by JOHN GRAY
IMAGE/Oxford University Press Entertaining Judgement: The Afterlife in Popular Imagination by Greg Garrett, Oxford University Press, 245pp, £18.99
The leading moral philosopher of the 19th century, Henry Sidgwick, spent much of his life looking for evidence that human consciousness survived bodily death. For this eminent Victorian (born in 1838, he died in 1900, having spent all his adult life as an academic in Cambridge), there had to be an afterlife if ethics was to have any meaning. If we are extinguished when we die, there can be no basis for morality – no reason why we shouldn’t follow the dictates of self-interest, or simply obey the whims of the moment. The only way of avoiding this “intolerable anarchy” was what he called “the Postulate of Immortality”. After devoting many years to investigating paranormal phenomena, he could find no convincing evidence that this postulate was well founded. An agnostic who in his intellectual life was never less than scrupulously honest, he died believing he had failed in his quest.
There was a curious postscript to Sidgwick’s life. Not long after he died, a medium who practised automatic writing – in which texts appear despite an absence of conscious awareness, with another mind seeming to be their author – began producing scripts purporting to be from the late philosopher. Most dealt with the mind/body question: how is consciousness related to the brain? One of the texts, however, dealt with Sidgwick’s search more directly. He had always been a seeker, the spectral author of the text wrote. Now he knew, from his immediate experience, that the human mind does continue after death. Yet he was as baffled as to the meaning of this posthumous existence as he had been regarding that of his earthly life. In a tone of earnest sadness echoing that found in Sidgwick’s writings, the text concluded: “We no more solve the riddle of death by dying than we solve the problem of living by being born.”
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