The Immortality of the Soul*
It seems clear that the immortality of the soul has something to do with its spirituality, so I shall begin by trying to discover what spirituality is. I cannot at present accept the idea that spirituality is soulishness itself, or the character of being a rational soul, for the only well developed argument I know to this position seems unconvincing to me. I mean the argument that thought and understanding are immaterial, since no act of a bodily organ is thinking or understanding, as e.g. an act of a bodily organ is seeing; hence thought and understanding are the acts of an immaterial part, and immateriality is spirituality. Certainly thought and understanding are immaterial - if that means that they are not material, both in the sense that they have no organ, and in the sense that to call something a thought is not to characterise it as a physical event. For example, it would certainly be a case of thinking if I were to take a piece of paper and a pencil and write down a calculation, as I might do now for the sake of illustration, and a purely physical description of this procedure could be given. But that description would not characterise it as thinking or calculating: it would not characterise what I write as a sum. I should argue that this was not because the description omitted to mention certain non-physical occurrences that went on at the same time. Such non-physical occurrences (which might be there) as certain feelings and images, would not of themselves be a sufficient addition to the list of happenings to make them a case of thinking; and if you say ‘No, it is not those, but the thinking itself that has been left out of the description’, I reply that it has indeed been left out, but not in the sense that it is an additional element existing side by side with those others. One way of showing this would be this: the thought is evidently all-important; it is the thought that I mean to convey to you, and do convey to you, if I show you the calculation; but I only show you the bit of paper, perhaps uttering some sounds as I do so; if the thought were an additional secret element, I could not convey it at all, and further it could not matter whether I conveyed it or not. The concept ‘thought’ is one which everybody has, and of which it is extraordinarily difficult to give an account. I cannot give an account of it, I know; all that I so far understand is that it is not material, in the sense that I have outlined. But that is not to say that it is an act of an immaterial, or spiritual, substance; a parallel set of considerations lead me to judge it a crude mistake to suppose that the number 2 is a material thing, and this I might conceivably express by saying that the number 2 is immaterial, but I should only mean by this the denial that is was material. In that case I should be little tempted to advance from calling it immaterial to calling it a spiritual thing. In the case of the soul, the inclination to make that advance, from non-materiality to spirituality, exists because the soul is spoken of as if it were a substance or part of a substance as the hand is part of a man. If I am told ‘not as the hand is part of a man, because that is a material part, whereas the soul is an immaterial part’ I can only say that I do not understand; of course it is clear to me that it is not a material part, but then I do not understand what it means to call it a part at all, at least in a sense that would justify the thought that it could exist separately.
The foregoing is a rough and short indication of the kind of difficulties I feel in arguing from the nature of thought and understanding as such, to the spirituality of the soul. I do not in fact mean that I do not understand if someone speaks of the immaterial or spiritual part, or the thinking part, of a man; I do understand and use such expressions myself. But I understand and use them, either with no particular implications about separability (his thinking part is quite atrophied; spiritual disease; concern with the immaterial part; etc., etc.) or as a formulation, not a justification of certain beliefs.
I may reasonably be asked: when I say that the nature of thought and understanding do not show me the spirituality of the soul, what am I saying that they do not show me? I have seemed to imply that spirituality is a nature in virtue of which it is possible that the soul should exist separate from the body - i.e. non-material substantiality. One reason why it is possible to take spirituality to mean this is that presumably it is the nature of spirits; now a spirit is a person without a body, i.e. an immaterial person, i.e. an immaterial substance. Therefore if the soul partakes of the nature of spirits, it is an immaterial substance, or at least exists in the manner of one when it is separate. It might seem, then, that if I think that the nature of thought does not show the spirituality of the soul, I believe either that something else shows its immaterial substantiality, or that nothing shows its spirituality. This is not my meaning. I believe that something does show the spirituality of the soul, but that nothing shows its immaterial substantiality: in fact, that the latter conception - the conception of an immaterial substance at all - is a delusive one.
