Raymond or Life and Death
Sir Oliver Lodge FRS
Publisher: Methuen
First Published: 1916
Pages: 404
Availability: Out of Print
- Part 3: Life and Death -
Introduction
Chapter 1
The Meaning of the Term Life
Chapter 2
The Meaning of the Term Death
Chapter 3
Death and Decay
Chapter 4
Continued Existence
Chapter 5
Past, Present, and Future
Chapter 6
Interaction of Mind and Matter
Chapter 7
"Resurrection of the Body"
Chapter 8
Mind and Brain
Chapter 9
Life and Consciousness
Chapter 10
On Means of Communication
Chapter 11
On the Fact of Supernormal Communication
Chapter 12
On the Contention that all Psychic Communications are a trivial Nature and Deal with Insignificant Topics
Chapter 13
On the Matter of Communication
Chapter 14
Various Psycho-Physical Methods
Chapter 15
Attitude of the Wise and Prudent
Chapter 16
Outlook on the Universe
Chapter 17
The Christian idea of God
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- (Part 3) - Life and Death -
Introduction
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"Eternal from Shall still divide
The eternal soul from all beside;
And I shall know him we meet."
Tennyson, In Memoriam
THE shorter the word the more inevitable it is that it will be used in many significations; as can be proved by looking out almost any monosyllable in a large dictionary. The tendency of a simple word to have many glancing meanings - like shot silk, as Tennyson put it - is a character of high literary value; though it may be occasionally inconvenient for scientific purposes. It is unlikely that we can escape an ambiguity due to this tendency, but I wish to use the term 'life' to signify the vivifying principle which animates matter.
That the behaviour of animated matter differs from what is often called dead matter is familiar, and is illustrated by the description sometimes given of an uncanny piece of mechanism- that "it behaves as if it were alive." In the case of a jumping bean, for instance, its spasmodic and capricious behaviour can be explained with apparent simplicity, though with a suspicious trend towards superstition, by the information that a live and active maggot inhabits a cavity inside. It is thereby removed from the bare category of physics only, though still perfectly obedient to physical laws: it jumps in accordance with mechanics, but neither the times nor the direction of its jumps can be predicted.
We must admit that the term 'dead matter' is often misapplied. It is used sometimes to denote merely the constituents of the general inorganic world. But it is inconvenient to speak of utterly inanimate things, like stones, as 'dead,' when no idea of life was ever associated with them, and when 'inorganic' is all that is meant. The term 'dead' applied to a piece of matter signifies the absence of a vivifying principle, no doubt, but it is most properly applied to a collocation of organic matter which has been animated.
Again, when animation has ceased, the thing we properly call dead is not the complete organism, but that material portion which is left behind; we do not or should not intend to make any assertion concerning the vivifying principle which has left it, - beyond the bare fact of its departure. We know too little about that principle to be able to make safe general assertions. The life that is transmitted by an acorn or other seed fruit is always beyond our ken. We can but study its effects, and note its presence or its absence by results.
Life must be considered sui generis; it is not a form of energy, nor can it be expressed in terms of something else. Electricity is in the same predicament; it too cannot be explained in terms of something else. This is true of all fundamental forms of being. Magnetism may be called a concomitant of moving electricity; ordinary matter can perhaps be resolved into electric charges: but an electric charge can certainly not be expressed in terms of either matter or energy. No more can life. To show that the living principle in a seed is not one of the forms of energy, it is sufficient to remember that that seed can give rise to innumerable descendants, through countless generations, without limit. There is nothing like a constant quantity of something to be shared, as there is in all examples of energy: there is no conservation about it: the seed embodies a stimulating and organising principle which appears to well from a limitless source.
But although life is not energy, any more than it is matter, yet it directs energy and thereby controls arrangements of matter. Through the agency of life specific structures are composed which would not otherwise exist, from a sea-shell to a cathedral, from a blade of grass to an oak; and specific distributions of energy are caused, from the luminosity of a firefly to an electric arc, from the song of a cricket to an oratorio.
Life makes use of any automatic activities, or transferences and declensions of energy, which are either potentially or actually occurring. In especial it makes use of the torrent of ether tremors which reach the earth from the sun. Every plant is doing it constantly. Admittedly life exerts no force, it does no work, but it makes effective the energy available for an organism which it controls and vivifies; it determines in what direction and when work shall be done. It is plain matter of fact that it does this, whether we understand the method or not, - and thus indirectly life interacts with and influences the material world. The energy of coal is indirectly wholly solar, but without human interference it might remain buried in the earth, and certainly would never propel a ship across the Atlantic. One way of putting the matter is to say that life times, and directs. If it runs a railway train, it runs the train not like a locomotive but like a General Manager. It enters into battle with a walking-stick, but guns are fired to its orders. It may be said to aim and fire: one of its functions is to discriminate between the wholesome and the deleterious, between friend and foe. That is a function outside the scope of physics.
Energy controlled by life is not random energy: the kind of self-composition or personal structure built by it depends on the kind of life-unit which is operating, not on the pabulum which is supplied. The same food will serve to build a pig, a chicken, or a man. Food which is assimilable at all takes a shape determined by the nature of the operative organism, and indeed by the portion of the organism actually reached by it. Unconscious constructive ability is as active in each cell of the body as in a honeycomb; only in a beehive we can see the operators at work. The construction of an eye or an ear is still more astonishing. In the inorganic world such structures would be meaningless, for there would be nothing to respond to their stimulus; they can only serve elementary mind and consciousness. The brain and nerve
system is an instrument of transmutation or translation from the physical to the mental, and vice versa.
Stages of Evolution
Steps in the progress of evolution-great stages which have been likened by Sir James Crichton Browne to exceptional Mendelian Mutations-may be rather imaginatively rehearsed somewhat thus:
Starting with
We need not insist on these or any other stages for our present purpose; yet something of the kind would seem to have occurred, in the mysterious course of time.
Three Explanatory Notes THREE EXPLANATORY NOTES
Note A. - Mechanics of Jumping Bean
The biological explanation of a jumping bean is sometimes felt to be puzzling, inasmuch as the creature is wholly enclosed; and a man in a boat knows that he cannot propel it by movement inside, without touching the water or something external. But the reaction of a table can be made use of through the envelope, and a live thing can momentarily vary its own weight-pressure and even reverse its sign. This fact has a bearing on some psycho-physical experiments, and hence is worthy of a moment's attention.
To weigh an animal that jumps and will not keep still is always troublesome. It cannot alter its average weight, truly, but it can redistribute it in time; at moments its apparent weight may be excessive, and at other moments zero or even negative, as during the middle of an energetic leap. Parenthetically we may here interpolate a remark and say that what is called interference of light (two lights producing darkness, in popular language) is a redistribution of luminous energy in space. No light, nor any kind of wave motion, is destroyed by interference when two sets of waves overlap, but the energy rises to a maximum in some places, and in other places sinks to zero.
No wave energy is consumed by interference-only rearranged. This fact is often misstated. And probably the other statement, about the varying apparent weight - ie. pressure on the ground-of a live animal, may be misstated too: though there is no question of energy about that, but only of force. The force or true weight, in the sense of the earth's attraction, is there all the time, and is constant; but the pressure on the ground, or the force needed to counteract the weight, is not constant. After momentary violence, as in throwing, no support need be supplied for several seconds; and, like the maggot inside a hollow bean, a live thing turning itself into a projectile may even carry something else up too. It is instructive also to consider a flying bird, and a dirigible balloon, and to ask where the still existing weight of these things can be found.
NOTE B.--DIFFERENCES BETWEFN A GROWING ORGANISM AND A GROWING CRYSTAL
The properties which differentiate living matter from any kind of inorganic imitation may be instinctively felt, but can hardly be formulated without expert knowledge. The differences between a growing organism and a growing crystal are many and various, but it must suffice here to specify the simplest and most familiar sort of difference; and as it is convenient to take a possibly controversial statement of this kind from the writings of a physiologist, I quote here a passage from an article by Professor Fraser Harris, of Halifax, Nova Scotia, in the current number of the quarterly magazine called Science Progress edited by Sir Ronald Ross
"Living animal bioplasm has the power of growing, that is of assimilating matter in most cases chemically quite unlike that of its own constitution. Now this is a remarkable power, not in the least degree shared by non-living matter. Its very familiarity has blinded us to its uniqueness as a chemical phenomenon. The mere fact that a man eating beef, bird, fish, lobster, sugar, fat, and innumerable other things can transform these into human bioplasm, something chemically very different even from that of them which most resembles human tissue, is one of the most extraordinary facts in animal physiology. A crystal growing in a solution is not only not analogous to this process, it is in the sharpest possible contrast with it. The crystal grows only in the sense that it increases in bulk by accretions to its exterior, and only does that by being immersed in a solution of the same material as its own substance. It takes up to itself only material which is already similar to itself; this is not assimilation, it is merely incorporation.
