ASPR Journal, V14 - Iapsop.com

Illusions in Psychical Research. 7
instincts while it has protected the ideals of personality and
their relation to the meaning of the cosmos.
Lucretius, the ancient materialist, taught that the fear of
death was the greatest evil with which man had to contend.
St. Paul too recognized that it was morally and perhaps psychologically
the worst enemy we have to meet, and the long line of
phobias in abnormal psychology and insanity bear out that view
of it. But St. Paul and Lucretius had different remedies for it.
Lucretius thought that the belief in aimihilation would eradicate
it, and certainly lacked sense of humor if he thought despair
was better than hope in relieving human nature of its maladies
or in creating a peaceful state of mind. St. Paul taught that
the hope of immortality would cure it, and he was certainly so
far right that psychoJbgically the assurance of continuity breeds
the hope of betterment in grief and sorrow while it mitigates the
pains of suffering.
But your modern man, without starting with the same confessions
as Lucretius, offers the same remedy, or, if not openly
avowing annihilation, he takes every occasion to discourage hope
and wonders why human nature does not fall down and worship
his perspicacity and intelligence. If asked whether he is a
materialist or not, he will usually say he is not. But he will not
allow you to draw the evident inference that survival is possible.
He carefully and sedulously attacks all efforts to give materialism
any meaning while he allows you to believe that he is orthodox
enough in as much as he denies what you deny, but he will
not affirm what you hope. If asked what he does believe he may
say idealism, the wonderful limbo in which all but clear ideas
dwell together in a higgledy-piggledy fashion. When pressed
to know if idealism supports survival he will hedge or admit
that it does not, but he does not wish, in most cases, to disturb
the illusions created by his denial of materialism and he remains
sublimely indifferent to any solution of the problem except the
one that enables him to preserve his game, salary, position and
respectability.
It is anything but alignment on the side of humanistic ideals.
If anything pleases the public it is a signal to let it alone or to
attack it. Every resource of ridicule or subterfuge is permissible
to avoid sympathy with the primitive ethical instincts. When
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