Substance is a classification, but whether of things or of concepts is difficult to determine. If you ask what falls into the class of substances an answer is ‘eg. men, horses, cabbages, gold, sugar, soap’. That is, you mention things, not concepts or words, so substance might seem to be a classification of things. On the other hand if you were to ask in virtue of what properties these things were substances, as you might ask in virtue of what properties apples and peaches are fruits, it would become clear that the two cases were different in kind. One does not establish that these things are substances by noting their properties; the description of their properties is already of the form: description of the properties of substances. I am not saying that it cannot be an empirical question whether such-and-such is a substance; it can for, say, the sky, or rainbows. But these are exceptions. It is not a well established hypothesis that gold is a substance, or that (in a manner of speaking less familiar in modern English, but I expect familiar enough here) a man is a substance. It relates to the existence of a special restricted sense for the question ‘what?’, the answer to which is of great practical importance and of great interest to us. The sense is that in which I ask ‘what?’ when pointing to an unfamiliar tree or plant or rock or parcel of stuff in a jar. The question ‘what?’ may be asked in such a way that the questioner has no clear conception of the form the answer may take, and it may then receive as answer the name of a substantial kind; or it may expect such an answer and not get it because there is no such answer to give; or it may be definite in quite another way than that of asking for the name of a substance; still there is this special restricted sense, and substances are those things that are named in answer to this restricted sense of ‘what?’. The question relates to a certain sort of knowledge that people have, and which is important. It follows that the term ‘substance’, which serves a very useful purpose here, is out of place where that kind of knowledge is not and cannot be in question. To put it very briefly, a natural object of human knowledge is the ti esti (quod quid est) of material things: or rather, ti esti itself expresses the form of one of the most important parts of our natural knowledge. But I do not wish to say: and therefore the ti esti (quod quid est) of immaterial things is beyond our ken, for although that sounds modest, it in fact unconsciously prejudges the matter. It is as if I were to say: it is only the square roots of numbers that we are able to calculate; the square roots of metals are not for us; perhaps the angels know them.
This is why I call ‘immaterial substance’ a delusive conception. The idea of substance, and the ramifications of properties of substance (in an indefinitely wide sense), as constituting reality itself, is so very strongly rooted in us that if I simply said that, I should be taken by most people with any familiarity with the term, whether they thought they agreed with me or not, to be denying the existence of spirits. I hope it is clear that I am not. But the reasons why the rejection of an idea of immaterial substance sounds like an expression of disbelief in spirits are worth considering.
It is not simply that the surface grammar of language gives us substantive words for spirits; for it gives us substantive words in hundreds of cases where we are not under any temptation to speak of substances. I suppose for example that no one has ever felt the least inclination to think that the alphabet was a substance. But here, and in most of the cases where no such inclination is likely, the direction of an answer to the question ‘what?’ is roughly clear; it is clear that it lies in a description of the procedures in connexion with which we speak of the alphabet and not in that of a description of a nature. An exception to this generalization is number; no one thinks of numbers as substances, but they have been thought of as objects, by Frege, for example; now if one were to say ‘If objects, are they substances or accidents?’ the question would appear inappropriate.
The reasons for the special temptation in regard to spirits are, I suggest, (a) that as spirits are persons without bodies it is natural to apply to them many of the conceptions that we use in connexion with persons, and hence also the logical conceptions, and hence that of substance; (b) the ambiguity and extreme indefiniteness of the question ‘what?’ and the notion of ‘something’. It is clear that you can ask ‘what?’ about anything, and that you may be extremely vague about what sort of answer you expect; the answer you are in fact given may help to determine the sense of the question in your mind. E.g. someone who asks what dreaming is may have no idea whether he wants a physiological or psychological answer; and also he might conceivably have an idea that as ‘to dream’ is - i.e. seems to work like - a word signifying an operation of a psychical subject, a proper answer would take the form of an account of such an operation; though he has only the vaguest notion of what such an account would be like. I suggest that there is an analogy in this to the conception of a spirit as an immaterial substance. Now to answer ‘nothing’, to the question ‘what?’, is to claim that the term about which ‘what is it?’ is being asked is false or delusive; and if you reject as false and delusive some preconception as to a possible form of answer then just because that preconception existed it sounds as if you were saying that the term itself was a mistaken, delusive one. Compare Plato: ‘The soul is something, isn’t it?’ It could not be replied: ‘no’; for that would mean that anyone who said anything about souls was talking nonsense, which is evidently false; but when one has said the ‘yes’ that is forced by this consideration one has really said very little. In just the same way one would have to say ‘yes’ to ‘numbers are something’, ‘the alphabet is something’ and a host of other things. Thus if someone says to me ‘You must at any rate hold that spirits are something’ I reply ‘Certainly, but that is not to say as much as you, perhaps, imagine if you think of it as determining that a certain philosophical position must be maintained’. (It is of course to say a good deal, if my interlocutor does not believe in spirits and says, ‘You really believe that there are such things?’)
