Review of J. W. Dunne, The New Immortality

Abstract

THIS little book is intended to supply the general reader with a more or less popular account of the theories about time and the self which Mr. Dunne has developed in considerable detail in his previous works, “An Experiment with Time” and “The Serial Universe”. Mr. Dunne thinks that these theories are entailed by certain quite general facts about time and change, on one hand, and about self-consciousness on the other. The former reduce to the linguistic fact that we talk of future events as ‘becoming real’ or coming into existence’, of past events as having ‘ceased to be real’ or having ‘passed out of existence’, and so on. The latter reduce to the linguistic fact that each of us uses expressions like ‘my self and ‘your self’, which seem to imply, in the case of each of us, the existence of an owned self and an owning self and an ‘I’ which knows them both and sees that the one owns the other.