Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T23:07:11.365Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Truth and Immortality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2011

Charles F. Dole
Affiliation:
Jamaica Plain, Mass.

Extract

One everywhere finds people who have given up the hope of immortality or else regard it with extreme doubt. Forms of belief with which it has been associated have proved unthinkable to them. Worse yet, to hope for immortality seems not to be loyal to truth. “We want reality,” they say. “We propose to face the facts; we demand honest thinking. We have no use for dreams, however pleasant; we wish only truth.” Mr. Huxley's famous letter to his friend Charles Kingsley expresses this attitude. Here is a man who, in the greatest of sorrows, feels obliged to put away comfort and hope in obedience to the demand of truth. It is not possible to divide his mind into exclusive compartments, and to indulge an ancient religious emotion on one side of himself, while on the other side he remains the conscientious student of science. He must keep his integrity at any cost to his feelings. No one can help admiring this type of mind. A multitude of people who have nothing like Mr. Huxley's rigor of conscience are immensely moved by the attitude of such men as he. If he could see no truth in immortality and had to remain an agnostic about it, why should we not be agnostics also?

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1909

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 The lack of clear recognition of the fundamental idea of truth in Mr. William James' Pragmatism is perhaps the chief fault in his treatment.