To say that we have no more business to formulate the idea of a ti esti than that of a square-root, for a spirit, sounds like saying: there is not anything that a spirit is; and if so, a spirit is nothing. But this is because of the slip from ‘what it is’ when this corresponds to that important range of knowledge that we exemplify every time that we knowledgeably use the names of substances to a ‘what it is’ corresponding to some other part of knowledge. (There are indefinitely many parts. Consider how, and in how many senses we know ‘what it is’ of e.g. a procession, or an emotion, or a coefficient of expansion; and how curious it is that this one formula covers so many different kinds of knowledge.)
These are the reasons why I reject the very conception ‘immaterial substance’ without meaning by that that I disbelieve in spirits. They are reasons for saying ‘Stop it’ to someone who is beginning to construct a certain sort of intellectual scheme. The relevance to the immortality of the soul is simply that a whole way of considering it is in this way closed to me.
I put it forward that the spirituality of the human soul is its capacity to get a conception of the eternal, and to be concerned with the eternal as an objective, and perhaps also as something that can be leant on and feared. I do not say ‘God’ because the thing is clear independently of people’s believing in God; it is clear for example in the existence of such an idea as Nirvana. What shows this capacity is the religions, and ethics, and in some way (which I will not go into) art; but they do not show it as circuses show the acrobatic possibilities of the human body, but rather as the existence of arithmetical studies shows the arithmetical capacities of the human mind. I mean that you can see what an acrobat can do without exercising a similar capacity yourself, but you cannot see what someone who does arithmetic can do without the exercise of arithmetical ability. If you were determined to describe arithmetical activity without exercising any arithmetical capacity in doing so, every step would appear arbitrary in the sense of pointless, though not arbitrary in the sense that the steps would appear not chosen but compulsive (as we speak of neurotic compulsions). Similarly if religious and moral life is described irreligiously and unethically everything appears pointless and compulsive. There is a middle course which is sometimes taken with regard to religion and sometimes too with regard to ethics, namely that of reacting to them as to poetic qualifications - e.g. of being affected by them as by a purge as Aristotle describes it in the Politics** - which may come more or less close to seeming to acknowledge the spirituality of the soul. The reason for this I take to be that poetry is itself inspired. But the inappropriateness appears as soon as it is made explicit; there is so evident a contrast between the relations: poet and enjoyer of the product of a poet; and: believer, or agent, and poetically affected observer. When the contrast is seen it appears that someone who reacts to religiousness or ethics as poetic qualifications is like someone who thought he was watching a play when some real action was going on. If he realises this, shame may prevent him from writing off what he has been observing, as, say, all superstitious stupidity; but it is easy to fall back upon being what in German is called pathetisch about it - a word difficult to translate, but in this context the nearest equivalent is perhaps ‘sentimental’.
I have mentioned this because there is a good deal of what looks like a vague acknowledgement of something that might go by the title ‘spirituality of the soul’ which is not accompanied by any acknowledgement of the eternal. Besides this, there is something else which can sometimes be noticed, not in conjunction with being poetically affected by e.g. the idea of God in other people or in writings; but in conjunction with a vague dumb reaction of respect towards it - namely a dislike of blasphemy against something deep and serious in human beings. This latter reaction might be the beginning of an acknowledgement of spirituality.
(To avoid misunderstanding I ought perhaps to say that I don’t regard the possibility [or actuality] of great heroism [say in exploring, or in making scientific discoveries], or of self-sacrifice for the natural good of other people, as marks of spirituality; nor yet again any capacity to do or bear a great deal, however remarkable or noble this may be.)
