such ostensible facts are bound
to be so highly problematic. But there is little doubt about the
central facts bearing upon the experiences of the dying,
apparitions, mental mediumship, and claimed instances of
reincarnation. What do these undoubted facts seem to show?
I suggest, to begin with, that they show complete agnosticism
to be completely out of place. Like Kant, we may be agnostics
about the immortality, or even about the existence, of a
transcendental ego or self. But the facts we have been examining
do not purport to favour claims for absolute immortality, but
only to favour claims for some kind and degree of survival of
physical death; and they may be taken at most to show that
survival has been accomplished by certain individuals who have
empirically recognizable personalities, and whose identity is not
necessarily rooted in any sort of transcendental ego (although,
pace Kant, this last possibility is not ruled out). The agnosticism
of Mill, I have suggested, was based simply on his pardonable
ignorance of the relevant facts. The radical agnosticism of the
early Wittgenstein or A. J. Ayer was based on special views about
the scope and limits of language, about what could be expressed
in meaningful propositions, and hence about what kinds of belief
we logically can and cannot hold. We cannot hold substantive
beliefs about entities which lie beyond all possible sense-
experience, since there is no way in which the existence of such
'entities' could ever become available for empirical investigation.
The existence or non-existence of discarnate spirits is therefore
186 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

not, strictly speaking, 'an unanswerable question'. For it is not a

meaningful question at all.
My only comments on this attempt to reduce all substantive
questions to empirical questions in principle answerable by
natural science are: first, that it is itself based on a notoriously
disputable theory about the nature and limits of meaningful
discourse; secondly, that by excluding all questions about
discarnate spirits from the scientific agenda, it is dogmatically
restricting the scope of scientific investigation; and thirdly, that
anyway the facts about the experiences of the dying, apparitions,
mediumship, and reincarnation cases are clearly empirical facts,
which do stand in need of some kind of scientific interpretation
and evaluation.
So what in the end do these facts prove? William James once
expressed the belief that one white crow would suffice to refute
the generalization that all crows are black. Unfortunately, the
attempt to prove that a single white crowlike bird is in fact a
'crow7 is liable to encounter the same kinds of difficulty as do the
attempts to prove the existence of white crows in general. Of
even the best-attested apparitional case or mediumistic commu-
nication it is always possible to ask: 'Can this really count as the
self-manifestation of a deceased person, or as a genuine
communication from someone now dead?' There have been
numerous attempts to construct a 'cast-iron' proof of survival, for
instance by individuals leaving behind sealed packages, the
contents of which they would try to communicate after then-
deaths; sometimes these have been encoded, lodging the cipher
key with a reputable organization like the SPR. These attempts
have nearly always dismally failed. But on the very few
occasions when mediums have seemingly given accurate
descriptions of these concealed private messages, the success or
failure of their endeavours has invariably been enveloped in
apparently intractable (and not unreasonable) controversy. It
looks as if, in the nature of the case, there cannot ever be one
indisputably white crow.
Osis and Haraldsson, denying the possibility of a single, crucial,
all-exclusive test of survival, comment that survival research
resembles in this respect the multi-dimensional problems of
research in the field of personality theory. There is and can be no
single, crucial experiment which could 'prove' one of the rival
 The Evidence from Psychical Research 187

theories of Skinner, Freud or Rogers. In what, then, can proof

(or disproof) of survival consist? Let us briefly explore the
concept of 'proof.
To prove any proposition is to show that it is a proposition
which any rational being ought to believe and one from which it
would be irrational to dissent. Obviously how this is achieved
will depend on the kind of proposition we are considering. A
biochemist does not require the certainty of geometrical proof, a
medical scientist cannot expect the degree of certainty to be had
in pure chemistry, and a judge in a criminal case must not
demand the kind of certainty which is only to be had in questions
of physical science. The judge can only demand that the guilt of
the accused be demonstrated 'beyond reasonable doubt'. In
human questions this is the most we can expect, or reasonably
require. It is the most we can reasonably require in the domains
of anthropology, psychology, history, sociology, or economics. In
these domains we rightly feel constrained to accept certain
beliefs which have been shown to be true beyond reasonable
doubt, and we rightly judge that anyone rejecting these beliefs is
reacting unreasonably. Adopting this standard, should we
conclude that the issue of survival has been brought within the
realms of proof and disproof?
The evidence against survival is huge in volume but all
essentially indirect in character, for example the massive body of
facts which purport to show that mental processes depend
unilaterally on the functioning of a physical brain. As evidence it
is necessarily indirect because, although we can easily investigate
defunct bodies, there can never be any instances of a 'defunct
mind' available for us to investigate. This kind of evidence has
been discussed in Chapter 3 of the present book, where we saw
that the empirical facts are far from pointing unequivocally to the
absolute dependence of minds on brains. The neuropsychologi-
cal facts admit of different interpretations, some of which are not
unfavourable to the possibility of survival. We cannot possibly
say that materialism in the domain of mentality has been proved,
in the sense of proof which I have outlined. Rejection of
materialism is not a sure sign of irrationality. But it has certainly
not been disproved. I think the most we can say is that any
theory which conflicts with materialism must be regarded as
having a fairly high degree of antecedent improbability.
188 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

However, to accept this is no more that to acknowledge that

the belief in mental survival of physical death may have a weak
starting-point, before the evidence favouring survival is consid-
ered. Some of this favourable evidence is indirect. The
independent evidence for ESP and PK, for instance, tends to
undermine mind-brain materialism and to show that minds can
sometimes stand out from the rest of the material universe and
operate in defiance of its purely physical laws. Of course, as we
have seen, the existence of ESP and PK - especially the
conjectural operation of 'super-ESP' - can also weaken evidence
otherwise supporting belief in communications from the dead.
Nevertheless there is no doubt that the occurrence of ESP is a fact
which on the whole tells in favour of survival, as the consistent
and sometimes desperate rejection of the evidence for ESP by
diehard materialists would seem to show.
When we look at the main direct evidence favouring survival,
chiefly reports of near-death experiences, apparitional episodes,
mediumistic communications, and ostensible reincarnation
cases, we find that this sizable body of evidence is very uneven
in quality. There is some outstandingly good evidence, and a
great deal of worthless evidence. But do the poor cases have the
effect of negating the value of the excellent cases? The answer, I
think, must be that they do not, for two reasons. In the first place,
a relatively small body of strong evidence for a theory is not in
the slightest tainted by an abundance of very weak evidence for
the same theory. The very weak evidence just does not count for
very much, while the strong evidence counts for every bit as
much as its intrinsic strength warrants. In the second place, the
strong evidence for survival consists of 'hits' on an apparently
invisible cognitive target, as when a medium supplies pet names,
descriptions of past incidents, mannerisms, preferences, and so
on, which are characteristic of the life and relationships of a
deceased person unknown to her. In many weaker cases the
medium completely misses the target. However, there is an
immense disproportion between the respective significance of
'misses' and 'hits' on an invisible target. The chances of a total
stranger being able to guess the very uncommon maiden names
of both my paternal grandmother and her mother are several
millions to one against. But a totally strange medium might be
able to supply me with these two items of information. In that
 The Evidence from Psychical Research 189

case her success would outweigh all the failures of thousands of

other mediums by more than a thousand times.
At the beginning of this chapter I cited Alan Gauld's comment
that in this area, and in important related areas, 'what we know
stands in proportion to what we do not know as a bucketful does
to the ocean'. It is indeed true that there are very many questions
concerning a possible life after death to which our answers must
be largely speculative - for instance, the natural and basic
question, 'What might an afterlife be like?' - since we do not
have anything like enough reliable empirical evidence from
which to construct more than tentative and highly fragile
empirical hypotheses. But although we presently lack the means
for seriously testing our hypothetical answers to these questions
against proven facts, this does not debar us from at least
constructing hypotheses which we can test against logic. We can
construct logically well-framed answers which may at least have
the merit of internal consistency. And, despite the 'ocean' of
ignorance or sheer conjecture which lies before us, we can
analyse the contents of the comparative 'bucketful' we have
acquired in an endeavour to see whether it contains the answer
to at least one question, and this surely the first and paramount
question. Do consciousness and individual personality in any
sense survive physical death?
An affirmative answer to this question, we have seen, must be
deemed initially to be quite highly improbable. But we have also
seen that this degree of initial improbability is somewhat
diminished when we take due account of the general arguments
for immortality to be found in the history of philosophy and
implicit in religious creeds. Now, when we come to examine the
evidence from psychical research, which is broadly although by
no means entirely favourable to survival, we naturally need to
scale down our estimate of the great value this evidence would
have if considered quite separately and by itself, in light of the
quite high antecedent improbability which still necessarily
attaches to it. However, this degree of antecedent improbability
cannot be held to continue unabated for ever. It is definitely
lessened by what we have discovered about near-death
experiences and the experiences of the dying, and gets still
further reduced when we take full cognizance of the facts about
apparitions, particularly apparitions of the dying, of the recently
190 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

