Concept

Immortality

Overview

Immortality is the concept of eternal life and permanent resistance to death from natural causes. Some species possess "biological immortality" due to an apparent lack of the Hayflick limit.

From at least the time of the ancient Mesopotamians, there has been a conviction that gods may be physically immortal, and that this is also a state that the gods at times offer humans. In Christianity, the conviction that God may offer physical immortality with the resurrection of the flesh at the end of time has traditionally been at the center of its beliefs. What form an unending human life would take, or whether an immaterial soul exists and possesses immortality, has been a major point of focus of religion, as well as the subject of speculation and debate. In religious contexts, immortality is often stated to be one of the promises of divinities to human beings who perform virtue or follow divine law.

Some scientists, futurists, and philosophers have theorized about the immortality of the human body, with some suggesting that human immortality may be achievable in the first few decades of the 21st century with the help of certain speculative technologies such as mind uploading (digital immortality).

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Immortality is discussed.

Religion, in fact, for the great majority of our own race _means_ immortality, and nothing else. God is the producer of immortality; and whoever has doubts of immortality is written down as an atheist without farther trial. I have said nothing in my lectures about immortality or the belief therein, for to me it seems a secondary point.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
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The substance must give rise to a stream of consciousness continuous with the present stream, in order to arouse our hope, but of this the mere persistence of the substance _per se_ offers no guarantee. Moreover, in the general advance of our moral ideas, there has come to be something ridiculous in the way our forefathers had of grounding their hopes of immortality on the simplicity of their substance. The demand…
William James, The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1
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But that, for all this, it was not at all the more immortal, but that its very entrance into the body of a man was the beginning of its destruction, as if it were a disease; so that it passes through this life in wretchedness, and at last perishes in that which is called death. But you say that it is of no consequence whether it comes into a body once or often, with respect to our occasion of fear; for it is right…
Plato, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates
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Obj. 4: Further, immortality is promised to man as a reward, according to Apoc. 21:4: "Death shall be no more." But man was not created in the state of reward, but that he might deserve the reward. Therefore man was not immortal in the state of innocence. _On the contrary,_ It is written (Rom.
Aquinas Thomas, Summa Theologica, Part I
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A member of series A and a member of series B, coalesce; and so lose their individualities. Now, obviously, if the immortality of a series is shown if its members divide and subdivide perpetually, then the opposite of immortality is shown when, instead of division, there is union. Each series ends, and there is initiated a new series, differing more or less from both.
Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Biology, Volume 1
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Immortality

Overview

In the original texts

Philosophers who discussed Immortality

Related ideas

Place in the tradition