"The term 'growth', strictly speaking, can. be applied. only to metabolism in the immature or convalescent organism. The healthy adult is not 'growing' in this sense; when of constant weight he is adding neither to his stature nor his girth, and yet he is assimilating as truly as ever he did. Put more technically: in the adult of stationary weight, anabolism is quantitatively equal to katabolism, whereas in the truly growing organism anabolism is prevailing over katabolism; and reversely in the wasting of an organism or in senile decay, katabolism is prevailing over anabolism. The crystal in its solution offers no analogies with the adult or the senile states - but these are of the very essence of the life of an organism...
"The fact, of course familiar to every beginner in biology, is that the crystal is only incorporating and not excreting anything, whereas the living matter is always excreting as well as assimilating. This one-sided metabolism - if it can be dignified with that term - is indeed characteristic of the crystal, but it is at no time characteristic of the living organism. The organism, whether truly growing or only in metabolic equilibrium, is constantly taking up material to replace effete material, is replenishing because it has previously displenished itself or cast off material. The resemblance between a so-called 'growing' crystal and a growing organism is verily of the most superficial kind."
And Professor Fraser Harris concludes his article thus:
"Between the living and the non-living there is a great gulf fixed, and no efforts of ours, however heroic, have as yet bridged it over."
NOTE C-OLD AGE
We know that as vitality diminishes the bodily deterioration called old age sets in, and that a certain amount of deterioration results in death; but it turns out, on systematic inquiry, that old age and death are not essential to living organisms. They represent the deterioration and wearing out of working parts, so that the vivifying principle is hampered in its manifestation and cannot achieve results which with a younger and healthier machine were possible; but the parts which wear out are not the essential bearers of the vivifying principle; they are accreted or supplementary portions appropriate to developed individual earth life, and it does not appear improbable that the progress of discovery may at least postpone the deterioration that we call old age, for a much longer time than at present. Emphasis on this distinction between germ cell and body cell, usually associated with Weismann, seems to have been formulated before him by Herdman of Liverpool.
Biologists teach us that the phenomenon of old age is not evident in the case of the unicellular organisms which reproduce by fission. The cell can be killed, but it need neither grow old nor die. Death appears to be a prerogative of the higher organisms. But even among these Professor Weismann adopts and defends the view that "death is not a primary necessity, but that it has been secondarily acquired by adaptation." The cell is not inherently limited in its number of cell-generations. The low unicellular organism is potentially immortal; the higher multicellular form, with well-differentiated organs, contains the germ of death within its soma. Death seems to supervene by reason of its utility to the species: continued life of an individual after a certain stage being comparatively useless. From the point of view of the race the soma or main body is "a secondary appendage of the real bearer of life-the reproductive cells." The somatic cells probably lost their immortal qualities on this immortality becoming useless to the species. Their mortality may have been a mere consequence of their differentiation. "Natural death was not introduced from absolute intrinsic necessity, inherent in the nature of living matter," says Weismann, "but on grounds of utility; that is from necessities which sprang up, not from the general conditions of life, but from those special conditions which dominate the life of multicellular organisms."
It is not the germ cell itself, but the bodily accretion or appendage, which is abandoned by life, and which accordingly dies and decays.
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- (Part 3) - Chapter 1 - Life and Death -
The Meaning of the Term Life
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"Eternal process moving on."
Tennyson
THE shorter the word the more inevitable it is that it will be used in many significations; as can be proved by looking out almost any monosyllable in a large dictionary. The tendency of a simple word to have many glancing meanings-like shot silk, as Tennyson put it - is a character of high literary value; though it may be occasionally inconvenient for scientific purposes. It is unlikely that we can escape an ambiguity due to this tendency, but I wish to use the term 'life' to signify the vivifying principle which animates matter.
That the behaviour of animated matter differs from what is often called dead matter is familiar, and is illustrated by the description sometimes given of an uncanny piece of mechanism - that "it behaves as if it were alive." In the case of a jumping bean, for instance, its spasmodic and capricious behaviour can be explained with apparent simplicity, though with a suspicious trend towards superstition, by the information that a live and active maggot inhabits a cavity inside. It is thereby removed from the bare category of physics only, though still perfectly obedient to physical laws: it jumps in accordance with mechanics, but neither the times nor the direction of its jumps can be predicted.(1)
(1) See explanatory note A at end of chapter.
We must admit that the term 'dead matter' is often misapplied. It is used sometimes to denote merely the constituents of the general inorganic world. But it is inconvenient to speak of utterly inanimate things, like stones, as 'dead,' when no idea of life was ever associated with them, and when 'inorganic' is all that is meant. The term 'dead' applied to a piece of matter signifies the absence of a vivifying principle, no doubt, but it is most properly applied to a collocation of organic matter which has been animated.
Again, when animation has ceased, the thing we properly call dead is not the complete organism, but that material portion which is left behind; we do not or should not intend to make any assertion concerning the vivifying principle which has left it,- beyond the bare fact of its departure. We know too little about that principle to be able to make safe general assertions. The life that is transmitted by an acorn or other seed fruit is always beyond our ken. We can but study its effects, and note its presence or its absence by results.
Life must be considered sui generis; it is not a form of energy, nor can it be expressed in terms of something else. Electricity is in the same predicament; it too cannot be explained in terms of something else. This is true of all fundamental forms of being. Magnetism may be called a concomitant of moving electricity; ordinary matter can perhaps be resolved into electric charges: but an electric charge can certainly not be expressed in terms of either matter or energy. No more can life. To show that the living principle in a seed is not one of the forms of energy, it is sufficient to remember that that seed can give rise to innumerable descendants, through countless generations, without limit. There is nothing like a constant quantity of something to be shared, as there is in all examples of energy: there is no conservation about it: the seed embodies a stimulating and organising principle which appears to well from a limitless source.
But although life is not energy, any more than it is matter, yet it directs energy and thereby controls arrangements of matter. Through the agency of life specific structures are composed which would not otherwise exist, from a sea-shell to a cathedral, from a blade of grass to an oak; and specific distributions of energy are caused, from the luminosity of a firefly to an electric arc, from the song of a cricket to an oratorio.
Life makes use of any automatic activities, or transferences and declensions of energy, which are either potentially or actually occurring. In especial it makes use of the torrent of ether tremors which reach the earth from the sun. Every plant is doing it constantly. Admittedly life exerts no force, it does no work, but it makes effective the energy available for an organism which it controls and vivifies; it determines in what direction and when work shall be done. It is plain matter of fact that it does this, whether we understand the method or not,- and thus indirectly life interacts with and influences the material world. The energy of coal is indirectly wholly solar, but without human interference it might remain buried in the earth, and certainly would never propel a ship across the Atlantic. One way of putting the matter is to say that life times, and directs. If it runs a railway train, it runs the train not like a locomotive but like a General Manager. It enters into battle with a walking-stick, but guns are fired to its orders. It may be said to aim and fire: one of its functions is to discriminate between the wholesome and the deleterious, between friend and foe. That is a function outside the scope of physics.
Energy controlled by life is not random energy: the kind of self-composition or personal structure built by it depends on the kind of life-unit which is operating, not on the pabulum which is supplied. The same food will serve to build a pig, a chicken, or a man. Food which is assimilable at all takes a shape determined by the nature of the operative organism, and indeed by the portion of the organism actually reached by it. Unconscious constructive ability is as active in each cell of the body as in a honeycomb; only in a beehive we can see the operators at work. The construction of an eye or an ear is still more astonishing. In the inorganic world such structures would be meaningless, for there would be nothing to respond to their stimulus; they can only serve elementary mind and consciousness. The brain and nerve system is an instrument of transmutation or translation from the physical to the mental, and vice versa.
Stages of Evolution
Steps in the progress of evolution-great stages which have been likened by Sir James Crichton Browne to exceptional Mendelian Mutations-may be rather imaginatively rehearsed somewhat thus:
Starting with
Then, as a new and astonishing departure, comes-
And after that
(1) See explanatory note B.