dead, and of the long dead. The cumulative weight of the facts
supporting the survival hypothesis, even when their evidential
value has been appropriately scaled down, is bound progres-
sively to erode the basis on which we may seek to continue
scaling them down. By the time we are ready to weigh up the
numerous impressive phenomena of mental mediumship and
also the suggestive data associated with ostensible reincarnation
cases, we may well judge that there remains only a very limited
balance of antecedent improbability telling against them as
evidence of survival (albeit a sufficiently adverse balance to
induce us to make a much lower estimate of their evidential
value than we would otherwise have made). But after we have
weighed up mental mediumship and ostensible reincarnation
data in this manner, we should, I think, be prepared to find that
the balance of prepossession has tilted decisively. Certainly there
remains enough antecedent improbability attaching to the idea of
survival to justify us in viewing any fresh types of survival
evidence with a considerable degree of reserve. But we are now
in a position to assess the overall probability or improbability of a
life after death, in the light of the principal types of evidence
which we have already examined.
There is in my opinion a probable conclusion which we are
intellectually constrained to draw from all this evidence, after
having ultimately subtracted from its evidential value quite a
substantial element representing the antecedent improbability of
any kind of survival. This conclusion is that on the whole, but
quite clearly, the facts point in the direction of personal survival
of bodily death. If we draw this conclusion, there is still a fan-
possibility that we may be wrong. I cannot claim that the belief in
a life after death has been coercively shown to be true. We are
dealing with relative probabilities. The fairly common view of
physical death as a total and final destruction of the personality
is not 'disproved', in the sense of proof or disproof with which
we are operating. A rational judge, who well understands the
evidence, could nevertheless reject the inferences on which I
have based my conclusion, without in any way forfeiting his
claim to rationality. Yet I am fairly sure that he would in fact be
wrong. Survival of physical death has therefore not been
'proved'. But it has, I think, been shown to be overall distinctly
probable.
 6
The Concept of an Afterlife

We have seen that, when all the relevant conceptual issues have
been clarified and all the relevant empirical facts have been
gathered in and appropriately weighed, there exists a clear
balance of probability in favour of the belief that persons can in
some sense survive their physical death. Of course it may be
objected that survival has at most been established in respect of
those individuals whose cases have figured in the evidence.
However, if some individuals have survived death, it is entirely
reasonable to draw the conclusion that all other individuals who
sufficiently resemble them will also have survived death, in the
absence of any evidence to the contrary. And there is no
characteristic which is common to all those people whose
survival is well evidenced, and which distinguishes them from
the great mass of humanity, other than the fact that in these cases
their survival is well evidenced. They differ from one another in
sex, race, religious convictions or the lack of them, in their moral
and intellectual qualities and attainments, in the age at which
they died, and in the manner of their deaths. It is, I suppose,
abstractly possible that some people should continue to exist
after their deaths, while others do not. But there seems to be little
or no evidence to support any belief that this is what happens.
Given that some of us definitely do survive, it looks as if we all
survive.
Now we obviously need to know in what manner we might
survive death. For example, we might survive this trauma of
total body-loss grievously, perhaps irreparably, damaged in
most of our mental capacities, as some people surviving fires or
air crashes find that the injuries with which they have emerged

191
192 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

leave them with very serious physical disabilities. There seem to

be three main possibilities. What survives might have the status
of a functioning mind which is still largely intact. Or it might be
something which is very much less than a normally functioning
mind, something more wasted and fragmentary. Broad's
hypothesis of a surviving 'psi-factor7 or bare mental germ,
which may manifest somnambulistically in apparitional episodes
and when associated with the brain of a medium may
temporarily re-awaken with some memories and specious
transient interests, would be an example of this second shrunken
possibility.1 Or of course it could be, as Plato and traditional
Christians have believed, that many surviving souls, at last
liberated from bodily and other mundane restrictions, emerge
with greatly heightened intellectual powers and moral sensi-
bilities, as 'angelic' beings fitted to accomplish a new and higher
destiny.
Here we are very much in the sphere of speculation. Any
conclusion at which we arrive is bound to be significantly less
probable than our original conclusion that something of us
survives death. This is because propositions with richer content,
which make more extensive claims, necessarily have a lower
measure of probability than propositions with lesser content,
which accordingly make fewer claims. But it does not follow that
the hypothesis of a meagre 'psi-factor' is therefore the most
probable. Slenderness of propositional content is not the same as
slightness of the objects asserted by the proposition. Tiny
elephants are not more probable than large elephants. We need
to be guided by what we already know to be certainly true about
those things concerning whose nature and activities in different
and unknown circumstances we are engaging in speculation. I
therefore suggest that the safest course is to assume that minds
which function in a certain way when embodied will probably
continue to function in a broadly similar way when they are
disembodied, naturally making due allowance for the huge
consequences which must be inseparable from the fact of
disembodiment itself. Although we are admittedly engaged in
conjecture, we ought to proceed on that assumption which is the
least conjectural.
The typical human mind with which we are already
acquainted has the following general characteristics. First of all,
 The Concept of an Afterlife 193

it is primarily related to its surrounding physical and social

world by means of the five bodily senses - vision, hearing, touch,
taste, and smell. When no longer embodied, such a mind must
necessarily be unable to have sense-experiences properly so
called. It will have no physical sense-organs and can be affected
by none of the physiological changes which tend to accompany
our sensations and perceptions when in the flesh. However,
these facts do not altogether exclude the possibility that a
discarnate mind might come to be aware of events occurring here
on earth by non-sensory means. We have strong independent
grounds for believing that embodied persons can occasionally
display a capacity for clairvoyance in circumstances which
permit us to verify the information which they thereby acquire,
and for believing that the exercise of this capacity does not in the
slightest depend on the operations of their physical brains or
nervous systems. 2 We may reasonably assume that this capacity
will not be diminished when we are finally without any kind of
brain or nervous system at all; and indeed it is fair to conjecture
that the complete absence of these organs (which on the
Bergsonian model of mind and brain serve chiefly to edit,
abridge, and in general limit the data available to the mind)
might well have the result of freeing and therefore enhancing our
intrinsic clairvoyant powers. 3 Phenomenologically, the fruits of
clairvoyance for a discarnate mind would be a transitory and
perhaps discontinuous series of images which it could recognize
as resembling possible earthly scenes. Ontologically, they would
of course have the status of hallucinations which the mind was
undergoing, not sense-experiences which it was enjoying.
Epistemologically, when they in fact correctly represented the
earthly scenes which the discarnate subject was envisaging, they
would then have the status of veridical hallucinations. Telepathic
interaction between the minds of discarnate persons and the
minds of persons still alive on earth could provide a further
input into the veridical post-mortem hallucinations of the
former. The seeming awareness of their immediate environment
exhibited by many apparitional figures offers some degree of
evidence for the belief that the dead can possess a measure of
extra-sensory knowledge of current situations in the physical
world, and this belief is considerably strengthened by the
continued interest in living friends and relatives often displayed
194 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

by the spirits who purportedly communicate through mediums.

From the point of view of the spirits themselves, of course, the
only means by which they could possibly test their putatively
veridical hallucinations in order to confirm that they actually
conveyed truth would be by checking the extent to which they all
hung together and supported one another. But we should note
that this test of overall coherence is certainly one of the main tests
of truth, though by no means the only one, which is available to
living human beings in many of the situations by which we, too,
are confronted every day and which call for a reasonable
judgment on our part.
In the second place, every human mind of which we have
knowledge is prone to emotions, feelings, and moods. Our
awareness of outward events and of our own inner states is
nearly always coloured by our likes and dislikes, by our desires,
hopes, and fears, and by more diffuse attitudes of generalized
boredom, anxiety, or contentment, which give a distinctive
tonality to the various situations by which we are confronted in
sense-experience. We should expect a discarnate mind to be
similarly affected. Naturally its states of elation or depression
cannot be associated with the increase in heart-beat or sinkings of
the stomach which frequently accompany our intense emotions
when embodied. But I can see no reason why discarnate
emotions and moods should not be accompanied by imagined
organic sensations of the kinds with which we are familiar in
everyday life. After all in this life our hearts may seem to race,
our faces may seem to sweat with terror or light up with
pleasure, and our steps may seem to be sluggish or quick with
anticipation, although all the time we are in fact asleep and in a
dream state.
Thirdly, every normal human mind can draw on a sizable fund
of memories. We do not need to accept in its entirety the
Bergsonian theory that every single experience we have lived
through would be available to us in memory were it not that the
physical brain, as an instrument of biological utility, tends to
inhibit most of our memories by suppressing them below the
surface of consciousness, allowing only those which are of
practical relevance at any given time to filter through to our
conscious minds. But we might well conjecture that the resources
of a surviving discarnate mind would be at least greatly enriched
 The Concept of an Afterlife 195

