Culture and Society
IMMORTALITY FROM THE
SCIENTIFIC POINT OF VIEW
Vladimir M. Bekhterev
A t such moments in history as the present, when al-
most every day brings us news of the death of hun-
dreds, even thousands of people on the battlefields, ques-
tions concerning “eternal” life and the immortality of
the human personality arise with particular persistence.
Of course, they arise likewise under the ordinary, mun-
dane conditions of life, where at every step we are con-
fronted with the loss of friends, relatives, and acquain-
tances due to natural or violent causes.
“A shot was fired and the person is no more.” “Ill-
ness has claimed our friend, and he has passed on to
another world.” Such are the words commonly spoken
at the graveside. But how true are they? After all, if our
intellectual or spiritual existence really was terminated
at the moment our heart beat its last; if death only trans-
formed us into nothingness, into inert matter subject to
decay and transformation; what would life itself be
worth? For if this life has no spiritual continuation, who
could possibly find it valuable, with all its anxiety and
emotional turmoil? Even if it is enhanced by the striv-
ing of great minds towards ideals of goodness, truth and
beauty, what would justify the preeminence of such ide-
als over selfish aspirations for the average individual,
his life and actions? If there is no immortality, then nei-
ther is there morality: all is permitted.
Indeed, why should I care for others given that ev-
eryone—I and they alike—must inevitably become
“nothing,” and that all moral responsibility, too, quite
naturally disappears into this “nothingness”? To suppose
that death is not accompanied by the kind of spiritual
immortality to which all religions subscribe, in which
all peoples have believed, does this not amount to re-
moving any foundation for a system of ethics, or even
simply for the desire to build a better future?
Indeed, if death extinguishes forever the existence of
the human individual, of what use are our concerns about
the future? What purpose is there to a concept of duty,
if our human personality expires with our last breath?
For if this were true, would it not be more appropriate
to seek nothing from life beyond the few comforts it
provides, since when it is over, nothing will remain in
74 SOCIETY • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2006
any case? Otherwise life itself, the gift of nature, might
pass by bereft even of those earthly pleasures that it is
capable of granting humankind, enjoyments that lend
some color to the individual’s brief existence.
As for the demonstration of concern for others, it
hardly bears consideration, seeing how tomorrow, or
the next day, or at some future point both “I” and “they”
will become “nothing.” Yet this is clearly a direct rejec-
tion of human obligation, responsibility, and likewise
of any sort of community, which is inextricably tied to
the responsibilities in question.
This is why the human mind cannot come to terms
with the idea of the complete death of the individual
beyond the limits of his earthly existence, and why reli-
gions of all nations have created the concept of the soul,
of an entity existing beyond the grave in the form of a
living, incorporeal being. This is why the Eastern
worldview has developed the idea of a soul that is trans-
ferred from one creature to another.
In this way both national epos and religious doctrine
draw our attention to a subject that, by virtue of its
importance, ought also to have been the subject matter
of science, but which until very recently has remained
outside the latter’s field of vision. True, the idea of
immortality is not foreign to philosophy, which has long
posed the problem of human immortality as central
enough to human life to require resolution one way or
another; certainly, we know that Spinoza and later Kant,
not to mention certain others, acknowledged the im-
mortality of the spirit.
Our great moralist, Leo Tolstoy, has also expressed
his opinion on the subject: “If life is to be found not in
the body, but in the spirit, then there is no death, only
liberation from the body. We acknowledge something
in the soul that defies death. Discover the element of
your mind which is intangible, and you will have grasped
that aspect of it which does not die.”
Among more recent authors, the American philoso-
pher James, recently deceased, “was so convinced of
the existence of a world beyond the grave, that he prom-
ised to find a means of spiritually communicating with
his friends after death.” In response, our scientist
Mechnikov has noted, not without irony, that James
“still has not fulfilled his promise.”
Some philosophers have even adopted Christian ideas
in dealing with this question. As is known, Christian
doctrine speaks of a universal resurrection of the dead,
and our famous philosopher Soloviev (z V. Soloviev,
“Foreword,” Opravdaniie dobra [Justification of Good-
ness]) draws on this particular aspect of Christianity in
the dialectical objections he directs against moral amor-
phism:
In rejecting various institutions, moral amorphism
neglects one in particular, an institution which
might well be considered relatively important—-
namely, death—and only this selective amnesia
allows the doctrine to exist.
