The Metaphysics of a Naturalist 93 
should be distorted to the support of the complicated beliefs of 
the Jewish doctrinaires in stages and grades of future existence 
into which much of the grossness of this life was transported. 
Sidartha, on the other hand, had but a sect as it were of the Saddu- 
cees for his propagandists — men accustomed by contemplation to 
distinguish the real under the phenomenal. 
Christ warns that in the other world men neither marry nor 
are given in marriage; that they do not seek emoluments or high 
stations, but are like the heavenly influences or Angels of God;’’ 
and, while using ever}^ vehicle of expression and illustration to 
convey the idea of superior felicity of the other world, clearly 
teaches that this felicity in some way consists in oneness with God. 
He informs his disciples of a great gulf fixed between the other 
world and this, and it is legitimate to conclude that this gulf is 
a natural result of the extreme divergence of the two stages of 
existence. Far different the teaching of the Church, which 
carries the extreme of individuality characteristic of its relations 
in this life into the next world with little change. This tendency 
of the teachers of religion and its poets illustrates the desire for 
an immortality of earthy consciousness and associations. 
Assuming that immortality must be of this sort, viz: a per- 
petuation of our soul as the thinking, remembering, and feeling 
function of self. Prof. William James attempts, in his Ingersoll 
lecture for 1897, to remove two important objections to such 
belief. 
The first objection grows out of the psycho-physiological 
dictum that thought is a function of the brain. This is again the 
body-mind problem which we at first agreed to waive for a time. 
But let us see how a representative psychologist meets this 
issue. In his own words: 
I must show you that the fatal consequence is not coercive, as is 
commonly imagined; and that, even though our soul’s life (as here be- 
low it is revealed to us) may be in literal strictness the function of a 
brain that perishes; yet it is not at all impossible, but on the contrary 
quite possible, that the life may continue when the brain is dead. 
The supposed impossibilit}^ of its continuing comes from too 
superficial a look at the admitted fact of functional dependence. 
But there are other kinds of function besides productive or gener- 
ative functions, there are transmissive functions. 