by the surmisably large stock of memories of its former life (or

lives) on earth now released and made more accessible to it by
the event of physical death. A disembodied spirit could spend
much of its time in reliving its ante-mortem biography, mulling
over salient episodes, and reviewing former relationships with
emotions of joy or remorse. If such a spirit were for one reason or
another to be deprived of current external stimuli, clairvoyant or
telepathic, and to be feeding on its memories alone, it might
easily confuse its memory-images with perceptions of real events
which it was actually experiencing at the time of their
occurrence. This could fill the spirit with largely specious
feelings of satisfaction or dismay.
Fourthly, we know that the memories of normal human minds
get interspersed with ingredients which are purely imaginary.
We should expect this also to happen with discarnate minds. It
would be surprising if their threads of memory were not often
rewoven to form new tapestries which were largely imaginary.
Moreover, in addition to the contributions made by the
discarnate mind's own powers of memory and imagination,
the mental panoramas by which it found itself confronted could
partly be built up from memories, images, and feelings which
actually emanated from the minds of other discarnate spirits
(and possibly from the minds of people still in the flesh) by
processes of telepathic interaction. And we can readily suppose
that in many cases a surviving discarnate mind which was
envisaging and seemed to be actively participating in some
vividly experienced post-mortem scene would be completely
unaware that it was made up of elements coming from such a
variety of different sources. The entire ensemble would in fact be
created from the materials of his memory and imagination,
shaped by his feelings, perhaps reinforced by some clairvoyance
and permeated by a great number of images acquired tele-
pathically, but the experiencing mind could easily be under the
impression that it was literally perceiving a set of events which
were occurring in an objective physical environment. It might fail
to notice, or might attach little importance to, those anomalies,
discontinuities, and ambiguities which characterize a totally
subjective flow of experience, just as when we are alive but
asleep we generally fail to pay these indications much heed
during our dreams. Many people who had survived death might
196 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

even for a time be wholly unaware that they were in fact

physically dead.
However, a fifth general characteristic of human minds is their
capacity to form rational judgments. We have critical faculties,
which we do not uniformly use, but over varying periods of time
they might suggest to a discarnate mind that its experiences were
not absolutely as they seemed. We should expect that stronger
intelligences would quickly learn to discriminate, interpret, and
evaluate, and to make rational inferences from their unusual
course of experiences which would lead them to make a sounder
assessment of what was actually happening to them. Then-
experienced environment might then become more stable and
they might begin to take more conscious charge of it.
A sixth general characteristic of human minds is their ability to
deny and reject what lies before them. This is closely connected
with our powers of imagination. In seeing what is 'there' we can
visualize what is 'not-there'. Thus a discarnate mind, engaged in
contemplating or taking part in some remembered or hallucina-
tory scene, will almost certainly become aware of features which
are as yet missing from the scene as presented to its conscious-
ness. It will sense that such-and-such a person, or such-and-such
an object, is conspicuously absent and therefore that the
presented situation is so far incomplete. Now to realize that
the scene in which one is involved lacks something which one
expects or desires is to be motivated to try to repair this omission.
Motives and intentions arise when we perceive that by our
efforts we might bring about changes in our situation which
would appear to make it on the whole more tolerable, more
interesting, or more positively agreeable, for ourselves or others.
In this way we can suppose that a discarnate mind might come to
entertain definite purposes and to frame definite intentions.
Naturally these intentions could only be carried out by purely
mental operations, for example by focusing and concentrating
more intensely on some desired outcome, by thrusting back into
our unconscious all those aspects of our situation which seem to
conflict with what we want, by relaxing and trying to abate our
fears and doubts, and by earnestly fostering in ourselves the
belief that our intentions will be successful. And naturally most
of the time we would probably be unaware that this was really
what we were doing. We might seem to be making strenuous
 The Concept of an Afterlife 197

physical efforts directed towards producing a visible and

palpable result, just as in a dream we can seem to be hurrying
anxiously along a railway platform to catch a train which is on
the brink of departing.
Seventhly, in conceiving of any mind whatsoever we are
conceiving of an essentially self-contained unity whose inner life
is utterly private. Our mental states are introspectible only by
ourselves and are never directly accessible to inspection by
others, whether we or they are embodied or discarnate. I have
tried to explain earlier4 how telepathic interaction can never-
theless take place. When Smith is thinking, say, of the Tower of
London, and Robinson becomes aware of this fact by telepathy,
what Robinson is aware of is not Smith's private act of thinking
itself but rather the intentional object of Smith's thinking, in this
case the Tower of London, which is an intrinsically public object.
Encrusted around this intentional object there will be a whole set
of other intentional objects (things perceived, remembered, or
imagined by Smith, and Smith's body or, if he is dead, his former
body) which provide the Tower of London as-thought-of-by-
Smith with a highly distinctive if not unique context; and it is this
particular intentional object, as apprehended in this particular
context, which can signify to Robinson that it is Smith's thinking-
about-the-Tower-of-London with which he is making telepathic
contact. Given such an analysis, we may loosely speak of two
discarnate minds 'sharing' each other's thoughts, memories,
feelings, and images.
The eighth and last feature of normal minds to which I shall
draw attention is their intrinsic 'intentionality7. Each of our
mental states has to be about something, that is, at some level it
must ultimately refer to some object external to itself, of which it
is conscious. I cannot just think, hope, or imagine in a total
vacuum. Each of my thoughts, hopes, and acts of imagination
must be directed to something with which my thinking, hoping,
and imagining are essentially concerned and which gives them
their distinctive content. Minds cannot just focus on other minds,
which then address themselves to yet other minds, which are still
occupied with further minds again, in a self-perpetuating and
unsupported circle. At some point, and probably at every point,
there has to be some contact with a reality which is extra-mental.
In the case of embodied minds this is commonly the physical
198 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

world. But the intentional objects of discarnate minds can equally

be physical objects and processes. Even leaving aside then-
potentialities of clairvoyance, we can see that the memories with
which discarnate minds are stocked will predominantly be of
scenes and events remembered from their previous physical life
on earth. This alone, then, will furnish the necessary link
between the discarnate mind and things extra-mental. From
these materials supplied by memory a discarnate mind can
proceed to weave the mainly imaginary panoramas, the
dreamscapes, within which it will henceforth dwell. Thus if we
try to construct a general metaphysical picture of the now past
and immediate future destiny of a surviving human mind, we
may surmise that the role of its earthly experiences when
incarnate is to provide it with the basic ingredients which will
prove to be initially necessary when it enters into the next, post-
mortem phase of its individual existence.
I ought finally to re-emphasize that the exercise on which I
have so far been engaged in this chapter - an attempt to delineate
the condition of our minds if or when we survive bodily death -
has been almost entirely speculative, and has been based much
less on direct empirical evidence than on what I believe to be
rational possibilities, without claiming for these any more than
that they are far from being actually improbable. Nevertheless I
can surely say that some account of our future condition will turn
out to be true, and the account I have offered seems to me in the
end to have the best chance (whether high or low) of proving to be
broadly true.

John Hick has recently reminded us of one puzzling feature of

the most impressive 'spirit communications' which have been
received through mediums. This is that the spirits say very little
about their own world and their own lives in if. 5 One obvious
possibility is that the evidential information which makes these
communications impressive actually has its source in the living
mind of the sitter, whose presence at the sitting is of course
limited to the duration of the sitting - or perhaps in the minds of
other living persons connected with the sitter; and that this
information, having been unconsciously acquired by super-ESP
on the part of the medium, then gets unconsciously worked up to
 The Concept of an Afterlife 199

produce a convincing temporary impersonation of a deceased

person unknown to her. However, I have already discussed this
somewhat implausible theory,6 and anyway in this chapter we
are proceeding on the assumption that in many cases the source
of the evidential information is indeed a surviving discarnate
intelligence. Why, then, are the spirits apparently so reticent
about their activities between sittings?
It could be that their mentality is essentially in abeyance, that
the dead are no more than bare unconscious 'psi-factors', until
conjunction with the brain of a medium suddenly recharges
these into brief semblances of recognizable human personalities.
In between sittings they would perhaps be like individuals
dreamlessly asleep. Before we are tempted to reach this
conclusion, however, there are three points that we need to
consider. First, the hypothesis of a 'psi-factor' into which we are
abruptly shrivelled on death is contrary to most of what we
know about the gradual development (and decay) of our mental
powers during our physical lives, from conception onwards;
admittedly there are accidents which can suddenly plunge
people into vegetable-like states, but they do not then emerge
from these states for short periods of an hour or more to engage
in rational conversation with those around them. Secondly,
uncommunicative though the best spirits may be with respect to
their present surroundings, they appear to be aware of many
earthly incidents which have occurred since their deaths, both
before they began to express themselves at mediumistic sittings
and also during the relatively protracted intervals between one
sitting and the next. Thirdly, while the best communicators tend
to be unforthcoming about the details of their activities in the
afterlife, there are many notable exceptions (e.g. 'Raymond
Lodge', 'Mrs Willetf); and we must not forget that evidentially
poorer communications yield an (often bewildering) abundance
of statements concerning the post-mortem situation, relation-
ships, interests, and ongoing activities of the particular spirits
ostensibly communicating.7
Perhaps here we should follow Sir Oliver Lodge's advice and
treat these statements as reports which are technically unverifi-
able but can nevertheless be 'scrutinised and tested by internal
consistency and inherent probability in the same sort of way as
travellers' tales have to be scrutinised and tested'.8 Singly, they
200 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