It is clear that moral amorphism, while failing
to give sufficient attention to the idea of death,
implicitly carries the concept within itself. It
claims to embody a restoration of true Christian-
ity; but it is quite obvious both psychologically
and historically that the gospel did not overlook
the subject of death, since above all its teachings
drew on the resurrection of the One, as an accom-
plished event, and on the future resurrection of All,
as a certain promise. Universal resurrection involves
the creation of a perfect form for all that exists; it is
the final expression and realization of the meaning
of the universe, and consequently it is also the end
and the goal of history.
Thus, our venerable philosopher understood the
Christian doctrine literally, exactly in the manner in
which it is presented in the Holy Book, and looked
upon the prospect of universal resurrection as a guar-
anteed promise, as an indisputable fact of the future,
forgetting that in certain cases the words of the Bible,
and words in general, should be interpreted according
to their inmost sense and not according to their exter-
nal, literal form.
In saying this, of course, we do not mean to detract
from the significance of Christian doctrine to the civi-
lized world. The elevation of the “spirit” above the body,
love for one’s fellow man, restraint from repaying evil
with force, and self-sacrifice for the sake of truth and
the common good——these are the moral principles
that Christianity promoted. And these principles, in
overturning the ancient pagan world, in conquering it
through the great sufferings of the Teacher himself and
later also the suffering of his disciples, led to the re-
newal of the world, created a new era for modern man.
But even having taken into account Soloviev’s as-
sertion regarding the promise of Christian teachings,
IMMORTALITY FROM THE SCIENTIFIC POINT OF VIEW
that is, the actuality of their future realization, a scien-
tist will say: the universal resurrection is a matter of
faith, because it is in the highest sense a kind of miracle,
while scientific process, on the other hand, has long
ago renounced the miraculous and cannot depend upon
faith. This is why even such powerful thinkers as
Mechnikov have completely rejected the idea of life
after death.
However, before attempting to deal with this debate,
let us leave the religious plane and its related philo-
sophical problems, and turn to a scientific analysis of
immortality, that is, to the branch of knowledge recog-
nized as precise; let us see how the question of the im-
mortality of the human personality may be addressed
from a scientific point of view.
Not so long ago, this scientific view rested on three
pillars—the acknowledgment of the separate existence
of physical energy, matter, and spirit, all three appar-
ently irreducible to more general phenomena and like-
wise not sharing any common features with one an-
other. Even the late Mendeleyev did not think it possible
to abandon this universally acknowledged view.
But since then, Meyer and Helmholtz have enriched
the scientific discipline with the addition of one
unshakeable principle: the law of conservation of energy.
This law states that energy can be subject to transforma-
tion, but is neither spent nor diminished in the process.
Previously, there had already been established the
principle of conservation of matter. It was postulated
that matter retained the same mass throughout all pos-
sible transformations; in other words, a given amount
of matter, regardless of transformation, always remained
the same.
However, subsequent scientific discoveries, especially
the discovery of radioactive substances and likewise of
Roentgen rays, shook the very foundations of the afore-
said principle of conservation of matter, because they
made evident an (albeit slow and gradual) transforma-
tion of matter into energy. On the other hand, science
has furthermore established that atoms of matter, de-
composable into electrons, are themselves centers of
energy; consequently, in the physical world we can speak
only of energy as the essence of both visible matter
and, obviously, physical energy itself.
In other words, we can say that under certain known
conditions, energy in its latent potential form is the
source of substance—matter or mass—and the latter, in
turn, under certain conditions, can be decomposed into
a variety of physical energies. In this sense, even
Descartes approached the truth of the matter in sug-
gesting that substance consists of “motion” or “force.”
Gustav LeBon, posing the question “Is matter en-
ergy?” notes:
75
 As anyone who has followed the progress of my
work must be aware, I have been able to demon-
strate that the properties of radium salts are equally
the properties of every body existing in nature,
with the difference that in the case of radium,
they are more obviously expressed. All substances
are characterized by the emission of particles, sim-
ply to a lesser extent than is radium. This proves
that matter is characterized by slow disintegra-
tion. Radioactivity and disintegration (or disso-
ciation, or decay), and dematerialization, are with
respect to the properties of matter, synonymous.
Electricity and the warmth of the sun consist of
nothing but dissociated matter. It can be proven
that elements given off by the Earth’s poles are
identical to the elements emitted by radium. (G.
