Human Immortality

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION S O MA N Y C R I TI C S have made one and the same objection to the doorway to immortality which my lecture claims to be left open by the “transmission- theory” of cerebral action, that I feel tempted, as the book is again going to press, to add a word of explanation. If our finite personality here below, the objectors say, be due to the transmission through the brain of portions of a preëxisting larger consciousness, all that can remain after the brain expires is the larger Consciousness itself as such, with which we should thenceforth be perforce reconfounded, the only means of our existence in finite personal form having ceased. But this, the critics continue, is the pantheistic idea of immortality, survival, namely, in the soul of the world; not the Christian idea of immortality, which means survival in strictly personal form.