cannot possibly carry the same conviction as do those highly

accurate reminiscences of earthly episodes which provide us
with evidence of identity. But collectively, we can examine and
collate this whole mass of 'travellers' tales' in an attempt to see
whether they have the degree of concordance which we are
entitled to expect if we are to regard them as coming near to what
may be broadly true.
Spiritualist literature is full of descriptions ostensibly given by
spirits of the conditions in which they live. These descriptions
tell us of beautiful landscapes, often bathed in sunshine, with
gardens and parks of glorious flowers and trees, bearing rich
luxurious fruit. Birds and beasts live gently and in amity with
human beings and one another. There are great libraries,
containing copies of every book ever written, and concert halls
where wonderful music can be freely enjoyed. There are
meetings often addressed by great teachers from higher spheres.
There is no war, disease, poverty or crime. Instead, there are
endless opportunities for personal development.
We also get descriptions of lower, darker realms tenanted by
souls which have become deformed by avarice, lust, and self-
centredness. They live in these ugly, squalid places by choice, for
their outer environment reflects their inner barrenness of spirit.
How seriously can we take all these descriptions of the next
world? It is obviously tempting to dismiss them lock, stock, and
barrel as pure fantasy, as the rather pathetic regurgitations from
the mediums' subconscious of mainly pleasant pictures ready-
made to lull and obscure fears and to provide solace for the
frustrated hopes of men and women whom life has dismally
failed to satisfy. Anyone who has the slightest inclination to treat
these next-world reports as essentially true has, I suggest, an
obligation to supply convincing answers to most of the following
questions. Where is the next world? How extensive is it? What is
known about its topography? How are its contents, from flowers
to library buildings, produced? Of what kinds of material are
they made? How is human life organized in this next world?
What kinds of personal relationship flourish there? In what types
of meaningful activity do its inhabitants engage?
Where is the next world? No one today believes that the spirit
world is located at some immense distance from the earth,
somewhere in the vastness of the physical universe. Spiritualists
 The Concept of an Afterlife 201

and others often claim that it is all around us, that it envelops us
and therefore that our deceased friends and relatives are literally
quite near to us, although normally invisible to us. They may
explain this by claiming that things in the spirit world 'vibrate' at
a much greater frequency than things in our ordinary physical
world. Perhaps this could be so - but it is extraordinary that
physicists have never found any evidence whatsoever of these
rarefied forests, mountains, lakes, and temples, although they
have ransacked the minutest processes of the submicroscopic
universe with the most sensitive instrumentation they can
devise. It certainly looks as if the spirit world and its contents
are not to be found anywhere in space.
If the spirit world has no location, it is idle to speculate about
its spatial extent. How many angels can dance on the point of a
needle? We can usefully ask questions about the area of Australia
or about the surface of the moon. We can think that one day the
huge continent of Australia might get overpopulated (and
perhaps, at some remote date, even the moon). But how can
we think of the next world as perhaps eventually having no more
room for new arrivals? Is this idea absurd because the next world
is capable of indefinite, limitless expansion? Or is it because the
spirit world has no dimensions in the first place, either to get
filled up to to expand?
It would be plainly impossible to construct any kind of map of
the spirit world, by means of which, for example, new arrivals
could be helped to orientate themselves. We are bound to ask
why this is so. Communicators make frequent reference to parks,
galleries, halls of meditation, cities, rivers, or far-off mountain
ranges, but they seldom or never try to describe the relations of
these places to each other or the exact distance between them.
And unlike places in Australia, say, they are never given proper
names. It would be interesting to learn whether my late Uncle
James and a colleague's deceased Aunt Sara, communicating to
us on separate occasions through different mediums and telling
us that they had been present at some great musical concert, had
in fact been present in the same hall at the same time in the same
spirit city, or whether their two experiences were totally
unconnected. As things stand, we have no means of knowing.
Without being given proper place names or precise descriptions,
how could we?
202 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

The spirits never seem to have much to say about the methods
by which natural processes are sustained in the spirit world, or
about how those things which they find useful for their personal
development get produced and distributed. Even if we assume
that all the spirits of animals as well as men are vegetarian, we
still need to know how it comes about that just the right balance
of soil and climate always produces just the right variety and
quantity of vegetables and fruit which exactly match the tastes of
every member of the population. How are they gathered? What
about the stones to build the halls of learning? Who quarries
them? Are the books in the libraries printed, and if so on what
kind of material and by whom? There is obviously a huge list of
such questions, which seem relevant and understandable given
the kinds of bland general descriptions we are offered by
communicators of the next world and its contents. They stand in
need of an answer. And no clear answer seems to be forthcoming
from the spirits themselves.
Then there is the issue of organization and control. Decisions
will need to be taken about the size and lay-out of the parks, the
siting of orchards and crop-bearing fields, the size to which spirit
communities should grow, about the distribution of resources to
libraries as against concert-halls, and so on. Is spirit opinion
always completely unanimous? Or are there the equivalents of
political parties and pressure groups? How are the rights of
minorities protected? Are there courts of law and agencies to
enforce the justice they declare? Descriptions of the next world
given through mediums tend to suggest that the spirits all have
broadly the same interests, wishes, and preferences. There are no
bad neighbours, no quarrels, no rivalries, no causes of resent-
ment, only love, kindliness, and tolerance.
Such abstract reassurances fail to reassure. Spirit commu-
nicators hardly ever touch on, far less give serious consideration
to, the obvious difficulties to which human relationships can give
rise. Take, for instance, the deep differences in outlook and
values between people dying in 1995 and those who died in 1895
or earlier. Do they live in the same spirit communities, despite
the huge generation gap? We can imagine the problems that
could ensue. Or are they segregated, and if so, by what means?
And consider the artistic activities in which the spirits are said
to spend so much time. Even attaining modest levels of
 The Concept of an Afterlife 203

competence at playing a musical instrument, or painting, or

acting, requires a great deal of training, regular practice, and
sheer hard effort and concentration. We hear about the
wonderful concerts, but we never hear about painstaking
rehearsals.
By this stage any intelligent person is bound to wonder
whether and in what sense a 'spirit world' can exist at all. It is
surely absurd to suppose that the next world could be just like
this world - with factories, mines, offices, workers, employers,
companies, presumably something like a stock market, police
forces or their equivalents, motorways, hotels, restaurants, and
so on, with all their personnel. But how can there be any kind of a
'world' in which people's needs are met without there being
such institutions and processes going on in order to meet them?
This is the dilemma by which we are confronted. On the one
hand, there is good evidence that after death the human
personality moves into another state of existence. On the other
hand, it seems impossible to furnish even a theoretical descrip-
tion of what this entire state of existence might be like. We can
conceive of discarnate post-mortem persons, but these have to be
related to some kind of external environment, and apart from
continuing with their earthly memories we seem able to imagine
nothing that they can find to do. Christian believers are faced by
a similar dilemma. We do not want to think of heaven, in Sydney
Smith's words, as everlastingly 'eating pates de foie gras to the
sound of trumpets', but neither can we be content with the
assertion that the quality of a future state is utterly inexpressible.
For this would mean that we cannot coherently think about it at
all and thus that we cannot conceive of any posthumous destiny
for the soul whatsoever.
Yet perhaps our dilemma is more apparent than real. We have
seen in the first part of this chapter that a discarnate post-mortem
mind could have resources, drawn ultimately from memory and
augmented to some extent by telepathic interaction with other
minds, which might enable it to construct many imaginary
scenes and mental tableaux in which it could think of itself as
taking part. Of course (apart from some fragmentary clairvoyant
knowledge of actual earthly events) its entire course of
experience would then seem to be purely hallucinatory. John
Hick asks whether in that case it would be 'proper to speak of the
204 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

individual as still living'. However, he notes that such an

individual would have conscious experiences and concludes
that, though he might only seem to himself to be making ethical
decisions and to be encountering other people, nevertheless
given these conditions he 'would indeed in a significant sense be
alive'.9
But would such an individual be living in any kind of real
world? Would it not be more accurate to describe him as being
permanently locked within a series of solipsistic hallucinations?
The term 'solipsistic' here, I think, begs too many questions.
Viewed as a paradigmatically untenable theory, solipsism has
been traditionally generated by extreme types of philosophical
reflection about the nature of human experience in this world,
not in the hereafter. It is supposed that I see certain distinctive
shapes which move and emit sounds, that I hear other sounds
emitted by similar shapes prompting me to call them all
'conscious beings', and that I then interpret this whole pattern
to mean that these beings perceive, think, remember, hope,
choose, and feel pleasure or pain in the same way that I do,
although I can never have any direct evidence that this is the
case, since the only experiences I can directly encounter are from
start to finish my own. If anyone is inclined to accept such an
analysis, we can point out that it apparently shows our life in 'the
real world' to be solipsistic anyway, and so moving into the next
world will make no difference. But of course the analysis which
gives rise to the theory of solipsism is notoriously imperfect and
tendentious, both for the here-and-now and for the hereafter. We
can readily admit that we often make serious mistakes, which
nevertheless we learn to rectify, about the thoughts, feelings, and
intentions of other living people, while remaining justifiably
unshaken in our conviction that in general we are surrounded by
other animate beings whose sensations are inherently like our
own. The circumstantial evidence is just too overwhelmingly
strong to admit of any other interpretation. And unless the
morphology of the next world proved to be bizarrely different,
unless it was full of protean figures which were sometimes mute
and sometimes emitted cacophonies, unless it seemed to contain
plants which spoke or stones which shrieked, we could surely
judge that the human and animal shapes we confronted were
conscious and that the remainder were not.
 The Concept of an Afterlife 205

