XIII THE DESIRE FOR IMMORTALITY' ARGUMENT Is man really distinguished above other animals by his preoccupation with death? If he is, he will show a concern about his future life of which there are few traces. Naturally, because hating to think of death, we avoid thinking of a future life. The practical inconvenience of the thought, and its relegation to the realm of 'faith.' Is Spiritism an exception? Yes, but that is why it fails to become popular. Other religious doctrines held in a peculiar manner, and calied up or dismissed according to the sentiment of the moment. Why, then, has an entirely contrary impression prevailed? (1) the indifference of the mass versus the vocal few; (2) the memory of bygone interest. The possibility of testing the issue and discovering the facts by the questionnaire of the American Branch of the Psychical Research Society. Social taboos as bars to inquiry. The world not unknowable. The old fear of know- ledge. Magic and Science. The need of social support in discovery. IT is a venerable commonplace that among the melan- choly prerogatives which distinguish man from the other 1 This essay appeared in the Fortnightly Review for September 1901, but, owing to an accident, without revision in proof. It was intended to draw atten- tion to the inquiry mentioned on pp. 243-245. Some 3000 answers were obtained and are now being studied, and, so far as they bear on the question which directly concerns the Society for Psychical Research, viz., to what extent is there a desire to know ?-they have been discussed by me in a report to be published in the forthcoming Proceedings of the S. P. R. The whole material, however, is so extensive and psychologically so valuable as to need fuller treatment in book form when some one finds time to do it. I may here avail myself of the occasion of expressing my conviction that there exist a number of questions concerning the psychological foundations of ethics, æstbetics, aud logic which urgently need study by statistical methods. We have always to find out how men actually do feel and think before we can safely generalise or systematise as to what they ought to feel and think, Now at present the actual facts are very imperfectly known, even in the case which has received most attention, that of the religious consciousness. As a rule writers have been content to go for their facts to their own preconceptions or to the analysis of their own individual consciousness. At most, they have noted, in a cursory and reluctant way, the more obvious varieties of sentiment whose existence was forced upon them by their Dotoriety. But there is no guarantee 228