Three Explanatory Notes
Note A - Mechanics of Jumping Bean
The biological explanation of a jumping bean is sometimes felt to be puzzling, inasmuch as the creature is wholly enclosed; and a man in a boat knows that he cannot propel it by movement inside, without touching the water or something external. But the reaction of a table can be made use of through the envelope, and a live thing can momentarily vary its own weight - pressure and even reverse its sign. This fact has a bearing on some psycho-physical experiments, and hence is worthy of a moment's attention.
To weigh an animal that jumps and will not keep still is always troublesome. It cannot alter its average weight, truly, but it can redistribute it in time; at moments its apparent weight may be excessive, and at other moments zero or even negative, as during the middle of an energetic leap. Parenthetically we may here interpolate a remark and say that what is called interference of light (two lights producing darkness, in popular language) is a redistribution of luminous energy in space. No light, nor any kind of wave motion, is destroyed by interference when two sets of waves overlap, but the energy rises to a maximum in some places, and in other places sinks to zero.
No wave energy is consumed by interference-only rearranged. This fact is often misstated. And probably the other statement, about the varying apparent weight - ie. pressure on the ground-of a live animal, may be misstated too: though there is no question of energy about that, but only of force. The force or true weight, in the sense of the earth's attraction, is there all the time, and is constant; but the pressure on the ground, or the force needed to counteract the weight, is not constant. After momentary violence, as in throwing, no support need be supplied for several seconds; and, like the maggot inside a hollow bean, a live thing turning itself into a projectile may even carry something else up too. It is instructive also to consider a flying bird, and a dirigible balloon, and to ask where the still existing weight of these things can be found.
Note B - Differences Between a Goring Organism and a Growing Crystal
The properties which differentiate living matter from any kind of inorganic imitation may be instinctively felt, but can hardly be formulated without expert knowledge. The differences between a growing organism and a growing crystal are many and various, but it must suffice here to specify the simplest and most familiar sort of difference; and as it is convenient to take a possibly controversial statement of this kind from the writings of a physiologist, I quote here a passage from an article by Professor Fraser Harris, of Halifax, Nova Scotia, in the current number of the quarterly magazine called Science Progress edited by Sir Ronald Ross
And Professor Fraser Harris concludes his article thus:
Note C - Cold Age
We know that as vitality diminishes the bodily deterioration called old age sets in, and that a certain amount of deterioration results in death; but it turns out, on systematic inquiry, that old age and death are not essential to living organisms. They represent the deterioration and wearing out of working parts, so that the vivifying principle is hampered in its manifestation and cannot achieve results which with a younger and healthier machine were possible; but the parts which wear out are not the essential bearers of the vivifying principle; they are accreted or supplementary portions appropriate to developed individual earth life, and it does not appear improbable that the progress of discovery may at least postpone the deterioration that we call old age, for a much longer time than at present. Emphasis on this distinction between germ cell and body cell, usually associated with Weismann, seems to have been formulated before him by Herdman of Liverpool.
Biologists teach us that the phenomenon of old age is not evident in the case of the unicellular organisms which reproduce by fission. The cell can be killed, but it need neither grow old nor die. Death appears to be a prerogative of the higher organisms. But even among these Professor Weismann adopts and defends the view that "death is not a primary necessity, but that it has been secondarily acquired by adaptation." The cell is not inherently limited in its number of cell-generations. The low unicellular organism is potentially immortal; the higher multicellular form, with well-differentiated organs, contains the germ of death within its soma. Death seems to supervene by reason of its utility to the species: continued life of an individual after a certain stage being comparatively useless. From the point of view of the race the soma or main body is "a secondary appendage of the real bearer of life-the reproductive cells." The somatic cells probably lost their immortal qualities on this immortality becoming useless to the species. Their mortality may have been a mere consequence of their differentiation. "Natural death was not introduced from absolute intrinsic necessity, inherent in the nature of living matter," says Weismann, "but on grounds of utility; that is from necessities which sprang up, not from the general conditions of life, but from those special conditions which dominate the life of multicellular organisms.
It is not the germ cell itself, but the bodily accretion or appendage, which is abandoned by life, and which accordingly dies and decays.
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- (Part 3) - Chapter 2 - Life and Death -
The Meaning of the Term Death
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"And Life, still wreathing flowers for Death to wear."-
ROSSETTI
WHATEVER Life may really be, it is to us an abstraction: for the word is a generalised term to signify that which is common to all animals and plants, and which is not directly operative in the inorganic world. To understand life we must study living things, to see what is common to them all. An organism is alive when it moulds matter to a characteristic form, and utilises energy for its own purposes - the purposes especially of growth and reproduction. A living organism, so far as it is alive, preserves its complicated structure from deterioration and decay.
Death is the cessation of that controlling influence over matter and energy, so that thereafter the uncontrolled activity of physical and chemical forces supervene. Death is not the absence of life merely, the term signifies its departure or separation, the severance of the abstract principle from the concrete residue. The term only truly applies to that which has been living.
Death therefore may be called a dissociation, a dissolution, a separation of a controlling entity from a physicochemical organism; it may be spoken of in general and vague terms as a separation of soul and body, if the term "soul' is reduced to its lowest denomination.
Death is not extinction. Neither the soul nor the body is extinguished or put out of existence. The body weighs just as much as before, the only properties it loses at the moment of death are potential properties. So also all we can assert concerning the vital principle is that it no longer animates that material organism; we cannot safely make further assertion regarding it, or maintain its activity or its inactivity without further information.
When we say that a body is dead we may be speaking accurately. When we say that a person is dead, we are using an ambiguous term; we may be referring to his discarded body, in which case we may be speaking truly and with precision. We may be referring to his personality, his character, to what is really himself ; in which case though we must admit that we are speaking popularly, the term is not quite simply applicable. He has gone, he has passed on, he has "passed through the body and gone," as Browning says in Abt Vogler, but he is - I venture to say - certainly not dead in the same sense as the body is dead. It is his absence which allows the body to decay, he himself need be subject to no decay nor any destructive influence. Rather he is emancipated; he is freed from the burden of the flesh, though with it be has also lost those material and terrestrial potentialities which the bodily mechanism conferred upon him; and if he can exert himself on the earth any more, it can only be with some difficulty and as it were by permission and co-operation of those still here. It appears as if sometimes and occasionally he can still stimulate into activity suitable energetic mechanism, but his accustomed machinery for manifestation has been lost: or rather it is still there for a time, but it is out of action, it is dead.
Nevertheless inasmuch as those who have lost their material body have passed through the process of dissolution or dissociative severance which we call death, it is often customary to speak of them as dead. They are no longer living, if by living we mean associated with a material body of the old kind; and in that sense we need not hesitate to speak of them collectively as 'the dead.'
We need not be afraid of the word, nor need we resent its use or hesitate to employ it, when once we and our hearers understand the sense in which it may rightly be employed. If ideas associated with the term had always been sensible and wholesome, people need have had no compunction at all about using it. But by the populace, and by Ecclesiastics also, the term has been so misused, and the ideas of people have been so confused by insistent concentration on merely physical facts, and by the necessary but over emphasised attention to the body left behind, that it was natural for a time to employ other words, until the latent ambiguity had ceased to be troublesome. And occasionally, even now, it is well to be emphatic in this direction, in order to indicate our disagreement with the policy of harping on worms and graves and epitaphs, or on the accompanying idea of a General Resurrection, with reanimation of buried bodies. Hence in strenuous contradiction to all this superstition comes the use of such phrases as 'transition' or 'passing,' and the occasional not strictly justifiable assertion that "there is no death."
For as a matter of familiar fact death there certainly is; and to deny a fact is no assistance. No one really means to deny a fact; those who make the statement only want to divert thoughts from a side already too much emphasised, and to concentrate attention on another side. What they mean is, there is no extinction. They definitely mean to maintain that the process called death is a mere severence of soul and body, and that the soul is freed rather than injured thereby., The body alone dies and decays; but there is no extinction even for it, only a change. For the other part there can hardly be even a change-except a change of surroundings. It is unlikely that character and personality are liable to sudden revolutions or mutations. Potentially they may be different, because of different opportunities, but actually at the moment they are the same. Likening existence to a curve, the curvature has changed, but there is no other discontinuity.