I have said that spirituality does not seem to me to be demonstrated by capacity to think, reason, and understand as such. A corollary to this would be that it does not seem impossible for there to be rational - i.e. language-using - beings, who were not spiritual. Such beings would not be able to understand the locutions of natural religion. In thinking of God, for example, the word ‘makes’ is used in a way that is reminiscent of a cook making a dish or a sculptor a statue, and yet in a new sense, which is shown by our saying ‘God made the world out of nothing’; as ‘I did the sum in my head’ is like ‘I did the sum’ and yet introduces a new sense of ‘doing the sum’. If God had been supposed to make the world out of something, like a cook making a dish of ingredients, the common suggestion that we should look for traces of such an event, in order to prove that there is a God, would be reasonable. The argument might be: the ingredients could not have got into the state of being a world without someone’s doing the mixing (cf. Plato’s Philebus) and then it could reasonably be asked how we know that certain ingredients got into the state of being a world. But as soon as ‘out of nothing’ is introduced we are using ‘makes’ in a new way, which paralyses critical questions based on the implications of the former way: but the fact that it is a new way is not itself a criticism; it would not be possible to erect a principle of never using words in a new way without paralysing language. Imagine that someone said ‘I touched him with no part of me’’. As things are, in our language, that is equivalent to saying ‘I did not touch him’. So far as I know no one has ever suggested that in a parallel way ‘God made the world out of nothing’ is equivalent to ‘God did not make the world’. People who heard it like that would have the right to say that they could make nothing at all of the teaching that God made the world out of nothing; because it evidently could only mean that God did not make the world, but then he was constantly spoken of as the maker of the world. Why should it not be that some people could never get the hang of certain new locutions, although nothing requisite to getting the hang of them seemed to be lacking? Meaning-blindness about certain new locutions (transposed expressions) might be characteristic of certain races. For that reason I cannot determine that rational beings must be capable of grasping the idea of God. Nevertheless such meaning-blindness as I am imagining does not occur as far as I know. (It has nothing to do with the professions of non-comprehension that one sometimes hears.)
Now let me imagine someone who, e.g., believed in God, and believed in the soul’s spirituality, but disbelieved in immortality entirely. Perhaps there are many possibilities, but what I imagine for him is this: following Schopenhauer,*** he says: ‘The fear of death is the fear of losing the present (the fear that there will be a present without me); but that is just as if people were afraid of slipping down the sides of the planet; the top is wherever they are, so they can’t fall off the top. So the present is where I am, and there can be no such thing as losing it’. Therefore - he goes on - even if I did live on for ever, that would not correspond to the spirituality of the soul; and if you say there is something about this endless life that does so correspond, then I reply that if that something can supervene upon an endless life, it can equally well supervene upon a terminating life. Why should heaven or hell - eternity - be compared to a very, very - an endlessly - long time, rather than to a moment? And why should not the moment which corresponds to eternity occur in this life? It is only childish minds which have to be threatened with a hell of endless temporal duration, because if you threatened them with hell in a moment they would, by childish misunderstanding, say: ‘At least it will soon be over’
I am inclined to reply to this by asking: ‘Could anyone say ‘I have lived through that moment’?’ If so, then the position seems senseless.
But if not - either because the moment is supposed to be the moment of death, or because even though the person is not physically dead, he has no more life that means anything - the simplest picture is of some sort of madness - then I do not see that there is any answer outside the authority of revealed religion. Except for one thing: it is difficult to believe that the consequences of the interior life are so exclusively interior. The interior life that is less than heavenly or hellish has outward expression; no outward sign but what would be the expression of hellish interior life, if it were the expression of anything eternal, can be imagined in this life, in which there is no manifestation of glory coming from human beings except in products of art (but these are not the expressions of glorious interior life). Then the hellish moment is perhaps credible but not the heavenly. The only things to be the manifestation of the moment corresponding to eternity would be the circumstances of this life, and these, if they are the outward sign of such a moment at all, can only be those of the hellish moment. This is no proof of immortality, but a proof that if there is not immortality, there is no good eternity. This seems to fit in with St. Paul: ‘If Christ did not rise, then the dead do not rise; you are still in your sins, and those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished’.****
In these surroundings, I can take for granted belief in the resurrection, unless anyone is doubtful whether to remain a Catholic or has simply hardly had his attention directed to this part of the creed. What I cannot take for granted, but should maintain myself, is the following: there is no reason whatever for believing in a temporal immortality of the soul apart from the resurrection; above all, there is no ‘natural immortality of the soul’ that can be demonstrated by philosophy. (I am not sure how far philosophy is competent to attack a belief in the temporal immortality of the soul, without the body, if some religion teaches it.) I take the Christian doctrine of immortality to be the doctrine of an unending human life, happy or unhappy, after the resurrection, and not the doctrine of an immortal sort of substance, the soul, to which is appended the doctrine of the resurrection because a disembodied soul is not a complete man; though I know that in apologetics the matter is often presented like that.