However, if our experiences in the afterlife are mainly

hallucinatory, essentially like dream sequences, does it not
follow that the other spirits whom we may seem to meet will also
be hallucinatory, mere dream figures without any separate
consciousness but animated solely by the consciousness of the
dreamer himself? It seems to me that anyone who survives
physical death but remains fully rational has to accept this as
initially greatly probable. He cannot know that the spirits whose
presence he welcomes are not in fact products of wish-fulfilment,
and that those whose presence he abhors are not figments of his
anxieties and fears. If he is acquainted with the fact and possible
scope of telepathy, he can reasonably hope or fear that the spirit-
figure addressing him is, as it appears to be, the expression of an
independent consciousness telepathically communicating. But
the only way in which he can try to verify his belief is by testing
the figure's 'speech' and 'behaviour' for internal consistency, and
for the compatibility of what it now seems to be saying and
doing with what it has characteristically said and done on former
occasions in his presence. Even if it passes these tests, it could
still be a figment of his own imagination. However, the more
detailed, intimate, and protracted his intercourse with this other
putatively independent spirit, the greater the certainty he might
rationally have that he was indeed communing with another
mind which existed separately from his own.
In a famous and influential paper entitled 'Survival and the
Idea of "Another World" 7 ° the philosopher H.H. Price
propounded the concept of a next world which would be
mind-dependent because formed entirely from mental images,
the very stuff of which our dreams are made, and structured
according to our deepest desires, of which we are not always
explicitly conscious. Such a world, Price argued, could be
different from the world of our ordinary dreams, because it
could in large part be shaped by the desires of a number of
different spirits who were in telepathic communication with one
another. The next world would be neither purely objective nor
purely subjective, but intersubjective. No doubt, as Hick points
out,11 there are difficulties in conceiving of a single common and
public world along these lines, given that the desires of different
individuals often diverge or conflict. We should probably have to
think of a plurality of 'next worlds', to some extent intermingling
206 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

and overlapping, with individual spirits moving from one world

to another according to shifts in their consciousness, whether
explicit and voluntary or involuntary because deeply implicit
and unrecognized. Some of these mental worlds might indeed
contain lovely parks, gardens, galleries, libraries, and everything
which corresponds to an individual spirifs idea of 'heaven',
while others would be more mixed and yet others filled with
darkness and cloudy symbols of guilt and foreboding. There
could be many forms of consistently hellish or purgatorial
experience. These would not be imposed by external authority
but would reflect what individual spirits had made of them-
selves, their inner strengths and failures or inadequacies,
although they might appear to be rewards or punishments for
things done or left undone. In other words, there might be a sort
of psychological justice which (as in this life) other ministering
spirits could strive to convert into actual justice. No condition of
any soul would in fact be everlasting, although it might seem to
be everlasting and this would be an element of some of the
'rewards' or 'punishments' which it thought it was undergoing.
The picture of a possible 'next world' at which we are arriving,
then, is of a world which in many respects would resemble this
world in which we lead our flesh-and-blood lives. Our transition
to such a world on death would involve no sudden movement
across space but rather a radical alteration in our state of
consciousness. The next world would of course not be in actual
space at all, although it could be said to be 'quasi-spatial' because
the events occurring in it would, as in our dreams, take place in a
kind of 'inner space'. But all these events would, I suggest,
necessarily occur within objective spans of time. Different spirits
might have very different perceptions of the flow of time, of the
duration of the events they were living through. Time might
seem to pass slowly or quickly. However, if two or more spirits
are ever to meet in the next world, or ever to communicate with
those still on earth, for example at mediumistic sittings, there will
obviously need to be exact synchronization for this to come
about. And there has to be an objective temporal dimension if
one thing is literally to happen before or after any other thing, or
if any true progress or development is to occur.
There would also need to be causality of some kind, for
otherwise there could be no sort of meaningful effort exercised
 The Concept of an Afterlife 207

by the inhabitants of such a spirit world. The causality would

need to be of a psychological order, in which a new situation
always resulted entirely from the mental state of some spirit or
combination of spirits. There might be general laws governing
the appearance or disappearance of things in the next world, as
in this one, but the full understanding of these phenomena
would require the skill of a post-mortem investigator more like a
Jung or Freud than like a Newton or Einstein.
Perhaps this is part of the answer to a problem mentioned by
Hick, who sees human existence as fundamentally a process of
moral and spiritual development. 'It is essential to this person-
making process', he says, 'that the world should not be plastic to
our human wishes but should constitute a given natural order
with its own stable character and "laws" in terms of which we
must learn to live'. 12 In the kind of next world which, largely
following Price, I have been trying to outline, there would indeed
be causal laws shaping situations which were often recalcitrant
to an individual's wishes, for these situations would be created
by the wishes (and fears) of other surviving spirits and,
moreover, by the deeply submerged desires and inhibitions of
the individual himself, which for this reason might often be
beyond his conscious control, as is the case in the dreams or
nightmares which we experience during sleep in this life. These
situations might reflect, not what an individual superficially
wants, but what at bottom he is, or is making of himself.
I have said that in many respects a wholly discarnate next
world might resemble the present physical world. Its inhabitants
might seem to have bodies, and to have experiences from a
bodily perspective and against a background of bodily sensa-
tions. These l>odies' would in fact be images of their former
bodies, no doubt modified by their changing wishes, anxieties,
and aspirations. Their state of health and general fitness might
reflect the assumptions of their owners that they still had
corporeal tasks which they could fulfil, and their 'age' could
express both how they inwardly felt, their sense of overall
wellbeing, and how they felt they ought to appear to other spirits
- to their former contemporaries and friends, their late parents,
or any of their deceased children. And I can think of no reason
why they should not seem to be rejoined by non-human animals
- dogs, cats, horses, and others - with which they formerly had
208 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

ties of trust and affection. These might or might not be actually

present to them telepathically.
After all, our life in the present physical world does not
conform to what we scientifically know this physical world to be
like. Our sensory data are suffused with 'qualia' - colours,
smells, sounds, tastes, and feels - although we know that in dry
fact the world by which we are now surrounded is basically
composed of colourless, odourless, soundless patterns of homo-
geneous energy-discharges which give rise to our experiences.
Even the concrete world of sense-experience which lies before us
is perceived by us through a lens of selectivity which organizes it
around our own concerns, preferences, and projects. Pure
unadultered perception of an object is a limiting case. Most of
the time what we perceive is heavily interpreted, saturated by
the deliverances of our memory, and shot through with the
contributions made from what we anticipate and can imagine.
We must not underestimate the role played by the mind in
constructing the situations in which we find ourselves in this life.
It is not impossible, and indeed it is on the whole probable, that
the mind - if it survives physical death - should play a similar
creative role in the life to come.

In this book I have been examining grounds for and against the
belief in a life after death. I have limited myself to the
examination of a possible future state which may begin
immediately after physical death and may then continue for
some indefinite period of time, whether long or short. I have not
sought to inquire into what might be the final state of the soul,
after its entire finite destiny is completed. John Hick has drawn a
valuable distinction between eschatology and 'pareschatology7.
'Whereas eschatology is the doctrine of the eschata or last things,
and thus of the ultimate state of man, pareschatology is, by
analogy, the doctrine of the para-eschata, or next-to-last things,
and thus of the human future between the present life and man's
ultimate state'.13 Christians and others have sometimes talked as
if the soul entered into its final state, of perfect bliss or eternal
torment, instantly upon death. Today, for a multitude of reasons,
this scenario seems, to say the least, highly implausible. As Hick
clearly sees, it therefore behoves us to draw upon what
 The Concept of an Afterlife 209

knowledge we possess in an attempt to construe what might

happen to the soul in the possibly lengthy interim between
leaving this present life and arriving at its ultimate destination.
Perhaps this interim period is punctuated, as Hindus,
Buddhists, and other reincarnationists believe, by lives spent
here on earth in a succession of new bodies. However, we have
seen that on this theory there would still need to be spans of
time, in between earthly lives, when the soul subsisted in a
wholly disembodied state. Thus whether we are considering
some version of reincarnationism or a more straightforward
account of the soul's future in an uninterruptedly discarnate
state of post-mortem existence, every belief in survival of death
has to face all the problems raised by materialist views of the
nature of human personality. I have examined these views at
some (albeit probably insufficient) length, and have tried to show
why they are very much less firmly established in the domain of
mentality than is popularly supposed. Although the metaphysi-
cal theory of reductionist materialism obviously has a great deal
to be said in its favour, it is seldom exposed to root-and-branch
criticism, and its uncritical acceptance is arguably the real
originating source of most of the objections levelled against any
belief in a discarnate life after death. We have seen that, as a
general theory of mind, materialism has serious philosophical
weaknesses and is blind to certain categories of fact, especially
those which it considers paranormal. We have therefore felt
entitled, indeed intellectually obliged, to inspect other models of
mind and brain which seem beset by fewer difficulties.
I have argued that some form of non-Cartesian interactionist
dualism is probably the safest philosophical theory to adopt.
Dualism, properly understood, generates fewer conceptual
problems and can accommodate all the empirical facts, including
the facts of parapsychology.
Now when dualism is taken as the most reasonable version of
the relation between our minds and their bodies, the general
arguments for immortality which we considered in Chapter 4
begin to fall into place. And the way is opened up for an
unprejudiced scrutiny and appraisal of the reported facts about
deathbed visions, near-death experiences, apparitions, mediu-
mistic communications, and claimed reincarnation cases, which I
have tried to examine in Chapter 5, as well as other types of
210 Philosophy and the Belief in a Life after Death