Death is not a word to fear, any more than birth is. We change our state at birth, and come into the world of air and sense and myriad existence; we change our state at death and enter a region of - what? Of Ether, I think, and still more myriad existence; a region in which communion is more akin to what we here call telepathy, and where intercourse is not conducted by the accustomed indirect physical processes; but a region in which beauty and knowledge are as vivid as they are here: a region in which progress is possible, and in which "admiration, hope, and love" are even more real and dominant. It is in this sense that we can truly say, "The dead are not dead, but alive."
Appendix on Feelings when Death is Imminent
Preliminary Statement by OJL
A lady was brought by a friend to call on us at Mariemont during a brief visit to Edgbaston, and I happened to have a talk with her in the garden. I found that she had been one of the victims of the Lusitania, and as she seemed very cheerful and placid about it, I questioned her as to her feelings on the occasion. I found her a charming person, and she entered into the matter with surprising fulness, considering that she was a complete stranger. Her chief anxiety seems to have been for her husband, whom she had left either in America or the West Indies, and for her friends generally; but on her own behalf she seems to have felt extremely little anxiety or discomfort of any kind. She told me she had given up hope of being saved, and was only worried about friends mourning on her behalf and thinking that she must have suffered a good deal, whereas, in point of fact, she was not really suffering at all. She was young and healthy, and apparently felt no evil results from the three hours' immersion. She was sucked down by the ship, and when she came to the surface again, her first feeling was one of blank surprise at the disappearance of what had brought her across the Atlantic. The ship was "not there."
I thought her account so interesting, that after a few months I got her address from the friend with whom she had been staying, and wrote asking if she would write it down for me. In due course she did so, writing from abroad, and permits me to make use of the statement, provided I suppress her name; which accordingly I do, quoting the document otherwise in full.
The Document referred to
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- (Part 3) - Chapter 3 - Life and Death -
Death and Decay
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"All, that doth live, lives always!"
Edwin Arnold
CONSIDER now the happenings to the discarnate body. In the first place, I repeat, it is undesirable to concentrate attention on a grave. The discarnate body must be duly attended to when done with; the safety of the living is a paramount consideration; the living must retain control over what is dead. Uncontrolled natural forces are often dangerous: the only thing harmful about a flood or a fire is the absence of control. Either the operations must be supervised and intelligently directed, or they must be subjected to such disabilities that they can do no harm. But to associate continued personality with a dead body, such as is suggested by phrases like "lay him in the earth," or "here lies such a one," or to anticipate any kind of physical resuscitation, is unscientific and painful. Unfortunately the orthodox religious world at some epochs has attached superstitious importance, not to the decent disposal, but to the imagined future of the body. Painful and troublesome to humanity those rites have been. The tombs of Egypt are witness to the harassing need felt by the living to provide their loved ones with symbols or tokens of all that they might require in a future state of existence,- as if material things were needed by them any more, or as if we could provide them if they were.(1) The simple truth is always so much saner and happier than the imaginings of men; or, as Dr. Schuster said in his Presidential address to the British Association at Manchester, 1915,- "The real world is far more beautiful than any of our dreams."
'It is rash to condemn a human custom which has prevailed for centuries or millenniums, and it is wrong to treat it de haut en bas. I would not be understood as doing so, in this brief and inadequate reference to the contents of Egyptian tombs. Their fuller interpretation awaits the labour of students now working at them.
In the same spirit I wish to leave open the question of what possible rational interpretation may be given to the mediaeval phrase "Resurrection of the body"; a subject on which much has been written. What I am contending against is not the scholarly but the popular interpretation. For further remarks on this subject see Chapter VII below.
What is the simple truth? It can be regarded from two points of view, the prosaic and the poetic.
Prosaically we can say that the process of decay, if regarded scientifically, is not in itself necessarily repugnant. It may be as interesting as fermentation or any other chemical or biological process. Putrefaction, like poison, is hostile to higher living organisms, and hence a self-protecting feeling of disgust has arisen round it, in the course of evolution. An emotional feeling arises in the mind of anyone who has to combat any process or operation of nature,--like the violent emotions excited in an extreme tee-totaller by the word 'drink': a result of the evil its profanation has done; for the verb itself is surely quite harmless. Presumably a criminal associates disagreeable anticipations with the simple word 'hanging.' The idea of a rank weed is repulsive to a gardener, but not to a botanist; the idea of disease is repellent to a prospective patient, not to a doctor or bacteriologist; the idea of dirt is objectionable to a housewife, but it is only matter out of place; the word 'poison' conveys nothing objectionable to a chemist. Everything removed from the emotional arena, and transplanted into the intellectual, becomes interesting and tractable and worthy of study. Living organisms of every kind are good in themselves, though when out of place and beyond control they may be harmful. A tiger is an object of dread to an Indian village: to a hunting party he may be keenly attractive. In any case he is a lithe and beautiful and splendid creature. Microscopic organisms may have troublesome and destructive effects, but in themselves they can be studied with interest and avidity. All living creatures have their assuredly useful function, only it may be a function on which we naturally shrink from dwelling when in an emotional mood. Everything of this kind is an affair of mood; and, properly regarded, nothing in nature is common or unclean. That a flying albatross is a beautiful object every one can cordially admit, but that the crawling surface of a stagnant sea can be regarded with friendly eyes seems an absurdity; yet there is nothing absurd in it. It is surely the bare truth concerning all living creatures of every grade, that "the Lord God made them all"; and it was of creeping water-snakes that the stricken Mariner at length, when he had learnt the lesson, ejaculated:
For what can be said poetically about the fate of the beloved body, the poets themselves must be appealed to. But that there is kinship between the body and the earth is literal truth. Of terrestrial particles it is wholly composed, and that they should be restored to the earth whence they were borrowed is natural and peaceful. Moreover, out of the same earth, and by aid of the very same particles, other helpful forms of life may arise; and though there may be no conscious unification or real identity, yet it is pardonable to associate, in an imaginative and poetic mood, the past and future forms assumed by the particles:
Quotations are hardly necessary to show that this idea runs through all poetry. An ancient variety is enshrined in the Hyacinthus and Adonis legends. From spilt blood an inscribed lily springs, in the one tale; and the other we may quote in Shakespeare's version (Venus and Adonis):
So also Tennyson -
We find the same idea again, I suppose, in the eastern original of Fitzgerald's well-known stanza:
"And this delightful Herb whose tender Green Fledges the River's Lip on which we lean- Ali, lean upon it lightly! for who knows From what once lovely Lip it springs unseen!"
The soil of a garden is a veritable charnel-house of vegetable and animal matter, and from one point of view represents death and decay, but the coltsfoot covering an abandoned heap of refuse, or the briar growing amid ruin, shows that Nature only needs time to make it all beautiful again. Let us think of the body as transmuted, not as stored.
The visible shape of the body was no accident, it corresponded to a reality, for it was caused by the indwelling vivifying essence; and affection entwines itself inevitably round not only the true personality of the departed, but round its material vehicle also - the sign and symbol of so much beauty, so much love. Symbols appeal to the heart of humanity, and anything cherished and honoured becomes in itself a thing of intrinsic value, which cannot be regarded with indifference. The old and tattered colours of a regiment, for which men have laid down their lives - though replaced perhaps by something newer and more durable - cannot be relegated to obscurity without a pang. And any sensitive or sympathetic person, contemplating such relics hereafter, may feel some echo of the feeling with which they were regarded, and may become acquainted with their history and the scenes through which they have passed.
In such cases the kind of knowledge to be gained from the relic, and the means by which additional information can be acquired, are intelligible; but in other cases also information can be attained, though by means at present not understood. It may sound superstitious, but it is a matter of actual experience, that some sensitives have intuitive perception, of an unfamiliar kind, concerning the history and personal associations of relics or fragments or personal belongings. The faculty is called psychometry; and it is no more intelligible, although no less well-evidenced, than the possibly allied faculty of dowsing or so-called water-divining. Psychometry is a large subject on which much has already been written: this brief mention must here suffice.
It seems to me that these facts, when at length properly understood, will throw some light on the connexion between mind and matter; and then many another obscure region of semi-science and semi-superstition will be illuminated. At present in all such tracts we have to walk warily, for the ground is uneven and insecure; and it is better, or at least safer, for the majority to forgo the recognition of some truth than rashly to invade a district full of entanglements and pitfalls.