But it is also Christian doctrine that the soul is judged at death and then suffers or is in glory till the resurrection. Must one not have a theory of how it can exist? I reply to this that no one can be obliged to have any theories at all; but one may feel irresistibly impelled to try to have a theory. I have an inclination to say that the good which philosophy could do here would be to cure one of this irresistible impulse. A pious person, not attacked by it, might say: ‘Don’t try to find out; we shan’t be able to find out, and perhaps are not meant to know; at least we certainly don’t need to know’. I am not that person; when I hear it suggested that something which is not clearly a divine mystery - like the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Eucharist - is beyond our ken, I feel an itch of irritation, as if I had been fobbed off; the thing has been put in the wrong light. I should like to say: I can’t be ‘not meant to know’ something I could not know, but only something I could know. So it is not in that spirit that I say the good of philosophy will be to cure us of the impulse to try and have a theory of the existence of the separated soul.
First, I want to argue that though our religion teaches us the existence of the souls of the dead between death and the resurrection, it does not do so in a way that justifies us in saying: so you see the soul has it in it to exist apart from the body, so that it might exist forever apart from the body. My only reasons for saying this are Scriptural; the passage from St. Paul just cited, and what is said of Judas Maccabaeus; that he ‘thought well and godly about the resurrection’, considering that it would have been vain to pray for the dead, if it were not for the resurrection.***** If this is so, we should be on our guard against any thinking that would make the existence of the separated soul an absolute possibility. We should not be tempted to say things like: ‘If the soul can exist at all without the body, then it could exist forever without the body’; or ‘The resurrection, which comes later, cannot be a condition of the possibility of the existence of the separated soul, which comes earlier’.
There will be the resurrection, and we pray for the dead, and to the saints, meanwhile. The time of this ‘meanwhile’ is a matter of years and seasons and clocks. It is because the resurrection will be a sensible event like an earthquake that temporal immortality of the soul (i.e. of human life) is a doctrine with any substance to it. But what does it mean to say that one thing is at the same time as others if there is no mediating system? For some reason we are apt, in our imaginations, to be vehemently convinced that we know what this expression ‘at the same time’ means, regardless of any mediating system, but however strongly imagination impresses us, our conviction signifies no more than that we have a mental picture of two events occurring at the same time and say that we mean by ‘at the same time’ in some other quite different case just what was meant in this one. Now in the case of the dead there is just this mediating system in our praying for and to them. It is not a system of assigning a history to them.
It may be asked: ‘Are you saying that to say the dead exist between death and the resurrection is to say that people pray for and to them?’ The answer is, certainly not, but to pray for and to them is to say that they exist and I know no other saying that they exist which has any content but that of an idle picture or of a superstitious fear or conventional reverence (for we can forget the idle picture).
Imagine a modern man, so very modern that he no longer has the idea that he can judge a savage’s religion of placating spirits to be a delusion, on grounds of ‘science’, common sense, Western enlightenment, and so on. He says ‘I do not do this; but I cannot call it mistaken’. Now he is confronted by three spectacles: a savage fearful of malicious spirits, carrying little bags of hair and nail parings about, appealing to witches to break spells and so on; a representative of some old civilization (I am vaguely thinking of China, but know too little about it, so I would rather make it fictitious) leading a dignified life in which the ritual honouring of ancestors plays a conspicuous part, and who speaks and acts like someone who regards the spirits of his ancestors as in constant attendance on his house, involving them in his regular activities (mealtimes and so on) and also in critical matters, very piously; and lastly, a Christian who, he knows, keeps on praying for dead people he has known and to the saints he has a devotion for. He says of none of these that he is wrong, nor yet that he disbelieves their presuppositions about the existence of those spirits, but only that he does not do any of these things.