relevant fact which I have had to pass over (accounts of

ostensible spirit possession, for example). Of course, these facts
all admit of different interpretations, particularly when we take
note of the possible scope of ESP. But taken as a whole and
viewed from every angle, this extensive range of facts tends to
supply us, I have suggested, with a great deal of evidence in the
light of which personal survival of bodily death becomes
strongly probable. If we ask ourselves, 'What kind of evidence
can we conceive of which would, if it occurred, provide us with
very good grounds for believing in survival of physical death?',
we find that such evidence has occurred, has been sifted and
investigated, and is readily available to anyone who troubles to
inquire.
In this last chapter I have been more freely speculative, more
concerned to explore logical possibilities than to support these
with ascertained facts. Clearly, if we have strong grounds for
believing in some kind of post-mortem existence for conscious
selves, we are justified in trying to imagine, as realistically as the
nature of the case permits, what kind of an afterlife they are
likely to be entering. As I have already indicated, our next
dimension of existence may well consist of an interrelated
plurality of 'worlds', each created by small or large groups of
interacting selves, with the possibility that an individual self may
transfer from one to another according to his current state of
consciousness, his character and emotional needs, and the
strength of his existing and developing relationships. This
conception of our future state seems not unreasonable, given
that in our present physical lives most of us operate in different
spheres of interest and activity at different times and these
different spheres often overlap and impinge on one another.
Furthermore, in this life some of the spheres of activity in which
we engage we believe to be of definitely higher value than others:
they are more intellectually challenging, or more aesthetically
rewarding, or more ethically satisfying, or in some other way
considered by us to be altogether superior, and in our more
reflective moments we may deplore the time we have wasted on
other pursuits which we can now see to have been markedly
inferior in quality. And so we cannot dismiss out of hand those
many 'travellers' tales' which report that in the next life there is a
hierarchy of spheres or realms of thought, action, and relation-
 The Concept of an Afterlife 211

ship, corresponding to the levels of consciousness attained by

those who dwell in them. To begin with, a surviving spirit might
spend all of his time on a plane in which his experiences are close
replicas of those he had, or had wished to have, during his
earthly life. But with part of himself he might learn to dwell
temporarily, and at last fully and finally, on higher planes where
his thoughts would become purified of their earlier mundane
concerns and his experiences would become more rarified and
less egocentric. Communication between spirits on an exalted
plane and those on lower planes might prove to be as difficult as
is communication between all spirits and human beings
presently alive on earth and veiled from them by the screen of
the body.
Rational conjecture can, I think, take us no further than this.
Perhaps it is as well that this should be so, since we have enough
tasks facing us in this life with which we all have a duty to
grapple, without troubling ourselves too greatly about where we
shall be or what we may be doing a thousand years hence. But if
we are apt to become discouraged by the thought that the aims
we have set ourselves, even if accomplished, will at last be
brought to nothing by our total destruction at our death, or the
deaths of those on whose behalf we have struggled; or by the
thought that those we have loved, whom death has snatched
away, are now lost to us forever, without remedy; then it should
be a comfort, and a fresh inspiration, to discover that these
despondent thoughts may be, and very probably are, unfounded
and false. We can rationally believe that we ourselves, and those
others who now mean so much to us, will continue in some form.
And we can rationally hope that we shall continue, undivided
and together, on an upward journey of which our shared
experiences in this life are merely the beginning.
 Notes and References

CHAPTER 1 PHILOSOPHY, BELIEF AND DISBELIEF

1. Certain forms of Christian belief seem to assert the opposite.

However, it is doubtful whether they really do. See infra, p. 74.
2. Hence the qualification mentioned on p. 2, supra.
3. 'Almost", because inductive surveys of the opinions of experts are of
some use as guides.
4. C D . Broad, Religion, Philosophy and Psychical Research (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953) p. 7.
5. D. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1902) Section X.
6. A. R. Wallace, Miracles and Modern Spiritualism (London: Spiritualist
Press, 1955) p. 16.
7. C. D. Broad, The Mind and Its Place in Nature (London: Kegan Paul,
1925) pp. 107-8.
8. J. A. Shaffer, Philosophy of Mind (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-
Hall, 1968) pp. 66-7.

CHAPTER 2 PROBLEMS OF POST-MORTEM IDENTITY

1. See for example, G. Madell, The Identity of the Self (Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press, 1981); D. Parfit, Reasons and Persons
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); S. Shoemaker, Self-Knowledge and
Self-Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963); B.
Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1973).
2. D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1896) p. 262.
3. Ibid., p. 633.
4. See for example, the Williams and Parfit books mentioned in note 1,
supra.
5. See J. Hick, Theology and Verification', in J. Hick (ed.), The
Existence of God (London and New York: Macmillan, 1974).
6. See Thomas Reid's celebrated example of the individual who is
now a general, was formerly a brave officer, and was once a
schoolboy flogged for robbing an orchard, in Chapter 4, 'Of
Memory7, in his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, first
published in 1785.

213
214 Notes and References

7. See supra, pp. 26-7.

8. See D. Parfit, op. cit.
9. See supra, pp. 27-35.

CHAPTER 3 THE MENTAL AND THE PHYSICAL

1. It may be argued that there are some mental states which lack this
property, e.g. 'objectless' anxiety or euphoria. However, it is
possible to construe such states as directed to an extremely general
and diffuse object, e.g. one's overall life situation. And it may be
argued that there are physical objects which have the property of
intentionality, e.g. some computers. But in the case of man-made
machines like computers, such 'intentionality' as they may evince is
entirely derivative from the purposes of those minds who have
designed them, and who alone truly have intrinsic intentionality.
We tend to be dazzled by complex and expensive machines like
computers, and can come to view them anthropomorphically. Yet
who would want to attribute intentionality to an old-fashioned Tell
Your Weighf machine on a railway platform?
2. This might seem to create a problem for the concept of 'telepathy7,
usually understood to be the direct, non-inferential knowledge of
another's mental state. The conceptual problem can be easily
overcome, however, if we define telepathy as non-inferential
knowledge of the intentional object of anothef s mental state (what
he is thinking about). This definition might seem to, but does not in
fact, conflate the concepts of 'telepathy7 and 'clairvoyance',
although the intentional object is indeed commonly a physical
object or a construct from features of physical objects. The concept
of clairvoyance is the concept of the non-sensory and non-
inferential knowledge of some physical state of affairs, whether or
not this state of affairs happens to be an object to which another
person's mental state is directed.
3. See J. A. Shaffer, 'Could mental states be brain processes?', in C. V.
Borst (ed.), The Mind-Brain Identity Theory (London: Macmillan,
1970) pp. 113-22.
4. See Kai Nielsen, The Faces of Immortality7, in Stephen T. Davis
(ed.), Death and Afterlife (London: Macmillan, 1989) pp. 2-9.
5. T. Penelhum, Survival and Disembodied Existence (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1970) p. 99.
6. The Westminster Confession of Faith, Chap. XXXII.
7. See W. Penfield, The Mystery of the Mind (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1975) pp. 21-7.
8. It does not, of course, follow that psychokinesis must be some kind
of obscure physical force. It is supposed to be a purely mental
power, which produces physical changes, e.g. in the distribution of
energy within a brain. See supra, p. 17.
 Notes and References 215