Transition
Longfellow's line, "There is no death; what seems so is transition," at once suggests itself. Read literally the first half of this sentence is obviously untrue, but in the sense intended, and as a whole, the statement is true enough. There is no extinction, and the change called death is the entrance to a new condition of existence what may be called a new life.
Yet life itself is continuous, and the conditions of the whole of existence remain precisely as before. Circumstances have changed for the individual, but only in the sense that he is now aware of a different group of facts. The change of surroundings is a subjective one. The facts were of course there, all the time, as the stars are there in the daytime; but they were out of our ken. Now these come into our ken, and others fade into memory.
The Universe is one, not two. Literally there is no 'other' world - except in the limited and partial sense of other planets - the Universe is one. We exist in it continuously all the time; sometimes conscious in one way, sometimes conscious in another; sometimes aware of a group of facts on one side of a partition, sometimes aware of another group, on the other side. But the partition is a subjective one; we are all one family all the time, so long as the link of affection is not broken. And for those who believe in prayer at all to cease from praying for the welfare of their friends because they are materially inaccessible - though perhaps spiritually more accessible than before - is to succumb unduly to the residual evil of past ecclesiastical abuses, and to lose an opportunity of happy service.
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- (Part 3) - Chapter 4 - Life and Death -
Continued Existence. Difficulty of Belief in Continued Existence
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""Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every
preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatsoever abysses Nature leads."
Huxley
PEOPLE often feel a notable difficulty in believing in the reality of continued existence. Very likely it is difficult to believe or to realise existence in what is sometimes called "the next world"; but then, when we come to think of it, it is difficult to believe in existence in this world too; it is difficult to believe in existence at all. The whole problem of existence is a puzzling one. It could by no means have been predicated a priori. The whole thing is a question of experience; that is, of evidence. We know by experience that things actually do exist; though how they came into being, and what they are all for, and what consequences they have, is more than we can tell. We have no reason for asserting that the kind we are familiar with is the only kind of existence possible, unless we choose to assert it on the ground that we have no experience of any other. But that is becoming just the question at issue: have we any evidence, either direct or indirect, for any other existence than this? If we have, it is futile to cite in opposition to it the difficulty of believing in the reality of such an existence; we surely ought to be guided by facts.
At this stage in the history of the human race few facts of science are better established and more widely appreciated than the main facts of Astronomy: a general acquaintance with the sizes and distances, and the enormous number, of the solar systems distributed throughout space is prevalent. Yet to the imaginative human mind the facts, if really grasped, are overwhelming and incredible.
The sun a million times bigger than the earth; Arcturus a hundred times bigger than the sun, and so distant that light has taken two centuries to come, though travelling at a rate able to carry it to New York and back in less than the twentieth part of a second, - facts like these are commonplaces of the nursery; but even as bare facts they are appalling.
That the earth is a speck invisible from any one of the stars, that we are on a world which is but one among an innumerable multitude of others, ought to make us realise the utter triviality of any view of existence based upon familiarity with street and train and office, ought to give us some sense of proportion between everyday experience and ultimate reality. Even the portentous struggle in which Europe is engaged
Yet, for true interpretation, the infinite worth and vital importance of each individual human soul must be apprehended too. And that is another momentous fact, which, so far from restricting the potentialities of existence, by implication still further enlarges them. The multiplicity, the many-sidedness, the magnificence, of material existence does not dwarf the human soul; far otherwise: it illumines and expands the stage upon which the human drama is being played, and ought to make us ready to perceive how far greater still may be the possibilities - nay, the actualities - before it, in its infinite unending progress.
That we know little about such possibilities as yet, proves nothing;- for mark how easy it would have been to be ignorant of the existence of all the visible worlds and myriad modes of being in space. Not until the business of the day is over, and our great star has eclipsed itself behind the earth, not until the serener period of night, does the grandeur of the material universe force itself upon our attention. And, even then, let there be but a slight permanent thickening of our atmosphere, and we should have had no revelation of any world other than our own.
Under those conditions-so barely escaped from - how wretchedly meagre and limited would have been our conception of the Universe! Aye, and, unless we foolishly imagine that our circumstances are such as to have already given us a clue to every kind of possible existence, I venture to say that "wretchedly meagre and limited" must be a true description of our conception of the Universe, even now,-even of the conception of those who have permitted themselves, with least hesitation, to follow whithersoever facts lead.
If there be any group of scientific or historical or literary students who advocate what they think to be a sensible, but what I regard as a purblind, view of existence, based upon already systematised knowledge and on unfounded and restricting speculation as to probable boundaries and limitations of existence, - if such students take their own horizon to be the measure of all things,- the fact is to be deplored. Such workers, however admirable their industry and detailed achievements, represent a school of thought against the fruits of which we of the Allied Nations are in arms.
Nevertheless speculation of this illegitimate and negative kind is not unknown among us. It originates partly in admiration for the successful labours of a bygone generation in clearing away a quantity of clinging parasitic growth which was obscuring the fair fabric of ascertained truth, and partly in an innate iconoclastic enthusiasm.
The success which has attended Darwinian and other hypotheses has had a tendency to lead men-not indeed men of Darwinian calibre, but smaller and less conscientious men-in science as well as in history and theology, to an over-eager confidence in probable conjecture and inadequate attention to facts of experience. It has even been said - I quote from a writer in the volume Darwin and Modern Science, published in connexion with a Darwin jubilee celebration at Cambridge - that "the age of materialism was the least matter-of-fact age conceivable, and the age of science the age which showed least of the patient temper of enquiry." I would not go so far as this myself, the statement savours of exaggeration, but there is a regrettable tendency in surviving materialistic quarters for combatants to entrench themselves in dogma and preconceived opinion, to regard these vulnerable shelters as sufficient protection against observed and recorded facts, and even to employ them as strongholds from which alien observation - posts can be shattered and overthrown.
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- (Part 3) - Chapter 5 - Life and Death -
Past, Present and Future
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"How often have men thus feared that Nature's wonders would be degraded by being closer looked into! How often, again, have they learnt that the truth was higher than their imagination; and that it is man's work, but never Nature's, which to be magnificent must remain unknown!"
Frederick Myers, Introduction to Phantasms of the Living
OUR actual experience is strangely limited. We cannot be actually conscious of more than a single' instant of time. The momentary flash which we call the present, the visual image of which can be made permanent by the snap of a camera, is all of the external, world that we directly apprehended. But our real existence embraces far more than that. The present, alone and, isolated, would be meaningless to us; we look before and after. Our memories are thronged with the past; our anticipations range over the future; and it is in the past and the future that we really live. It is so even with the higher animals: they too order their lives by memory, and anticipation. It is under the influence of the future that the animal world performs even the most trivial conscious acts. We eat, we rest, we work, all with an eye to the immediate future. The present moment is illuminated and made significant, is controlled and dominated, by experience of the past and by expectation of the future. Without any idea of the future our existence would be purely mechanical and meaningless: with too little eye to the future - a mere living from hand to mouth - it becomes monotonous and dull.
Hence it is right that humanity, transcending merely animal scope, should seek to answer questions concerning its origin and destiny, and should regard with intense interest every clue to the problems of 'whence' and 'whither.'
It is no doubt possible, as always, to overstep the happy mean, and by absorption in and premature concern with future interests to lose the benefit and the training of this present life. But although we may rightly decide to live with full vigour in the present, and do our duty from moment to moment, yet in order to be full-flavoured and really intelligent beings - not merely with mechanical drift following the line of least resistance - we ought to be aware that there is a future,- a future determined to some extent by action in the present; and it is only reasonable that we should seek to ascertain, roughly and approximately, what sort of future it is likely to be.
Inquiry into survival, and into the kind of experience through which we shall all certainly have to go in a few years, is therefore eminently sane, and may be vitally significant. It may colour all our actions, and give a vivid meaning both to human history and to personal experience.
If death is not extinction, then on the other side of dissolution mental activity must continue, and must be interacting with other mental activity. For the fact of telepathy proves that bodily organs are not absolutely essential to communication of ideas. Mind turns out to be able to act directly on mind, and stimulate it into response by other than material means. Thought does not belong to the material region: although it is able to exert an influence on that region through mechanism provided by vitality. Yet the means whereby it accomplishes the feat are essentially unknown, and the fact that such interaction is possible would be strange and surprising if we were not too much accustomed to it. It is reasonable to suppose that the mind can be more at home, and more directly and more exuberantly active, where the need for such interaction between psychical and physical-or let us more safely and specifically say between mental and material-no longer exists, when the restraining influence of brain and nerve mechanism is removed, and when some of the limitations connected with bodily location in space are ended.