Ought he to be able to judge that one or other of these three is wrong? Say the savage at least, for fearing harmless things? But if the harm the savage fears is not just a particular result, but some unspecified harm from that action, this may make him not so easy to refute in practice, especially if a few accidents happen. I am inclined to think that it is only if that man I imagined brings in the thought of God that he will be able to call any of these things lies: only if, e.g. he can say such a thing as: one should not trust or fear any spirit because God is the master of everything. If he says this, he can discriminate between the Christians, who fear or placate no spirits, and except when they grow superstitious seek nothing from spirits but intercession,[1] on the one hand, and the ancestor worshippers and again the superstitious savages, on the other.
For reasons too complex and various for me to describe, to someone trained in a certain sort of modern philosophy the question ‘Are there, or could there be, spirits?’ lacks mindhold (like a precipice lacking foothold). Instead the question ‘What should be thought of someone who speaks of spirits?’ looks tractable. So let me imagine one case, though I suppose it is rarely to be met with. But suppose someone had the idea that a devil - or devils - were out to plague him; to hide what he looks for, to make him miss trains; even to peer at him from discoloured patches on walls or the patterns of lace and shadow in window curtains. Must he be either mentally ill or making some blunder of judgment? Obviously he may be; but the question is settled by what else goes with his trouble; we may be able to judge it as plain silliness or painful neurosis. But that judgment must be based not just on his having that idea, but on a general impression and a good knowledge of him. Neurosis is one pattern, or set of patterns, silliness another. It may be that there is nothing to criticise in him and nothing suggesting treatment. Then a Catholic would, if he were concerned, pray for him and might be able to encourage him to pray, possibly recommending him to accept the plague as a thorn in the flesh (not to try to overcome it, but to ‘stand in the rain’). I suppose that a certain sort of rationalist would say flatly that the man was certainly the victim of delusive ideas. But what is the delusion? To this the ‘rationalist’ will reply: ‘If not delusion, then truth, and I say that this kind of thing cannot be true; there is nothing there’. I reject this dichotomy: ‘If not delusion, then truth’ because the meaning of my saying ‘truth’ in this case is that I say ‘the devil is plaguing him’, and while I might be drawn in to his trouble in such a way as to say that, I need not be; I may say only ‘he needs help and I can try to give him help’ or perhaps ‘he needs help but I am a long way from being able to give him any’. But to the talk of ‘if not delusion, then truth’, I might want to say ‘Shut up!’ Not that judging that it was not delusion would necessarily result in, so to speak, bowing to the man’s idea. It might be possible to say ‘Don’t! Don’t think these thoughts!’ But that again might be wrong and it might be right to say instead ‘Think also of this whenever those thoughts come to you’.
I will try to explain now what this digression was for. I replaced the question ‘Are there spirits?’ by ‘What should be thought of someone who speaks of spirits?’ and by constructing a particular case aimed at receiving the answer: ‘he might have to be taken seriously’, where giving medical treatment is not taking seriously. (It may be worth saying that in constructing this case I am not trying to delineate anything essential to having the idea of spirits.) Now what has been achieved? Someone may concede this, and say: ‘but that does not enable me to speak of spirits’. Of course it does not; but what of that? And if he says: ‘What is more, I am sure I never shall, at least, not if I am in my right mind’, the only answer is: you do not know what may not happen. It is like finding nothing in an author; if one is clear that one understands him, and judges that there is nothing in him, that is all right; but if one merely finds nothing in him (without being able to see what is supposed to be in him) then one cannot say ‘Never, in my right mind, will I admire him’.
A spirit is a person without a body. (I am not counting God, here, among spirits, because it appears to me that the idea of God could exist without the idea of a spirit. Imagine people who believe in God, but have no conception of spirits at all; that is, they agree that God, who is beyond everything, is not a body, but they have no word ‘Xs’ one of which God is, and of which there may be other examples, which bodies are not. They might reject any such suggestion as wrong, as trying to put God into a class of beings. So the fact that people truly believe in God, and that God is spirit, is neither here nor there for settling the question whether they have the idea of a spirit.I will not try to determine whether, if they do not, they are incapable of the idea that God created man in his own image. Nor do I know whether that doctrine is supposed to be purely one of faith or to be known by reason, or even whether this question has ever been canvassed.)
