Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 79:313 (Jan 1922)
Article: Critical Notes On Immortality
Author: James Lindsay

BSac 79:313 (Jan 1922) p. 89

Critical Notes On Immortality

James Lindsay

IN the Hibbert Journal for July, 1917, appears an article on “Survival and Immortality” by Dean Inge, of St. Paul’s, London.

The article has many good qualities, but ought not to be allowed to pass without criticism. It will leave many readers thinking he has left eternal values for them very much “in the air,” and provided an immortality of “not very graspable conception.” I wish to point out some ways in which the paper might have been made more satisfying and effective.

He quotes Münsterberg, “every doubt of absolute values destroys itself,” etc., and adds, “it is not necessary or desirable to follow Münsterberg in identifying valuation with will.” In one sense, that is true, and strongly to be maintained, but it is very misleading without proper qualification or explication. It would be an entirely wrong impression that it is never “necessary” nor “desirable” to connect “will” with valuation. Much misapprehension would have been saved if Dean Inge had anywhere observed the well-accepted distinction by philosophical writers into truth or reality values (for the reason), and will and feeling values, from which Münsterberg cut off feeling in his one-sided preference for will. Dean Inge says, further, of Münsterberg,—“he talks of the will judging; but the will cannot judge.” True enough, and it is pleasing that Dean Inge has preserved a sufficiently robust intellectualism not to have succumbed to the one-sided and unsatisfactory Voluntarism now frequent. “In contemplating existence,” he says, “we use our will to fix our attention, and then try conscientiously to prevent it from influencing the verdict.” Quite true, when “Contem-

BSac 79:313 (Jan 1922) p. 90

plating existence” or reality values, but it leaves entirely aside the place and function of will in the other class of values, those willing and feeling values, which are those generally meant in value-writing. It is the frequently overdone stress on this latter class of values—which, it is said, cannot be absorbed by rationality—that makes much value-writing tend to depreciation of existence or reality values. This, in contravention of the fact that, as Dean Inge properly enough urges, reality is the support of value. The fact that existence may be regarded as, in a sense, “itself a value” is no reason for not recognizing the well-observed distinctions between existence and value, and there is certainly less care in the paper to distinguish the two kinds of value I have spoken of than there might have been. This, although I should not care to doubt “the ultimate identity” of existence and value, if that phrase —not unexceptionable—be taken to...