LeBon, The Evolution of Matter [in Russian], St.
Petersburg, 1911)
But beyond all this there remains the spiritual world
or, more precisely, the realm of so-called neuro-psy-
chic activity, which we directly perceive as the world
of phenomena originating in self-observation and self-
analysis. This world is commonly juxtaposed with the
objective world, for the latter is not subject to a process
of self- observation; yet at the same time, the objective
world is only perceived by mediation of the senses, of
internal emotion, that is, by means of the very same
subjective world that was discovered through self-analy-
sis.
However, this juxtaposition can exist only as long as
we judge neuro-psychic activity on the basis of our
emotional experience, in other words acknowledge this
activity as completely subjective, and as long as we
lack, at the same time, the capability to perceive the
internal workings of the external world. The scientific
discipline that I am striving to establish under the name
of “Objective psychology” or “Reflexology,” examines
neuro-psychic (associative) activity from a strictly ob-
jective point of view, as the totality of “higher” or as-
sociative reflexes, and their external causes or influ-
ences; and leaves the study of the subjective aspects of
these reflexes to the discipline of subjective (traditional)
psychology.
Thus, from a strictly objective point of view, analo-
gies can and must be drawn between various human
actions and the movements of pseudopods belonging to
the simplest creatures, such as amoebas; and what we
understand to be a higher or associative reflex is, in the
end, simply the response of living substance to an ex-
ternal stimulus. From this it is clear that mental activ-
ity in general, wherever and however it is manifested
in nature, must likewise be reduced to a particular form
76 SOCIETY • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2006
of energy, whose various manifestations we observe in
the surrounding organic world.
We know moreover, that the basis of the associative
activity of higher organisms is neural current (i.e., nerve
impulses) (in itself the product of protoplasmic reac-
tivity), for there is no associative (neuro-psychic) pro-
cess that does not occur in the brain; and brain activity,
as we know, is based on neural current, which is trans-
formed via muscular contraction and bodily movement
into mechanical energy.
It is known, too, that the impulse that arouses neural
current is external energy, which acts on receptive or-
gans located on the external and internal surfaces of the
body, organs which thus play the role of transformers
of external energy (as I have already indicated in 1896);
the proper conduction of current along neural threads,
on the other hand, is ensured by continuous blood flow
to the brain.
Existing evidence leaves no doubt as to the fact that,
under conditions of normal blood circulation in the
brain, the intensification of subjective (conscious) pro-
cesses corresponds to the slowing or even delay of physi-
cal movement, that is, the reduction of mechanical ac-
tivity. On the other hand, the acceleration and
intensification of mechanical activity corresponds to the
weakening of consciousness. Out of this flows the op-
position between subjective manifestations of conscious-
ness and objective motor processes, which speaks in
favor of the idea that active mental activity is accom-
panied by the delay of energy in the body’s centers,
more precisely in the cells of neural tissue.
We are all well aware that the active form of mental
work proceeds more slowly than the automatic. While
walking, for example, it is enough to make a concen-
trated mental effort, striving to carefully focus on pro-
ducing each step, for one’s pace immediately to slow
down or even be temporarily interrupted; on the other
hand, as soon as one’s attention is diverted to another
subject, the process of walking becomes more free and
regular.
Certain direct experiments with newborns, conducted
at the Pedological Institute in Petrograd (founded by
V. T. Zimin and myself), have proven that any external
impression attracting the attention of the infant child
has a calming effect on his movements and especially
on his breathing pattern, which grows more steady.
Thus, it is essential to acknowledge that the con-
scious or, to speak philosophically, spiritual realm is
tied to the delay of neural current. The neural current
itself consists, as we saw, of transformed physical en-
ergy of one kind or another. From this it is clear that
the spiritual aspect of the human personality, if by this
we mean the totality of subjective processes taking place
within that personality as well as the related external
phenomena, in the end is derived from external energy
and is the result of the delay and, consequently, the
maximum intensity of energy in the neural centers.
In this way it is obvious not only that there is no
opposition between neuro-psychic and so-called physi-
cal energy, but that, in fact, there exists a mutual rela-
tion between the two forms, based on the transition of
one into the other and vice versa.
For this reason it is essential to acknowledge that all
natural phenomena, including the internal processes of
living creatures and manifestations of the “spirit,” can
and must be considered as the product of one universal
energy, in which all known physical energy, along with
its material forms and even its manifestation as human
spirit, must potentially be contained.