Experience must be our guide. To shut the door on actual observation and experiment in this particular region, because of preconceived ideas and obstinate prejudices, is an attitude common enough, even among scientific men; but it is an attitude markedly unscientific. Certain people have decided that inquiry into the activities of discarnate mind is futile; some few consider it impious; many, perhaps wisely mistrusting their own powers, shrink from entering on such an inquiry. But if there are any facts to be ascertained, it must be the duty of some volunteers to try to ascertain them: and for people having any acquaintance with scientific history to shut their eyes to facts when definitely announced, and to forbid investigation or report concerning them on pain of ostracism,- is to imitate a bygone theological attitude in a spirit of unintended flattery - a flattery which from every point of view is eccentric; and likewise to display an extraordinary lack of humour.
On the Possibility of Prognostication
I do not wish to complicate the issue at present by introducing the idea of prognostication or prevision, for I do not understand how anticipation of the future is possible. It is only known to be possible by one of two processes
And these methods must be pressed to the utmost before admitting any other hypothesis.
As to the possibility of prevision in general, I do not dogmatise, nor have I a theory wherewith to explain every instance; but I keep an open mind and try to collate and contemplate the facts.
Scientific prediction is familiar enough; science is always either historic or prophetic (as Dr. Schuster said at Manchester in the British Association Address for 1915), "and history is only prophecy pursued in the negative direction." This thesis is worth illustrating:- That Eclipses can be calculated forwards or backwards is well known. A tide-calculating machine, again, which is used to churn out tidal detail in advance by turning a handle, could be as easily run backwards and give past tides if they were wanted; but always on the assumption that no catastrophe, no unforeseen contingency, nothing outside the limits of the data, occurs to interfere with the placid course of phenomena. There must be no dredging or harbour bar operations, for instance, if the tide machine is to be depended on. Free-will is not allowed for, in Astronomy or Physics; nor any interference by living agents.
The real truth is that, except for unforeseen contingencies, past, present, and future are welded together in a coherent whole; and to a mind with wider purview, to whom perhaps hardly anything is unforeseen, there may be possibilities of inference to an unsuspected extent. Human character, and action based upon it, may be more trustworthy and uncapricious than is usually supposed; and data depending on humanity may be included in a
completer scheme of foreknowledge, without the exercise of any compulsion. "The past," says Bertrand Russell eloquently, "does not change or strive; like Duncan, after life's fitful fever it sleeps well; what was eager and grasping, what was petty and transitory, has faded away; the things that were beautiful and eternal shine out of it like stars in the night." My ignorance will not allow me to attempt to compose a similar or rather a contrasting sentence about the future.
Reference to Special Cases
It will be observed that none of those indications or intimations or intuitions which are referred to in a note on page 34, Part I, if they mean anything, raise the difficult question of prevision. In every case the impression was felt after or at the time of the event, though before reception of the news. The only question of possible prevision in the present instance arises in connexion with the 'Faunus' message quoted and discussed in Part II. But even here nothing more than kindly provision, in case anything untoward should happen, need be definitely assumed. Moreover, if the concurrence in time suggests prognostication, the fact that a formidable attempt to advance the English Front at the Ypres salient was probably in prospect in August 1915, though not known to ordinary people in England, and not fully carried out till well on in September, must have been within human knowledge; and so would have to be considered telepathically accessible, if that hypothesis is considered preferable to the admission of what Tennyson speaks of as
Prognostication can hardly be part of the evidence for survival. The two things are not essential to each other; they hardly appear to be connected. But one knows too little about the whole thing to be sure even of this, and I decline to take the responsibility for suppressing any of the facts. I know that Mr. Myers used to express an opinion that certain kinds of prevision would constitute clear and satisfactory evidence of something supernormal, and so attract attention; though the establishment of such a possibility might tend to suggest a kind of higher knowledge, not far short of what might be popularly called omniscience, rather than of merely human survival.
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- (Part 3) - Chapter 6 - Life and Death -
Interaction of Mind and Matter
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LIFE and mind and consciousness do not belong to the material region; whatever they are in themselves, they are manifestly something quite distinct from matter and energy, and yet they utilise the material and dominate it.
Matter is arranged and moved by means of energy, but often at the behest of life and mind. Mind does not itself exert force, nor does it enter into the scheme of physics, and yet it indirectly brings about results which otherwise would not have happened. It definitely causes movements and arrangements or constructions of a purposed character. A bird grows a feather, and a bird builds a nest: I doubt if there is less design in the one case than in the other. How life achieves the guidance, how even it accomplishes the movements, is a mystery, but that it does accomplish them is a commonplace of observation. From the motion of a finger to the construction of an aeroplane, there is but a succession of steps. From the growth of a weed to the flight of an eagle,- from a yeast granule at one end, to the human body at the other,- the organising power of life over matter is conspicuous.
Who can doubt the supremacy of the spiritual over the material? It is a fact which, illustrated by trivial instances, may be pressed to the most portentous consequences.
If interaction between mind and matter really occurs, and if both are persistent and enduring entities, there is no limit to the possibilities under which such interaction may occur - no limit which can be laid down beforehand - we must be guided and instructed solely by experience.
Whether the results produced are styled miraculous or not, depends on our knowledge,- our knowledge of all the powers latent in nature, and a knowledge of all the intelligences which exist. A savage on his first encounter with white men must have come into contact with what to him was supernatural. A letter, a gun, even artificial teeth, have all aroused superstition; while a telegram must be obviously miraculous, to anyone intelligent enough to perceive the wonder. A colony of bees, unused to the ministrations or interference of man, might puzzle itself over the provision made for its habitation and activities if it had intelligence enough to ponder the matter. So human beings, if they are open-minded and developed enough to contemplate all the happenings in which they are concerned, have been led to recognise guidance; and they have responded to the perception by the worshipful attitude of religion. In other words, they have essentially recognised the existence of a Power transcending ordinary nature - a Power that may properly be called supernatural.
Meaning of the term Body
Our experience of bodies here and now is that they are composed of material particles derived from the earth, whether they be bodies animated by vegetable or by animal forms of life. But I take it that the real meaning of the term 'body' is a means of manifestation,- perhaps a physical mode of manifestation adopted by something which without such instrument or organ would be in a different and elusive category. Why should we say that bodies must be made of matter? Surely only because we know of nothing else of which they could be made; but that lack of knowledge is not very efficient as an argument. True, if they were made of anything else they would not be apparent to us now, with our particular evolutionally-derived sense organs; for these only inform us about matter and its properties. Constructions built of Ether would have no chance of appealing to our senses, they would not be apparent to us; they would therefore not be what we ordinarily call bodies; at any rate they would not be material bodies. In order to become apparent to us, a psychical or vital entity must enter the material realm, and either clothe itself with, or temporarily assimilate, material particles.
It may be that etherial bodies do not exist; the burden of proof rests upon those who conceive of their possible existence; but we are bound to admit that even if they did exist, they would make no impression on our senses. Hence if there are any intelligences in another order of existence interlocked with ours, and if they can in any sense be supposed to have bodies at all, those bodies must be made either of Ether or of something equally intangible to us in our present condition.
Yet, though intangible and elusive, we have reason to know that Ether is substantial enough, far more substantial indeed than matter, which turns out to be a rare and filmy insertion in, or modification of, the Ether of Space; and a different set of sense organs might make the Ether eclipse matter in availability and usefulness. In my book The Ether of Space this thesis is elaborated from a purely physical point of view.
I wish, however, to make no assertion concerning the possible psychical use of the Ether of Space. Anything of that kind must be speculative; the only bodies we now know of in actual fact are material bodies, and we must be guided by facts. Yet we must not shut the door prematurely on other possibilities; and we can remember that inspired writers have sometimes contemplated what they term a spiritual body.
'That a great poet should have represented the meeting between the still incarnate 'Eneas and his discarnatee father Anchises as a bodily disappointment, is consistent:
It may be said that what is intangible ought to be invisible; but that does not follow. The Ether is a medium for vision, not for touch. Ether and Ether may interact, just as matter and matter interact; but interaction between Ether and matter is peculiarly elusive.
