C. D. Broad, Mind and Its Place in Nature , 1925

SECTION D

Introductory Remarks

"By the mere light of reason it seems difficult to prove the Immortality of the Soul. The arguments for it are commonly derived either from metaphysical topics, or moral, or physical. But, in reality, it is the Gospel, and the Gospel alone, that has brought life and immortality to light. . . . Nothing could set in a fuller light the infinite obligations which mankind have to Divine revelation; since we find that no other medium could ascertain this great and important truth."

(Hume, Essay on the Immorality of the Soul)


SECTION D

ALLEGED EVIDENCE FOR HUMAN SURVIVAL OF BODILY DEATH

Introductory Remarks

In this section I am going to consider certain causes which have led people to believe that the human mind can and does sometimes exist apart from the human body. And I am going to consider how far these causes are also adequate reasons. It is worth while to remark that, for our purposes arguments which led to the view that the human mind existed before it became connected with its present body would be just as important as arguments which led to the view that it exists after the destruction of its body. And arguments which led to the conclusion that a human mind can become temporarily disconnected with its body during life, can function during this interval, and can then again animate the body would be equally important for our purposes. For, if there be reason to believe that a human mind can ever exist and function apart from a human body, it will be almost impossible to accept the epiphenomenalist theory of the mind and its relations to the body. I propose, however, to deal only with arguments which claim to prove that human minds survive the destruction of the bodies which they have animated; the other possibilities will be considered only in so far as they are involved in certain arguments for survival.

      I think that men have believed in human survival for five reasons.

  1. Some have thought that it was immediately obvious or that they had received a divine revelation which assured them of it.
  2. Others have believed it on authority.
  3. Some have thought that it could be proved by general metaphysical arguments.
  4. Some have thought that it follows from certain ethical premises. And
  5. some have thought that there is special empirical evidence in favour of it.
I shall say what I have to say about the first three causes of the belief in these Introductory Remarks, and I shall devote one chapter to ethical arguments and one to empirical arguments.

      (1) Most of us do not find the proposition that our minds will survive the destruction of our present bodies in the least self-evident. And most of us do not claim to have received personally a divine revelation on this or on any other subject. And, if I believe in survival because I believe that it is immediately certain to some one else or that it has been divinely revealed to someone else, I am believing it on authority. So that it is certain that the vast majority of people who believe in human survival must do so either on authority or because of some kind of argument which seems to them to make it certain or probable.

      (2) We all of us believe a great many propositions on the authority of others, and we should be behaving very unreasonably if we did not. We must, therefore, try to distinguish the cases where it is reasonable to believe something on authority from those where it is not reasonable to do so. And we must then consider whether the proposition that human minds survive the death of their bodies is or is not one which it is reason able to believe on authority.

      (a) My authority may himself believe the proposition as the result of an argument, which is too difficult or unfamiliar for me to follow for myself. I am then justified in attaching considerable probability to his conclusion, provided

  1. that I accept his premises;
  2. that I can follow and accept simpler arguments of the same kind as he has used to prove this proposition;
  3. that I know that men's capacities for following arguments of this kind vary, and
  4. that other experts who have looked into the matter for themselves all come to the same conclusion.
I am, e.g., justified in attaching considerable weight to any proposition in the Theory of Numbers which Professor Hardy and Mr Littlewood tell me that they have proved. Now a great many much better philosophers than I (e.g., Plato and St Thomas) have persuaded themselves by argument of the truth of human survival. Ought I then to attach a high probability to this proposition on their authority? It does not seem to me that I ought. For
  1. I am quite competent to follow their arguments, and they seem to me not to be valid.
  2. They use premises which seem to me very doubtful. And
  3. there is no consensus among experts either about the validity of these arguments or the truth of the premises. Kant was a greater philosopher than I, and he thought such arguments involve logical fallacies. Spinoza was a greater philosopher than I, and he rejected the premises of such arguments.