In the final analysis, all energy must be acknowl-
edged as a single essence existing in the universe, and
all transformations of matter or substance, indeed all
forms of motion in general, including the flow of neu-
ral current, are nothing less than a manifestation of
universal energy. The latter is unknowable in its es-
sence, but represents the primary foundation of the
physical energies we observe, that is, the source of their
expression under certain conditions.
The most recent scientific conceptions, it is true,
speak of electrons as the smallest elements serving as
carriers of energy. However, this does not in the least
exclude the possibility that electrical atoms, or elec-
trons, containing positive or negative charges, are
not the final subdivision of the visible and invisible
physical world. Indeed, these ideas about electrons
as particles in continuous motion indicate, if any-
thing, the reluctance of the human mind to let go of
the idea of an endless divisibility of the material world
into smaller and smaller parts, in favor of acknowledg-
ing the complete disintegration of matter into energy.
Moreover, as Khvolson rightly indicates in his pam-
phlet, “Knowledge and Faith,” the hypotheses of mod-
ern physics are, in general, based more on faith than on
scientific proof.
In the end we must acknowledge that due to the lim-
ited capacity of human thought, which draws its sub-
ject matter from the visible, material world, the es-
sence of universal energy remains inaccessible to our
understanding.
Nonetheless, one thing is clear: that universal en-
ergy serves as the origin of both the material and spiri-
tual worlds, consequently, in potential form it must like-
wise contain equally the spiritual and the material. Be
that as it may, we find, among the smallest subdivi-
sions of the material world, as for example among the
products of radioactivity, that the properties of matter
IMMORTALITY FROM THE SCIENTIFIC POINT OF VIEW
have already ceased to be manifested, and that only the
qualities specific to energy remain. Similarly, mental
processes are revealed, in the final analysis, to lose any
strictly psychical properties and must be reduced in-
stead to unconscious processes connected to the expen-
diture of energy.
In this way, not only do we see no basis for the jux-
taposition of physical energy, matter, and spirit as sepa-
rate or particular entities, but rather we hold to the view
that all three have a single origin in the form of univer-
sal energy, the latter being the basis of everything that
is material and “spiritual” in the universe. This doc-
trine, which unifies all world phenomena, we term evo-
lutionary monism, choosing this particular label because
in the given case we arrive at monism via the clarifica-
tion and analysis of an evolutionary process that re-
duces all external manifestations of the visible world to
a single “universal” energy. It is this energy that deter-
mines the motion of everything in the universe, for we
are not aware of any natural phenomenon, any process,
that is not accompanied by movement.
With motion, in turn, is associated the energy of at-
traction and repulsion (forming the foundation of the
laws of gravitation between celestial bodies), the en-
ergy underlying the chemical combination of atoms,
and lastly the energy contained in the active compounds
of colloid substances, which, lying at the basis of all
life processes, is the source of the ability to respond to
stimuli, and also, consequently, of all responsive reac-
tions and reflexes of the living matter that composes
organisms.
Moreover, we must acknowledge that all motion
occurs seemingly within a single continuous chain,
thanks to the ceaseless transformation of one energy
into another. From here stems the constant and con-
tinual dependence of one phenomenon on another,
thanks to which the whole world becomes an endless
system of interactions, underlying the so-called law of
relativity. Thus, in the end, all natural forces are based
on interaction and all of them, furthermore, participate
in the creation of the human being, thus connecting
man to the primal origin.
However, this does not provide us with a complete
picture of the world process: we must add the fact that
organic nature, living and dead, is subject to the law of
evolution, according to which the development of one
thing from another guarantees the progress of all that
exists, of the world process itself, and likewise of man-
kind as the highest organism on Earth.