Taking spirits, then, as a class of beings, spirits are persons without bodies, and we are not counting God among them. Now the idea of a person without a body is fantastic from certain familiar points of view. ‘A person without a body - that is like a cat or cabbage or table without a body’. In fact, if one were asked to make something of these conceptions, one would probably say: ‘You mean as if a cat or cabbage or table had a spirit’. That sounds more nonsensical - i.e. less of an idea one could do anything with in one’s imagination - for cabbages than for cats and for tables than for cabbages. The reason is that cabbages and tables have no dealings with us, though we can more easily imagine a cabbage having dealings with us than a table. A table would have to have movement as a whole from within, which it has not, before we could credit it with spirit. If a spirit is something that has dealings with us then a table has no spirit; but if it were something that we dealt with, then it could have one. I mean that people might lay a spiritual table with spiritual knives and forks. But I never heard of such an activity or anything like it; whereas people do address or honour or fear or placate persons without bodies. From a certain point of view this seems as insane as laying a spiritual table sounds (i.e. going through the motions, when there is no table or knives or forks; and for this to be an activity with a certain special kind of importance in human life). Now suppose someone were to reply to those holding that point of view: How do you know it is not right to be insane in some such way? It would be insane to put your right foot over the edge of a precipice and tread as if there were ground there. But suppose that people who did that succeeded in walking? - until, indeed, they went over, because, as the rest of us say, they persisted in putting their right feet there; but we all fall over the precipice somehow in any event? The ‘insanity’ is then no argument, and in fact it turns out only to have meant not relying on sensible things, physical probabilities, and purely conventional procedures.
Some sort of ‘insanity’ which has a family resemblance to that of taking account of spirits, of placating fairies, for example, is characteristic of any effective belief in the eternal. (A non-effective belief either borders on sentimentality or is expressed only in purely conventional procedures.) The resemblance consists in the fact that both involve acting as if something unseen were there, to be respected in some way. A great difference lies in whether it is only temporal things that are sought or avoided. This means that the contrast between superstition and religion is especially evident when the unseen thing to be respected is simply an end sought (so long as the observances involved do not seem too trifling and insignificant). This may explain why some forms of eastern religion strike some people as particularly ‘high’.
Here we come to the most essential feature of a non-superstitious and non-fabulous belief in spirits, which explains why it should have any connections with religion. It is that spirits are good or evil; not mixtures of good and bad, or oscillating between them like a human being. Without this qualification they are only fantasy, or suitable topics for psychical researchers; a name for more or less uninteresting phenomena. That they are good or bad - indeed mostly bad, dangerous things - is a common idea among people who believe in them. ‘An evil spirit’ is not so much like ‘a wicked man’ as ‘a white man’; i.e. a man must be of a definite colour and his colour cannot be altered. It is this that confines spirituality to personality and makes spirituality into a significant concept rather than a composite fantasy like a centaur or a talking jug; we are back in the sphere of such fantasy the moment shilly-shally or a mixed character is ascribed to a spirit. Hence if spirits are supposed to play a part in human lives, it is a part that essentially concerns good and evil; so that even in a degenerate, superstitious development it is proper for a spirit to play nasty tricks rather that to be harnessable like a force of nature.
I suggest that the reason for speaking of the spirituality of the soul - that is, for using the adjective of ‘spirit’ - is not a quasi-physical common property, but that human beings are in for a final orientation towards or away from the good. Now this could be believed on Schopenhauerian lines (I mean as suggested by the remarks in the quotation given above) in some such way as I indicated before, without any belief in immortality; spirituality, so explained, does not indicate immortality. But an immortal existence is as it were the body to this as its soul. To sum up: (1) without this an immortal existence, concretely expressed as the life of the resurrection, as in orthodox Christianity, would have no significance; (2) temporal immortality of the soul without the body is empty of content; (3) spirituality, consummated without immortality, is like a meaning without a vehicle. To say that is not to show that the idea of it is delusive. It is only from revelation that we can believe in anything else - namely in the resurrection.
* Text of an undated and unpublished typescript of a paper given to the Philosophical Enquiry Group that met at the Dominican Conference Centre at Spode House, Staffordshire. (See Preface.) Probably dating from the late 1950s.
** See, for instance, Politics 1342a4-16 on the effects of music.
*** See Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, translated by R B Haldane and J Kemp, Volume 1 (London: Trübner & Co, 1883), especially pp. 361ff.
1 Nor do they believe, except when they grow superstitious, that the spirits so much as hear or intercede for them nisi in Verbo.