9. J. Eccles, The Neurophysiological Basis of Mind (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1953) p. 285.
10. The same applies to interspecies comparisons. If the degree of
mental development attainable by a typical human being is higher
than that attainable by a typical monkey or rat, this is of course
overwhelmingly due to the genetic superiority of the human brain
over that of these less intelligent species. But it does not follow that
the relatively limited mental capacities of a ten-year-old monkey
are entirely attributable to its more primitive brain. Its ten-year-old
brain has in part become what it now is because of the ten years of
mental effort contributed by the monkey's mind, germinating from
its earliest beginning as a mere psychic 'seed' in the closest
association with its genetically limited brain.
11. Supra, p. 69.
12. Supra, pp. 63-4.
13. Supra, p. 68.
14. Supra, pp. 67-9.
15. W. Grey Walter, The Living Brain (London: Duckworth, 1953) p. 176.
16. H. Berger, Psyche (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1940). Although a fully
paid-up physicalist, he confusingly called this form of physical
energy 'psychic energy'.
17. N. Marshall, 'ESP and Memory: a Physical Theory7, British Journal
for the Philosophy of Science, Vol.X, 1959-60.
18. H. A. C. Dobbs, Time and ESP, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical
Research, Vol.54, pt. 197, 1965.
19. D.M. Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of Mind (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1968) p. 364.
20. Loc. cit.
21. See K. R. Lashley, The Search for the Engram', esp. pp. 501-3, in
F. A. Beach and D. O. Hebb, The Neurophysiology of Lashley, cited in
H.A. Bursen, Dismantling the Memory Machine (Dordrecht: D.
Reidel, 1978) pp. 15-16.
22. Of course there are facts in nature from which human beings can
infer that other facts must have occurred. From the rings in a tree
trunk the dendrologist can infer that the tree is a hundred years old.
But these rings are not literally the tree's encoded statement of its
age. The relation between a natural result and its natural cause is
utterly different from the relation between a symbol and what it
symbolizes. Cause-effect relations cannot be discovered merely by
learning a language. And although there can be mistaken
interpretations of a natural effect, the effect itself cannot tell lies.
23. See H.A. Bursen, op. cit., for a much fuller development of this
argument.
24. Supra, p. 64.
25. See the first section of this chapter.
26. Henri Bergson, The Soul and the Body', in Mind-Energy (London:
Macmillan, 1935) p. 47.
216 Notes and References

CHAPTER 4 GENERAL ARGUMENTS FOR THE IMMORTALITY

OF THE SOUL

1. J.S. Mill, Theism', in Three Essays on Religion (London: Longmans,

1874).
2. Mill, op. cit., p. 202.
3. Mill, loc. cit.
4. Mill, op. cit., p. 203.
5. Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1897) p. 22.
6. Butler, op. cit., p. 23.
7. Butler, op. cit., p. 20.
8. Butler, op. cit., p. 27.
9. D. Hume, 'On the Immortality of the Soul', in Essays, Moral, Political,
and Literary (Oxford: OUP, 1963) p. 602.
10. Hume, op. cit., pp. 602-3.
11. Mill, op. cit. p. 205.
12. George Gallup Jr. with William Proctor, Adventures in Immortality
(London: Souvenir Press, 1982).
13. Supra, p. 20.
14. Mill, op. cit., p. 206.
15. Hume, 'Of Miracles', op. cit., p. 542.
16. Mill, op. cit, pp. 204-5.
17. Plato, Phaedo, 78b-84b.
18. Plato, op. cit, 80e.
19. Plato, Republic, 608c-610e.
20. Plato, op. cit, 610e.
21. I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (London: Macmillan, 1929) pp. 333ff.
22. I. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1949) pp. 225-7.
23. C. D. Broad, Five Types of Ethical Theory (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1930) p. 140.
24. B. Spinoza, Ethics, Part IV, proposition LXVII.
25. W. James, The Will to Believe (New York and London: Longmans,
1897) p. 11.
26. S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (London: Oxford
University Press, 1945) p. 180.
27. B. Pascal, Pensees (London: J.M. Dent, 1932) pp. 65-9.
28. W. James, op. cit, p. 6.
29. W. James, op. cit, p. 11.
30. W. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York and
London: Longmans, 1928) p. 524.
31. Plato, Phaedo, 78\x.
32. R. Descartes, Discourse on Method (London: J. M. Dent, 1912) p. 139.
33. R. Descartes, op. cit, p. 77.
34. G.W. Leibniz, Philosophische Schriften, Vol.4 (ed. C.J. Gerhardt)
(Hildesheim: Olms, 1960) p. 300.
35. R. Descartes, op. cit, p. 89.
 Notes and References 217

36. G. W. Leibniz, Philosophical Writings (London: J. M. Dent, 1934) p. 3.

37. G. Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge (London: Nelson,
1949) p. 117.
38. G. Berkeley, op. cit, p. 116.
39. See esp. supra, pp. 35-8.
40. I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (London: Macmillan, 1929) pp. 341-4.
41. 'Nothing can come out of nothing, and nothing can again become
nothing'. A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation,
Vol. II (New York: Dover, 1966) p. 487.
42. I. Kant, op. cit, pp. 372-3.
43. J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Vol. 2 (New
York: Dover, 1959) p. 425.
44. J. Hick, Death and Eternal Life (London: Collins, 1976) p. 179.
45. J. Hick, op. cit, p. 171.

CHAPTER 5 THE EVIDENCE FROM PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

1. A. Gauld, Mediumship and Survival (London: Paladin, 1982) p. 261.

2. W. Barrett, Death-bed Visions (London: Methuen, 1926) pp. 10-17.
3. K. Osis, Deathbed Observations by Physicians and Nurses (New York:
Parapsychology Foundation, 1961).
4. K. Osis and E. Haraldsson, At the Hour of Death (New York: Avon,
1977).
5. C. Green and C McCreery, Apparitions (London: Hamish Hamilton,
1975) p. 178.
6. Osis and Haraldsson, op. cit, p. 160, where they refer to R. K. Siegel
and L. J. West, Hallucinations: Behaviour, Experience and Theory (New
York: John Wiley and Sons, 1975).
7. Op. cit, pp. 186-7.
8. S. Blackmore, Beyond the Body (London: Paladin, 1983) pp. 140-1.
9. Osis and Haraldsson, op. cit, pp. 193-4.
10. R. Moody, Life After Life (Atlanta: Mockingbird Books, 1975).
11. For a much fuller discussion of all these attempts to provide a
naturalistic explanation of the NDE, see M. B. Sabom, Recollections
of Death (New York: Harper and Row, 1982) Chap. 10.
12. See, for example, R. Almeder, Death and Personal Survival (Lanham,
Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1992); C D . Broad, Lectures on
Psychical Research (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962); S.
Blackmore, op. cit; C. Green, Out-of-the-body Experiences (London:
Hamish Hamilton, 1968).
13. D. Scott Rogo, The Return from Silence (Wellingborough: The
Aquarian Press, 1989) pp. 191-2.
14. K. Ring, Life At Death (New York: Coward, McCann, and
Geoghegan, 1980).
15. See M. Rawlings, Beyond Death's Door (Nashville: Thomas Nelson,
1978) and M. Grey, Return from Death (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1985).
218 Notes and References

16. Critics could perhaps still argue, but with very much diminished
plausibility, that the NDE was being generated by unrecorded
electrical activity in, say, the brain-stem.
17. F. Schoonmaker, Ttenver cardiologist discloses findings after 18
years of near-death research', Anabiosis, May 1979, p. 102.
18. Almeder, op. cit, pp. 195-8.
19. Almeder discusses these in Chapter 4 of his book. Although he is
primarily concerned with the OBE, his analysis is obviously
relevant to NDEs.
20. See, amongst others, H. Hart, 'Six Theories about Apparitions',
Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 50, part 185 (1956)
and F.W.H. Myers, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily
Death (London: Longmans, 1903).
21. See supra, pp. 47-50.
22. Green and McCreery, op. cit, p. 123.
23. Op. cit, p. 138.
24. Op. cit, p. 180.
25. Op. cit, pp. 189-90.
26. Proceedings of the SPR, Vol. 6 (1889-90), pp. 17-20.
27. Myers, op. cit, Vol.11, pp. 326-9.
28. Green and McCreery, op. cit, pp. 96-7.
29. E. M. Sidgwick, Thantasms of the Living7, Proceedings of the SPR,
Vol.33 (1923), pp. 152ff.
30. Green and McCreery, op. cit, p. 188.
31. Proceedings of the SPR, Vol. 10 (1894).
32. G.N.M. Tyrrell, Apparitions (London: Duckworth, 1943) pp. 32-3.
33. See supra, p. 47.
34. Proceedings of the SPR, Vol. 36 (1927), pp. 517-24.
35. See supra, p. 153.
36. See supra, pp. 50-5.
37. Proceedings of the SPR, Vol. 16 (1901), pp. 1-649.
38. Ibid., Vol. 13 (1897-8), pp. 284-582.
39. Ibid., Vol.6 (1889-90), pp. 443-557.
40. Ibid., Vol.23 (1909), p. 77.
41. A. Findlay, On the Edge of the Etheric (London: Psychic Press, 1931)
pp. 96^102.
42. Proceedings of the SPR, Vol. 31 (1921), pp. 253-60.
43. G. Cummins, Swan on a Black Sea (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1965).
44. D. Kennedy, A Venture in Immortality (Gerrards Cross: Colin
Smythe, 1973) pp. 44-5.
45. Kennedy, op. cit, pp. 105-6.
46. Op. cit, pp. 126-7; and p. 115.
47. Op. cit, pp. 49-50; and pp. 47-8.
48. J. G. Fuller, The Airmen Who Would Not Die (London: Souvenir Press,
1979).
49. Proceedings of the SPR, Vol. 45 (1938-9), pp. 257-306.
 Notes and References 219

50. See A. Gauld, Mediumship and Survival (London: Paladin, 1982)

pp. 68-71.
51. O. Lodge, Raymond (London: Methuen, 1916) pp. 271-5.
52. Proceedings of the SPR, Vol. 52 (1960).
53. For a brief but illuminating discussion of the scripts see H.F.
Saltmarsh, Evidence of Personal Survival from Cross Correspondences
(London: G. Bell & Sons, 1938).
54. Proceedings of the SPR, Vol. 28 (1915), pp. 437-48.
55. Proceedings of the SPR, Vol. 35 (1925), pp. 523-49.
56. See supra, pp. 50-3.
57. See, for example, P. Moss with J. Keeton, Encounters with the Past
(London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1979).
58. For instance see I. Wilson, Reincarnation? (London: Penguin, 1982).
59. I. Stevenson, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (Charlottes-
ville: University Press of Virginia, 1974).
60. See A. Gauld, Mediumship and Survival (London: Paladin, 1982)
Chap. 11.
61. Supra, pp. 176-7.
62. Osis and Haraldsson, op. cit, p. 11.