To emphasize the grandeur of this law of evolution,
and its significance even in the moral sphere, let us cite
the words of H. Drummond, who says in Progress and
Evolution of Man:
77
 In the boundless progression of the natural world, However, is this, in fact, the last word on the matter
which from the very beginning moves ever up- of the continued existence or nonexistence of the hu-
wards, from incompleteness to completion and man personality?
from imperfection to perfection; in this progress, If neuro-psychic activity is reducible to energy, we
moral nature asserts in all its breadth and depth must acknowledge that the law of conservation of en-
an eternal right to exist. Completeness, perfec- ergy—stated by Meyer, supported by Helmholtz, and
tion, love, have always been human needs. But now generally accepted— must be applied likewise to
never before have they been supported on “natu- neuro-psychic or correlative activity. In this way, the
ral” grounds by such commanding voices, or con- properties of energy that lie at the basis of Reflexology
firmed by such great and rational authority. give us the opportunity not only to examine the higher
manifestations of human neuro-psychic activity from a
With this preliminary information in mind, let us
strictly objective point of view, in the manner of any
proceed to the examination of the matter at hand. Let
natural phenomenon, without, furthermore, having to
us see whether science truly is powerless to address the
contrast spirit with matter, as so many have done even
question of the continued existence of the human per-
to this day; but also to investigate neuro-psychic activ-
sonality beyond the limits of life and death.
ity in light of the law of conservation of energy. (Per-
When a person dies, his body decomposes and ceases
haps this cycle [of conservation of energy], an under-
to exist: this is a fact. The decay of complex protein-
standing of which was accessible even to ancient peoples,
and carbohydrate-based substances leads to the decom-
helped serve to create the doctrine of transmigration of
position of the organism into simpler elements. In the
souls.)
process, energy is released, only to be entrapped again
Thus, in relation to the subject at hand, this law can
as the basis for the growth of vegetation, which, in
be restated to read: not one human action, not one step,
turn, serves as nutritive matter for other life forms
not one thought, whether expressed verbally or non-
and thus as a condition of the development of energy
verbally; none of these disappears without trace. This
in the latter. In this way, the physical aspect of the
is due to the fact that any action, word, gesture, or
human organism—what is known as the body—dis-
mimetic movement in general is inevitably accompa-
integrates; but this is not the same as saying that it is
nied by specific organic impressions that are, in turn,
destroyed. In fact, it is not lost, but rather trans-
reflected in the individual’s personality, becoming com-
formed, contributing to the creation of new organ-
ponents of new forms of activity.
isms and new creatures that are, in turn, subject to the
However, the particular characteristics of neuro-psy-
laws of evolution, and thus capable of infinite transfor-
chic activity presuppose that the latter is not exhausted
mation and perfection. Consequently the circulation of
in this simple “self-influence.” The fact of the matter is
energy does not cease even after the death of the organ-
that if the individual’s action, mimetic movement, or
ism, fostering, to the contrary, the development of life
gesture is produced in the presence of others, provid-
on earth.
ing that these others are capable of assimilating what
But what happens to the individual consciousness of
they see and hear, it is clear that they will transform
the human being, or more precisely, to his mental ac-
such actions and gestures into neuro-psychic activity,
tivity? Let us refer to the words of Mechnikov, a great
either thanks to suggestion, acquisition, and imitation,
skeptic as regards the question of human immortality:
or due to opposition and reaction; and that this activity
Before our birth, as so often during the course of
will be reflected in their future interactions with the
our lifetime, consciousness may be absent; but never is
surrounding world.
it transformed at these instances into anything else, at
Our soul acts in the manner of an imperceptible liq-
least not into something observable to ourselves. Even
uid, easily permeating its surroundings, unimpeded in
the slight alteration of our consciousness which we per-
the exercise of its influence on the external world, by
ceive in dreams can be unpleasant because it is condi-
mediation of its animal manifestations. It alters the
tional on the disruption of the brain’s proper function-
material environment in which these manifestations take
ing. And upon the complete cessation of the latter, rather
place: the presence of a virtuous individual improves
than its simple temporary disturbance, we are left with
the surrounding air and soil; the existence of evil and
precisely nothing, although it is true that the brain is in
lawlessness, on the other hand, is conducive to the spread
a physical sense integrated into nature; but how far from
of physical infection. (Freichtersleben, Hygiene of the
consciousness, from a normally functioning mind, is
Soul [in Russian])
the brain that has become a culture for bacteria or the
In the end, each person’s self-expression is deter-
contents of an insect’s intestinal tract.
mined by the influence exerted upon him by other in-

78 SOCIETY • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2006

dividuals. The human being is an organism which re-
ceives at birth a certain part of its ancestors’ biological
heritage, and subsequently acquires, through its upbring-
ing, the experience of older generations, and likewise
their moral outlook. At the same time, the human is
enriched by his own personal life experience, and de-
velops particular skills.