But why should anyone suppose a body of some kind always necessary? Why should they assume a perpetual sort of dualism about existence? The reason is that we have no knowledge of any other form of animate existence; and it may be claimed as legitimate to assume that the association between life and matter here on the planet has a real and vital significance, that without such an episode of earth life we should be less than we are, and that the relation is typical of something real and permanent.
Why matter should be thus useful to spirit and even to life it is not easy to say. It may be that by the interaction of two things better and newer results can always be obtained than was possible for one alone. There are analogies enough for that. Do we not find that genius seems to require the obstruction or the aid of matter for its full development? The artist must enjoy being able to compel refractory material to express his meaning. Didactic writings are apt to emphasise the obstructiveness of matter; but that may be because its usefulness seems self-evident. Our limbs, and senses, and bodily faculties generally, are surely of momentous service; microscopes and telescopes and laboratory instruments, and machinery generally, are only extensions of them. Tools to the man who can use them:- orchestra to the musician, lathe or theodolite to the engineer, books and records to the historian, even though not much more than pen and paper is needed by the poet or the mathematician.
But our bodily organs are much more than any artificial tools can be, they are part of our very being. The body is part of the constitution of man. We are not spirit or soul alone,- though it is sometimes necessary to emphasise the fact that we are soul at all, - we are in truth soul and body together. And so I think we shall always be; though our bodies need not always be composed of earthly particles. Matter is the accidental part: there is an essential and more permanent part, and the permanent part must survive.
This is the strength, as I have said elsewhere and will not now at any length repeat, of the sacramental claims and practices of religion. Forms and customs which appeal to the body are a legitimate part of the whole; and while some natures derive most benefit from the exclusively psychical and spiritual essence, others probably do well to prevent the more sensuous and more puzzling concomitants from falling into disuse.
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- (Part 3) - Chapter 7 - Life and Death -
'Resurrection of the Body'
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"Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never."
Edwin Arnold
In the whole unknown drama of the soul the episode of bodily existence must have profound significance. Matter cannot only be obstructive, even usefully obstructive,- by which is meant the kind of obstruction which stimulates to effort and trains for power, like the hurdles in an obstacle race,- it must be auxiliary too. Whatever may be the case with external matter, the body itself is certainly an auxiliary, so long as it is in health and strength; and it gives opportunity for the development of the soul in new and unexpected ways - ways in which but for earth life its practice would be deficient. This it is which makes calamity of too short a life.
But let us not be over-despondent about the tragedy of the present. It may be that the concentrated training and courageous facing of fate which in most cases must have accompanied voluntary entry into a dangerous war, compensates in intensity what it lacks in duration, and that the benefit of bodily terrestrial life is not so much lost by violent death of that kind as might at first appear. Yet even with some such assurance, the spectacle of thousands of youths in full vigour and joy of life having their earthly future violently wrenched from them, amid scenes of grim horror and nerve-wracking noise and confusion, is one which cannot and ought not to be regarded with equanimity. It is a bad and unnatural truncation of an important part of each individual career, a part which might have done much to develop faculties and enlarge experience.
Meanwhile, the very fact that we lament so sincerely this dire and man-caused fate serves to illustrate the view we inevitably take that the earth-body is not only a means of manifestation but is a real servant of the soul,- that flesh can in some sense help spirit as spirit can undoubtedly help flesh,- and that while its very weaknesses are serviceable and stimulating, its strength is exhilarating and superb. The faculties and powers developed in the animal kingdom during all the millions of years of evolution, and now inherited for better for worse by man, are not to be despised. Those therefore who are able to think that some of the essential elements or attributes of the body are carried forward into a higher life-quite irrespective of the manifestly discarded material particles which never were important to the body, for they were always in perpetual flux as individual molecules--those, I say, who think that the value derived and acquired through the body survives, and becomes a permanent possession of the soul, may well feel that they can employ the mediaeval phrase "resurrection of the body" to express their perception. They may feel that it is a truth which needs emphasising all the more from its lack of obviousness. These old phrases, consecrated by long usage, and familiar to all the saints, though their early and superficial meaning is evidently superseded, may be found to have an inner and spiritual significance which when once grasped should be kept in memory, and brought before attention, and sustained against challenge: in no case should they be lightly or hastily discarded.
It seems not altogether fanciful to trace some similarity or analogy, between the ideas about inheritance usually associated with the name of Weismann, and the inheritance or conveyance of bodily attributes, or of powers acquired through the body, into the future life of the soul.
When considering whether anything, or what, is likely to be permanent, the answer turns upon whether or not the soul has been affected. Mere bodily accidents of course are temporary; loss of an arm or an eye is no more carried on as a permanent disfigurement than it is transmissible to offspring. But, apart from accidents which may happen to the body, there are some evil things rendered accessible by and definitely associated with the body-which assault and hurt the soul. And the effect of these is transmissible, and may become permanent. Habits which write their mark on the countenance whether the writing be good or bad-are not likely to take effect on the body alone. And in this sense also future existence may be either glorified or stained, for a time, by persistence of bodily traits,- by this kind of "resurrection of the body."
Furthermore it is found that although bodily marks, scars and wounds, are clearly not of soul-compelling and permanent character, yet for purposes of identification, and when re-entering the physical atmosphere for the purpose of communication with friends, these temporary marks are re-assumed; just as the general appearance at the remembered age, and details connected with clothes and little unessential tricks of manner, may-in some unknown sense-be assumed too.
And it is to this category that I would attribute the curious interest still felt in old personal possessions. They are attended to and recalled, not for what by a shopman is called their 'value,' but because they furnish useful and welcome evidence of identity; they are like the pieces de conviction brought up at a trial, they bear silent witness to remembered fact. And in so far as the disposal or treatment of them by survivors is evidence of the regard in which their late owner was held, it is unlikely that they should have suddenly become matters of complete indifference. Nothing human, in the sense of affecting the human spirit, can be considered foreign to a friendly and sympathetic soul, even though his new preoccupations and industries and main activities are of a different order. It appears as if, for the few moments of renewed earthly intercourse, the newer surroundings shrink for a time into the background. They are remembered, but not vividly. Indeed it seems difficult to live in both worlds at once, especially after the life-long practice here of living almost exclusively in one. Those whose existence here was coloured or ennobled by wider knowledge and higher aims seem likely to have the best chance of conveying instructive information across the boundary; though their developed powers may be of such still higher value, that only from a sense of duty or in a missionary spirit can they be expected to absent them from felicity while in order to help the brethren.
Quotation of a passage from Plotinus seems here permissible -
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As a digression of some importance, I venture to say that claims of thoughtless and pertinacious people upon the charitable and eminent, even here, are often excessive: it is to be hoped that such claims become less troublesome and less effective hereafter; but it is a hope without much foundation. Remonstrances are useless, however, for only the more thoughtful and those most deserving of help are likely to attend to remonstrances. Nevertheless - useless or not - it behoves one to make them. We are indeed taught that in exceptional cases there may ultimately supervene such an extraordinary elevation of soul that no trouble is too great, and no appeal is unheard. But still, even in the Loftiest case of all, the episode of having passed through a human body contributes to the power of sympathising with and aiding ordinary humanity.
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- (Part 3) - Chapter 8 - Life and Death -
Mind and Brain
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"For nothing is that errs from law."
Tennyson
IT is sometimes thought that memory is located in the brain; and undoubtedly there must be some physiological process at work in the brain when any incident of memory is recalled and either uttered or written. But it does not at all follow that memory itself is located in the brain; though there must be some easier channel, or some already prepared path, which enables an idea to be translated from the general mental reservoir into consciousness, with clarity and power sufficient to stimulate the necessary nerves and muscles into a condition adequate for reproduction.
Sometimes in order to remember a thing, one writes it in a note-book; and the memory In- ay be said to be in the note-book about as accurately as it may be said to be in the brain. A physical process has put it in the notebook; there is a physical configuration persisting there; and when a sort of reverse physical process is repeated, it can be got back into consciousness by simply what we call 'looking' at the book and reading. But surely the real memory is in the mind all the time, and the deposit in the note-book is a mere detent for calling it out or for making it easy of recovery. In order to communicate any information we must focus attention on it; and whether we focus attention on a part of the brain or on a page of a note-book matters very little; the attention itself is a mental process, not a physiological one, though it has a physiological concomitant.
