The Sense of Immortality

Immortality has been variously asserted, denied, debated, discussed, worshipped, and ridiculed. The net result of the whole mass of arguments has been summarized by David Hume: 'Nothing could set in a fuller light the infinite obligation which mankind have to divine revelation, since we find that no other medium could ascertain this great and important truth.' To the mystical philosopher, and particularly to the theologian, it is a basic problem concerned not with testing and verifying an assumption or an hypothesis, but with the intricate endeavor to prove that immortality is irrefutable. One gains the impression that there is an obsessional taint to such thinking. Whether the preoccupation with immortality is called faith or a fundamental human need matters little; phenomenologically it appears to be a preoccupation which bears all the earmarks of an obsessional reaction. The rationalistic and materialistic matrix of modern life gives the impression (erroneously as we shall presently see) that we are free from this idle preoccupation with the question of our immortality, that we even attempt to deny it because its non-existence seems to be taken for granted. If this were the universal attitude, the title of this paper would have been a misnomer, or the designation for a purely pathological phenomenon. Let us, however, examine a few salient facts.

We may observe first of all that outside the realm of pure theology there are a goodly number of people preoccupied with the problem of immortality who, as enthusiastic amateurs or pseudo-scientific cranks, devote a great deal of time and energy to so-called communication with the dead and to conjuring up the reappearance of people no longer living. In so doing, they hear or feel the breath of dead people, hear the voices of the