SELF—THE WORLD—DEATH—PLURALITY

If we agree to leave aside, without further discussion, as altogether too naïvely puerile, the idea of a soul dwelling in the body as in a house, quitting it at death, and capable of existing without it, then I think that one of the principal problems, if not the principal problem, without whose solution there can be no final peace for the metaphysical urge, can be quite briefly characterised as follows.

Consider these four questions, which cannot, as a whole, be satisfactorily answered with any combination of ‘yes’ and ‘no’, but rather lead one on in an endless circle.

1. (1)Does there exist a Self?

2. (2)Does there exist a world outside Self?

3. (3)Does this Self cease with bodily death?

4. (4)Does the world cease with my bodily death?

If we start with Self, then all the facts of physiology assure us that there is so intimate and necessary a connection between all the sensations of this Self and the material modifications of my own body that it is impossible to doubt that destruction of the body implies dissolution of the Self. With equal certainty we must reject a world existing outside Self, because both consist of the same empirical ‘elements’, and in fact that to which the term ‘world’ is applied consists entirely of elements which also belong to Self. In any case, that to which we give the name ‘world’ is only a complex within the Self, but my own body is only a complex within the world-complex.