HUMAN IMMORTALITY 28 1 



our private selves." ^ This theory, Professor James 

 in his argument presents as a possible supposition 

 merely, and his logical aim is simply to show that 

 the superficially alarming proclamation of physio- 

 logical psychology, which declares all consciousness 

 to be a function of the brain, cannot exclude the 

 chance for this supposition, nor our rational right 

 to make it if we will. He puts it, indeed, as an 

 imaginative possibility rather than a scientific hy- 

 pothesis, and gives it great poetic force as well 

 as logical plausibility by his quotation of Shelley's 

 lines,^ — 



Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, 

 Stains the white radiance of eternity. 



"Suppose," he adds, "that this were really so, and 

 suppose, moreover, that the dome, opaque enough 

 at all times to the full super-solar blaze, could at 

 certain times and places grow less so, and let certain 

 beams pierce through into this sublunary world. . . . 

 Only at particular times and places would it seem 

 that, as a matter of fact, the veil of Nature can grow 

 thin and rupturable enough for such effects to occur. 

 But in those places gleams, however finite and un- 

 satisfying, of the absolute life of the universe, are 

 from time to time vouchsafed. . . . Admit now 



1 William James : Human fimnortaliiy, p. 15 seq. Boston: Hough- 

 ton, Mifflin, and Co., 1898. 



- Shelley's .Idoiiais, stanza lii. 



