COLONEL: Do you believe in ghosts, Professor?
PROFESSOR: Ghosts? Well, that’s a sticky one, isn’t it? I’m not quite certain what you mean. I mean, I don’t quite know what I’m being invited to believe when anyone asks me a question like that. I’m not even quite certain what I’m being invited to disbelieve, if it comes to that.
COLONEL: Not quite with you, old chap.
PROFESSOR: No. Well, I mean, when you ask me do I believe, say, in Australia, I know perfectly well what sort of thing I’m being asked to judge. We all agree what we mean by Australia. Large continent… Southern Hemisphere…discovered by Captain Cook…four or five main cities…kangaroos. So on and so on. Given that, one can perfectly well imagine the procedure one might put in motion to confirm, or on the other hand dis confirm, its existence. Now, it’s not the same thing with ghosts. Is it? I mean, there’s no broad consensus about what a ghost is… Is there? There’s no common agreement as to what a ghost is, or even might be. Which makes it hard to imagine the procedures that one might put in hand to confirm or to disconfirm their existence. So that given this ambiguity about initial definitions, it makes it very hard for me to answer your question, at least phrased as it is. ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ It’s rather like saying, ‘Do you believe in bandersnatches?’ It makes no sense to say that I do or I don’t.
COLONEL: You’ve bowled me a bit of a Chinaman there. Ghosts. Well, all right – spirits of the dead, the survival of the human personality.
PROFESSOR: Aha. Survival of the human personality. Well now, that’s a different question again, really. And once again, it’s got the grammatical appearance of a real question. But I wonder…I mean, does it really mean anything either? I mean, does it? Well, let’s see. We say, for the sake of argument at least, that the human personality survives death. All right?
COLONEL: Right.
PROFESSOR: Very well, then. Now would we want to say it in the same way that we might say, for example, that someone survived a train crash?
COLONEL: Yes…
PROFESSOR: Ah, but would we? Would we, you see? I mean we say, don’t we, that Pausanias survived the train crash but was very badly injured by it. Now we wouldn’t want to say Pausanias survived death but was very badly injured…by it. We wouldn’t want to say that, would we?
COLONEL: No, I suppose not.
PROFESSOR: Well, quite. So we’ve clearly got a logical difference in usage here, haven’t we? In the sense that death is not quite like other physical catastrophes; in that survival from it need not, and indeed cannot, entail severe injury. Or at least, not injury due to it. Directly. We don’t talk about anyone being very badly hurt by death. The relatives of the deceased, possibly, but not the victim himself – excluding, of course, the special interpretation in which one might say that he had been injured fatally by death. Or for that matter that she had.
COLONEL: True, true. But there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.
PROFESSOR: I prefer to put it another way. There are more things in philosophy than are dreamed of in heaven and earth.