     (b) My authority may believe a certain proposition because he has access to facts which I cannot perceive for myself. These facts may be imperceptible to me simply because I am not placed in a suitable position in space and time for perceiving them; or because I lack the necessary instruments of precision and the necessary training in using such instruments; or because my mind or body or both lack certain powers which are possessed by the mind and body of my authority. On the first two alternatives my authority claims only to be perceiving something of the same kind as I can perceive; and there is no reason why I should not be able to perceive it too, if I went to the right place and did the right things. If I have reason to believe that my authority is a skilled experimenter and observer, and if he is believed to be so by other experts, it is rational to attach considerable weight to what he asserts. This weight will, of course, be increased if other experts perform the same experiments and observations and reach similar results. It is on such grounds as this that it is rational for me to attach considerable probability to statements made by Professor Rutherford or Dr Aston about the experimental splitting of atoms. But, when people are said to believe in survival on the authority of some religious teacher, the situation is not at all closely analogous to this. They suppose that the religious teacher is either himself a divine being or that he has received his information directly from some divine being. The Christian who believes in survival on the authority of Christ is an example of the former case, and the Mohammedan who believes it on the authority of Mohammed is an example of the latter. Let us consider this kind of authority a little more closely.

      The ultimate authority in either case is the supposed divine being. Before accepting such statements on authority we must therefore satisfy ourselves

  1. that our religious teacher was a divine being or was inspired by one;
  2. that he has been properly reported;
  3. that the divine being knows the truth about the question under consideration; and
  4. that the divine being is not intentionally deceiving us, or accommodating his statements to the current beliefs of the time and place, or speaking metaphorically. Lastly
  5. if our authority is not supposed to be himself divine, but only to be divinely inspired, we must be sure that he has not deliberately or unwittingly falsified the message with which he has been entrusted.
I can only say that I know of no historical case in which there seems to me to be any strong reason to believe that all these conditions have been fulfilled. The question has been discussed by Mr Hobbes with his usual acuteness in Chapter XXXII of the Leviathan, where he writes as follows. "If a man pretend to me that God hath spoken to him immediately and supernaturally, and I make doubt of it, I cannot easily perceive what argument he can produce to oblige me to believe it. It is true that, if he be my Sovereign, he may oblige me to obedience so as not by act or word to declare I believe him not; but not to think any otherwise than my reason persuades me. But, if one that hath not such authority over me shall pretend the same, there is nothing that exacteth either belief or obedience." (My italics.) I find nothing to add to Mr Hobbes's statement or to alter in it.

      (3) I pass now to the case of general metaphysical arguments in favour of human survival. These are at present somewhat out of fashion; and I think it would be generally admitted that the older kind of argument which Kant dealt with in the Paralogisms of Pure Reason really was refuted by Kant. The only modern philosopher of importance, so far as I know, who claims to prove the immortality of the soul by general metaphysical arguments is Dr McTaggart. He points out quite rightly that all such arguments have an a priori and an empirical part. The a priori part consists in proving that anything which had certain characteristics would necessarily be permanent. The empirical part consists in showing that the human mind has such characteristics. How then do such arguments differ from those which I call "empirical"? The difference is this. An empirical argument for survival takes certain special phenomena, viz., those which are dealt with by Psychical Research. And it argues that the hypothesis of human survival explains these phenomena better than any other hypothesis that we can think of. Such an argument of course uses a priori principles of logic and probability, as every argument does. But it has no a priori premise. In this respect it differs fundamentally from such an argument as M'Taggart's, and is of exactly the same kind as the arguments for the wave-theory of light or the constitution of the benzene molecule.

      Now I cannot prove that all general metaphysical arguments for human survival must necessarily be invalid. I can only say that all that I am acquainted with seem to be extremely doubtful either in their a priori part or in their empirical part or in both. And they are so much bound up with elaborate metaphysical systems, and have persuaded so few men beside their authors, that I propose to ignore them here. We are thus left with Ethical Arguments and Special Empirical Arguments. I shall deal with the former in the next chapter, and with the latter in the chapter which follows it. I may say at once that my own view is that, if human survival can be rendered probable at all, this can be done only by empirical arguments based on the phenomena which are treated by Psychical Research.


Contents -- Go to Chapter XI