Do we all truly feel that we only want immortality out of simple self-interest, greed or selfishness if you will - and not because we feel that creatures such as ourselves should not have to die, that death is an injustice, that we deserve to live?

If so, then maybe we are not like the men of the 19th century James is describing, and that is a very interesting change in its own right.

EDIT: This may be an interesting link about the emotional content of the fight against death: http://yudkowsky.net/other/yehuda

What would it be like to be a rational atheist in the fifteenth century, and know beyond all hope of rescue that everyone you loved would be annihilated, one after another as you watched, unless you yourself died first? That is still the fate of humans today; the ongoing horror has not changed, for all that we have hope. Death is not a distant dream, not a terrible tragedy that happens to someone else like the stories you read in newspapers. One day you'll get a phone call, like I got a phone call, and the possibility that seemed distant will become reality. You will mourn, and finish mourning, and go on with your life, and then one day you'll get another phone call. That is the fate this world has in store for you, unless you make a convulsive effort to change it.

...

If I had spoken Yehuda's eulogy I would not have comforted the mourners in their loss. I would have told the mourners that Yehuda had been absolutely annihilated, that there was nothing left of him. I would have told them they were right to be angry, that they had been robbed, that something precious and irreplaceable was taken from them, for no reason at all, taken from them and shattered, and they are never getting it back.