In this way, every individual possesses certain en-
ergy reserves that are endowed at birth, and others that
are acquired through upbringing and life experience;
and, consequently, the activity of external influences is
effective to the extent that it is able to stimulate the
active manifestation of, or to channel in a particular
direction, the previously acquired stores of energy. If
this proves impossible, the activity of these external
influences is inhibited.
Nonetheless, even in the latter case their activity
leaves a mark, being manifested in one way or another,
even to a very limited extent, even perhaps in the form
of reactionary opposition on the part of the individual.
In any case, we must keep in mind that inhibition rep-
resents only the temporary delay, rather than the utter
and final destruction, of a phenomenon.
How else could matters stand? If human neuro-psy-
chic activity must be reduced to energy, then it is clear
that this energy, manifested in the speech, mime, ges-
ture, or action of certain individuals, acts on the sen-
sory organs of other individuals and must be reflected,
in turn, in their speech, gesture, mime, and action,
which is precisely what guarantees the social transfer-
ence of facts and events in the historical life of nations.
It can be said that not one sigh, not one smile ever
disappears without trace. It would seem that nobody
hears the last breath of a dying prisoner, sequestered
from the world in his cell; and yet this very breath is
reincarnated in the streets, in meeting-halls, in the cries
of a people rebelling against tyranny, against a power
that leaves its political enemies to rot in jail. Equally
insignificant, it seems, is the smile on the face of a
young bride sending her beloved to war; and yet it makes
the soldier a hero, for he has understood the smile’s
meaning and dares not return home without the laurels
of victory.
Being an expression of the energy inherited by the
individual from his parents and accumulated through-
out his life thanks to the conversion by receptory or-
gans of external energies into neural current, and like-
wise being an expression of those external manifestations
which characterize it, neuro-psychic activity contains
all the preconditions for its dissemination from one in-
dividual to another, and from generation to generation.
This provides us with the basis to suppose that a person’s
“spiritual” self, which possesses inherent value, can never
IMMORTALITY FROM THE SCIENTIFIC POINT OF VIEW
vanish without trace. The human individual, as an amal-
gam of personal and inherited experience, does not ter-
minate his existence with the termination of his life.
On the contrary, he continues to exist in all those people
with whom he made contact, even indirectly, and thus
is preserved in posterity for as long as there is life on
earth.
In other words, it can be said that during his life-
time, the individual disseminates his energy among those
who surround him, who, in turn, transfer this energy to
others, continuing the cycle to the furthest limits of
human communication and interaction; moreover, the
originator of this cycle is also eventually influenced by
his own energy in its transmuted form.
In the collective human personality, everyone is con-
nected in an intricate relationship, such that no single
event can occur without having widespread repercus-
sions. One heroic gesture breeds another, just as one
crime inevitably brings another in its wake.
To make a figurative comparison—not forgetting to
take into account the boundlessness of human interac-
tions—we may say that over the course of his lifetime,
the individual distributes his influence through the col-
lective human personality, and is, in turn, influenced
by others, in the same way that a ship’s progress across
the sea creates waves that move outward in all direc-
tions and which, upon finally encountering the impedi-
ment of the shore, are sent back once again to their
point of origin, the ship itself.
It goes without saying that in connection to the ex-
ertion of its influence on others, every human person-
ality confronts the activity of a whole range of other
personalities, an activity which is not infrequently in
opposition to its own, and which by consequence acts
as an inhibitor to the dissemination of the individual
personality’s influence. However, inhibition in the sci-
entific sense is, as we already noted, a temporary phe-
nomenon. Upon its elimination under certain favorable
conditions, the barrier it presents to the further spread
of the individual’s influence quite simply falls away.
In this way is achieved the circulation of energy from
one person to the next, thanks to which there occurs a
continual, albeit not always observable, interaction be-
tween individuals; and not only between individuals,
but likewise between human beings and all the other
living creatures with which they make contact. In the end,
the mutual influence of individuals on each other creates a
general spiritual personality within a particular environ-
ment; from the totality of these, are formed the spiritual
personalities of nations; and taken all together, the lat-
ter make up the universal human personality.