CHAPTER 6 THE CONCEPT OF AN AFTERLIFE

1. See C D . Broad, Lectures on Psychical Research (London: Routledge

and Kegan Paul, 1962) pp. 415ff.
2. See supra, p. 83.
3. See supra, pp. 94-9.
4. See supra, Chapter 3, note 2.
5. J. Hick, 'A Possible Conception of Life After Death', in S. T. Davis
(ed.), Death and Afterlife (London: Macmillan, 1989) p. 184.
6. See, for example, supra, pp. 51-3, 173-4 and 182.
7. See P. Beard, Living On (London: Allen and Unwin, 1980); R.
Crookall, The Next World - and the Next (London: Theosophical
Publishing House, 1966); Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding, Many
Mansions (London: Rider, 1944); and many other such works, which
draw upon a wide range of descriptions of the next world as given
by a large number of different spirits.
8. O. Lodge, Raymond (London: Methuen, 1916) p. 348.
9. J. Hick, Death and Eternal Life (London: Collins, 1976) pp. 268-9.
10. Proceedings of the SPR, Vol.50, part 182 (1953) and often reprinted,
for example in J.R. Smythies (ed.), Brain and Mind (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965).
11. J. Hick, op. cit, pp. 270-2.
12. Op. cit, p. 273.
13. Op. cit, p. 22.
 Index

afterlife Christian belief, 72-4, 121-30

concept of, 191-211 cognitive probability, 5-8
intersubjective 'dream world', Coombe-Tennant, W. ('Mrs
205-8 Willetf), 164-5, 169-70
spiritualist descriptions, 200-3 cryonics, 71-2
agnosticism, 104, 107-8, 185-6 cryptomnesia, 51, 179-80, 182
Almeder, R., 148 Cummins, G., 164-5
animals, nonhuman, 95-6, 123-7,
176, 215
deathbed visions, 134-9
apparitions, 47-50, 107-8, 127-8,
Descartes, R., 60-1, 67, 85, 95,
133-9, 149-60
114-16, 118
awareness, 157
discarnate mental processes
characteristics, 149-51
characteristics, 192-8
examples, 151-2
ESP, 193-4, 195, 197
explanations, 158-60
imagination, 195-8
frequency, 153-4
intentionality, 197-8
information conveyed, 158
memory, 194-5
purposiveness, 157-8
privacy, 197
testimony, 154-7
Dobbs, H. A. C , 84
Armstrong, D. M., 85
Ayer, A.J., 185
Eccles, J. C , 75
Balfour, A. J., 170 epiphenomenalism, 70-7
Barrett, W., 135 extra-sensory perception (ESP)
basic limiting principles, 8-19 clairvoyance, 83, 193, 214
Berger, H., 82-3 precognition, 84
Bergson, H., 85, 95-9, 193, 194 'super-ESF, 52-3, 159-60, 174,
Berkeley, G., 92, 117 182, 188, 198-9
Best, A., 165-6 telepathy, 19, 51-2, 82-3, 173-4,
Blackmore, S., 138-9 193, 195, 197, 214
brain, 3, 9, 106, 129, 137, 144-5,
148, 187,
Findlay, A., 163-4
and mind, 59-60, 66, 67-9,
Fuller, J.G., 166-7
70-91, 93-101; and ESP,
82-6; and memory, 86-91
and personal identity, 23, 32-3, Gallup, 107
41-2, 49 Garrett, E., 166-7
Broad, C D . , 8, 17, 111, 164, 192 Gauld, A., 132, 168-9, 183, 189
Brown, R., 55 Green, C , 136, 151, 153
Bursen, H. A., 87-90, 215 Grey, M., 139
Butler, J., 104-6, 128 Guirdham, A., 178

221
222 Index

Hall, G.S., 171-2 Marshall, N., 83

Haraldsson, E., 135-9, 186-7 materialist theories of mind, 70-94,
Hick, J., 34, 126-7, 198, 203-4, 205, 128-9, 209
207, 208 materializations, 46-7
Hodgson, R., 162-3, 171-2 McCreery, C , 136, 151, 153
Hume, D., 13, 14, 23, 75, 105-6, McTaggart, J. McT. E., 176
107-8, 118 memory, 35-7, 50-3, 86-91, 116,
Hyslop, J.H., 162 154-5, 172-3, 194-5
Mendelssohn, M., 120
identity theories, 77-91, 92-4 mental mediumship, 50-5, 161-76,
token-identity, 80-1 180, 182
type-identity, 79-80 cross-correspondences, 169-71
imagination, 64, 195-8, 205-8 drop-in communicators, 168-9
immortality, 2, 103-30, 133 erroneous information conveyed,
analogical arguments, 104-6 171-2
argument from consensus, 106-8 explanations, 173-5
arguments from simplicity of the proxy sittings, 167-8
soul, 114-21, 128-9 veridical information conveyed,
arguments from status of the 162-76
soul, 109-10 mental processes
ethical argument, 110-11 characteristics, 59-69
pragmatic argument, 111, 113-14 consciousness, 60-3
and survival, 2, 133 imagination, 64
theistic arguments, 121-9 indubitability, 66-7
voluntarist arguments, 112-13 intentionality, 62-3
indivisible unity of the mind, 65, introspectibility, 64-6
114-21, 128-9 non-spatiality, 67-9
intentionality, 62-3, 197-8, 214 privacy, 65-6
interactionist dualism, 60, 75-6, unity, 65
85-6,90-2,94-101, 106, metaphysical materialism, 11-13,
128-9, 184,209 209
Mill, J.S., 104, 106-8, 185
James, W., 112, 113-14, 163, 186 'miracles', 13-14
Jesus Christ, 126-7 Moody, R., 139
Myers, F.W.H., 108, 171
Kant, I., 110-11, 118-21, 185
Kennedy, D., 165-6 near-death experiences (NDEs),
Kierkegaard, S., 112 139-49
Kubler-Ross, E., 139 characteristics, 140-2
naturalistic explanations, 142-5
Lashley, K. S., 87 verification, 145—9
Leibniz, G.W., 92, 115-17 Nielsen, K., 72-3
Leonard, C O . , 164, 167-8, 169 Noyes, R., 139, 143
Locke J., 122
Lodge, O., 163, 169, 199 Origen, 176
Osis, K., 135-9, 186-7
Madell, G., 40 out-of-the-body experiences
Manning, M., 55 (OBEs), 145, 148
 Index 223

pareschatology, 208 explanations, 183-5

Parfit, D., 43 hypnotic regression, 178-80
Pascal, B., 112-13 infant prodigies, 178
Penelhum, T., 73 involuntary images, 177-8
Penfield, W., 74 spontaneous recall of ostensible
personal identity, 21-57 memories, 180-3
meaning, 21-7; relative, 24-7, religious belief, 19-20, 121-30
41-6; strict, 24-7, 41-6 resurrection, 72-4
criteria, mental: character, 37-8; Ring, K., 139, 147
memory, 35-7; Rogo, D.S., 139
transempirical, 38-40
criteria, physical: brain, 32-3; Sabom, M.B., 139, 146, 147, 217
genetic, 33-4; spatio- Salter, W.H., 164
temporal track, 34-5; whole Saltmarsh, H.F., 219
body, 27-32 Schoonmaker, F., 146, 148
evidence, physical, 46-50 Shaffer, J. A., 17,68-9
evidence, psychological: Smith, S., 203
character, 53-5; memory, Soal, S.G., 172
50-3 solipsism, 204
possibility of error, 56-7 Spinoza, B., 43, 111
personhood, 123-6 Stevenson, I., 139, 180-3, 184
Piper, L., 162-3, 171-2 survival evidence, 131-4, 185-90,
Plato, 109-10, 114, 117-18, 128, 191,209-10
178, 192 Swinburne, R., 39-40
poltergeist phenomena, 16-17
possession, 180, 182-3 Tyrrell, G.N.M., 153
Price, H.H., 205-8
psychokinesis, 17,75, 84-5,100,138 Vasiliev, L., 82

Rawlings, M., 139 Wallace, A. R., 13

Reid, T., 213 Walter, W.G., 82
reincarnation, 176-85 Williams, B. A. O., 36-7
cryptomnesia, 179-80 Wilson, I., 219
deja vu, 177
different versions, 176-7 xenoglossy, 55, 182