Yet if continual mutual influence is an indisputable
fact of human life, then it is clear that physical death
79
does not correspond to spiritual death; the individual
personality continues to exist beyond the boundaries of
its physical form. The manifestations of this personal-
ity, the ways in which it asserted itself in the hearts and
minds of men, are all transformed into new neuro-psy-
chic processes among surrounding individuals and
among future generations; are passed from person to
person, from generation to generation, forever remain-
ing a motive impulse which instigates its recipients to
one or another form of activity.
This is why the so-called afterlife, that is, life be-
yond the limits of the corporeal aspect of the human
individual, undoubtedly exists; for the content of the
human personality is distributed in the manner of a
stimulus across the depth and breadth of human soci-
ety, as though physically poured into other beings and
thus transferred to the future; and it has no end as long
as even one human creature still exists on the earth. In
this respect, the Eastern doctrines of reincarnation seem
to have anticipated by many centuries an idea that we
now assert on strictly scientific grounds.
We come in this way to the idea of the social im-
mortality of any given human being. This kind of im-
mortality necessarily and even inevitably stems from
the fact that energy cannot simply disappear in the ex-
ternal world. The neuro-psychic activity of the indi-
vidual, as the expression of the energy held in his neu-
ral centers, manifested externally in one form or another
and received by surrounding individuals thanks to the
mediation of specialized organs as transformers of en-
ergy—this neuro-psychic activity, then, serves to stimu-
late certain processes in other organisms and conse-
quently gives the latter the necessary impulse to express
anew those processes in the external world.
In this way proceeds the ceaseless transfer of energy
from one individual to another, and from one generation
to another over the centuries, via a process known in ev-
eryday life as influence or mutual influence, though only
viewed as such when the aforementioned transfer of en-
ergy is more or less obvious; yet in reality that transfer,
whether clearly visible or not, is inevitably and necessar-
ily occurring every minute—even every second—wher-
ever one human being interacts with another.
From what we have said above, it is clear that we
are not dealing with the immortality of an individual
human personality in its entirety, since the latter, as we
have noted, ceases to exist as a personality, as a species,
as an individual, after death; rather, we are dealing with
a social immortality stemming from the indestructibil-
ity of the neuro-psychic energy that makes up the basis
of the human personality. Speaking in philosophical
language, we can say that we are dealing with the im-
mortality of a “spirit” which throughout its individual
80 SOCIETY • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2006
existence passes via mutual influence into the thousands
of human personalities it encounters, and can spread its
influence still further by means of certain cultural in-
stitutions (writing, the printed word, the telegraph, the
telephone, the gramophone, art, architecture, etc.) so
that it transcends immediate person-to-person relations
and can even transmit itself to subsequent generations.
One could say in other words that the personality, with
all of its many facets and idiosyncrasies, flows into a
number of other personalities, both contemporaneous
and subsequent.
This is why, to the extent that humanity’s existence
may be considered eternal, all manifestations of the
human personality must likewise be considered eter-
nally transferable. This is why the scientific concep-
tion of life after death must, in essence, come down to
an understanding of the human personality as continu-
ing outside the limits of its individual existence, such
that it participates in the perfection of humanity as a
whole and in the creation of a universal human spiri-
tual personality. In the latter, a part of every separate
human personality exists, even if it has ceased to exist
in the physical world; a part of it continues to live,
continually transformed, in the spiritual life of human-
ity, in other words in an endless number of human per-
sonalities.
It goes without saying that not every personality,
through its activity and work in general, makes the same
contribution to the spiritual culture of humanity: its
part might greater or lesser, positive or negative, cre-
ative or destructive, compared to the contribution of
others. However, the nature of this contribution does
not affect the immortality of the personality; indeed,
we are forced once again to concede that the personal-
ity is not destroyed by death, but, having manifested
itself throughout its lifetime in all its various forms,
lives on, and lives eternally, contributing to the cre-
ation of human spiritual culture; and the latter itself is
formed from the creative work of all individual human
personalities in general.
Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev (1857–1927), the great
Russian psychiatrist and neurologist, founded the St. Pe-
tersburg Psychoneurological Research Institute in 1907.
It was named after him in 1925. This speech was delivered
at a special meeting of the Institute in February 1916. It
was translated by Alisa Lockwood when she was a student
in the Department of Political Science at the University of
Ottawa and edited by Lloyd Strickland of the Department
of Psychology, Carleton University, Ottawa. It was pub-
lished in 1918 in Vestnik Anznia, Issue #2, and in a sepa-
rate edition from which this version was translated, with
several brief sections not included here.