This is an important matter, the keystone in fact of our problem about the connexion between mind and matter, and I propose to amplify its treatment further; for this is an unavoidably controversial portion of the book,
I am familiar with all the usual analogies drawn between organic habit and memory on the one hand, and the more ready repetition of physical processes by inorganic material on the other. Imperfectly elastic springs, for instance, which show reminiscences of previous bendings or twistings by their subsequent unwindings; and cogs which wear into smooth running by repetition; are examples of this kind. A violin which by long practice becomes more musical in tone, is another; or a path which by being often traversed becomes easier to the feet. A flower-bed recently altered in shape, by being partly grassed over, is liable to exhibit its former outline by aid of bulbs and other half-forgotten growths which come up through the grass in the old pattern.
This last is a striking example of apparent memory, not indeed in the inorganic but in the unconscious world; where indeed it is prevalent, for every one must recognise the memory of animals- there can be no doubt of that. And it would seem that a kind of race-memory must be invoked to account for many surprising cases of instinct; of which the building of specific birds' nests, and the accurate pecking of a newly-hatched chicken, are among the stock instances. No experience can be lodged in the brain of the newly-hatched!
That some sort of stored facility should exist in the adult brain, is in no way surprising; and that there is some physical or physiological concomitant of actual remembrance is plain; but that is a very different thing from asserting that memory itself, or any kind of consciousness, is located in the brain; though truly without the aid of the brain it is, as far as this planet is concerned, latent and inaccessible.
Plotinus puts the matter in an interesting but perhaps rather too extreme form:
The actual reproduction or remembrance of a fact the demonstration or realisation of memory-undoubtedly depends on brain and muscle mechanism; but memory itself turns out to be essentially mental, and is found to exist apart from the bodily mechanism which helped originally to receive and store the impression. And though without that same or some equivalent mechanism we cannot get at it, so that it cannot be displayed to others, yet in my experience it turns out not to be absolutely necessary to use actually the same instrument for its reproduction as was responsible for its deposition: though undoubtedly to use the same is easier and helpful. In the early Edison phonographs the same instrument had to be used for both reception and reproduction; but now a record can readily be transferred from one instrument to another. This may be regarded as a rough mechanical analogy to the telepathic or telergic process whereby a psychic reservoir of memory can be partially tapped through another organism.
But, apart from any consideration of what may be regarded as doubtful or uncertain, there are some facts about the relation of brain to consciousness, which, though universally admitted, are frequently misinterpreted. Injure the brain, and consciousness is lost. 'Lost' is the right word-not 'destroyed.' Repair the lesion, and consciousness may be restored, ie. normal manifestation of consciousness can once more occur. It-., is the display of consciousness, in all such cases, that we mean when we speak of the effect of brain injury; the utilisation of bodily organs is necessary for its exhibition. If the bodily organs do not exist, or are too damaged no normal manifestation is possible. That is the fact which may be misinterpreted.
In general we may say, with fair security, that no receptivity to physical phenomena exists save through sense-organ, nerve, and brain; nor any initiation of physical phenomena, save through brain, nerve, and muscle. Apart from physical phenomena consciousness is isolated and inaccessible: we have no right to say that it is non-existent. In ordinary usage it is not customary or necessary to be always harping on this completer aspect of things: it is only necessary when misunderstanding has arisen from uniformly inaccurate, or rather unguarded, modes of expression.
In an excellent lecture by Dr. Mott on "The Effects of High Explosives upon the Central Nervous System," I find this sentence:
What is intended is clear enough but analysed strictly this assertion goes far beyond what is known. We do not really know that oxygen, or any form of matter, has anything to do with consciousness: all that we know, and all that Dr. Mott really means to say, I presume, is that without a supply of oxygen consciousness gives no physical sign.
Partial interruptions of physical manifestations of consciousness well illustrate this: as, for instance, when speech centres of the brain alone are affected. If in such case we had to depend on mouth-muscle alone we should say that consciousness had departed, and might even think that it was non-existent; but the arm-muscle may remain under brain control, and by intelligent writing can show that consciousness is there all tile time, and that it is only inhibited from one of the specially easy modes of manifestation, In some cases the inhibition may be complete,- from such cases we do not learn much; but when it is only partial we learn a good deal.
I quote again from Dr. Mott, omitting for brevity the detailed description of certain surgical war-cases, under his care, which precedes the following explanatory interjection and summary:
Very well, all this interesting experience serves among other things to illustrate our simple but occasionally overlooked thesis. For it is through physical phenomena that normally we apprehend, here and now; and it is by aid of physical phenomena that we convey to others our wishes, our impressions, our ideas, and our memories. Dislocate the physical from the psychical, and communication ceases. Restore the connexion, in however imperfect a form. and once more incipient communication may become possible again.
That is the rationale of the process of human intercourse. Do we understand it? No. Do we understand even how our own mind operates on our own body? No. We know for a fact that it does.
Do we understand how a mind can with difficulty and imperfectly operate another body submitted to its temporary guidance and control? No. Do we know for a fact that it does? Aye, that is the question - a question of evidence. I myself answer the question affirmatively; not on theoretical grounds-far from that - but on a basis of straightforward experience. Others, if they allow themselves to take the trouble to get the experience, will come to the same conclusion.
Will they do so best by allowing their own bodies or brains to be utilised? No, that seems not even the best, and certainly not the only way. It may not, for the majority of people, be a possible way. The sensitive or medium who serves us, by putting his or her bodily mechanism at our disposal , is not likely to be best informed concerning the nature of the process. Mediums have perhaps but little conscious information to give us concerning their powers; we must learn from what they do, not from what they say. The outside observer, the experimenter, whose senses are alert all the time and who continues fully conscious without special receptivity or any peculiar power of his own, is in a better position to note and judge what is happening,- at least from the normal and scientific point of view. Let us be as cautious and critical, aye and as sceptical as we like, but let us also be patient and persevering and fair; do not let us start with a preconceived notion of what is possible and what is impossible in this almost unexplored universe; let us only be willing to learn and be guided by facts, not by dogmas; and gradually the truth will permeate our understanding and make for itself a place in our minds as secure as in any other branch of observational science.
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- (Part 3) - Chapter 9 - Life and Death -
Life and Consciousness
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THE limitation of scope which eminent Professors of a certain school of modern science have laid down for themselves is forcibly expressed by one of the ablest of their champions thus:
I should myself hesitate to promulgate such a markedly non-possumus and ignorabimus statement concerning the scope of physical science, even as narrowly and popularly understood; but it illuminates the position taken tip by those savants who are commonly known as Materialists, and explains their expressed though non-personal hostility to other scientific men who seek to exceed the boundaries laid down, and investigate things beyond the immediate range of the senses.
Eliminating the future tense from the statement, however, I can agree with it. The instrument of translation from the mental to the physical, and back from the physical to the mental, is undoubtedly the brain, but as to how the translation is accomplished, I venture to say, we have not the inkling of an idea. Nevertheless, hints which may gradually lead towards a partial understanding of psycho-physical processes may be gained by study of exceptional cases: for such study is often more instructive than continued
scrutiny of the merely normal. The fact of human consciousness, though it raises the problem to a high degree of conspicuousness, by no means exhausts the difficulty; for it is one which faces us in connexion with every form of life. The association of life with matter, and of mind with life, are problems of similar order, and a glimmering of understanding of the one may be expected to throw light upon the other. But until we know more of the method by which the simplest and most familiar psycho-physical interaction occurs until we know enough to see how the gulf between two apparently different Modes of Being is bridgedit is safest to observe and accumulate facts, and to be very chary of making more than the most tentative and cautious of working hypotheses. For to frame even a tentative hypothesis, of any helpful kind, may require some clue which as yet we do not possess.
I have been struck by the position taken by Dr. Chalmers Mitchell in his notable small book Evolution and the War, the early chapters of which, on Germany of the past and present, I would like unreservedly to commend to the reader. Indeed, commendation of a friendly and non-patronising kind may well extend to the whole book, although it must be admitted that here and there mere exposition of Darwinism is suspended, and difficult and debatable questions are touched upon.
On these questions I would not like to be understood as expressing a hasty opinion, either against or for the views of the author. The points at issue between us are more or less fine- drawn, and cannot be dealt with parenthetically; nor do I ever propose to deal with them in a controversial manner. The author, as a biologist of fame, is more than entitled to such expression of his own views as he has cared to give. I quote with admiration, not necessarily with agreement, a few passages from the part dealing with the relation between mind and matter, and especially with the wide and revolutionary difference between man and animal caused by either the evolution or the incoming of free and conscious Choice.
He will not allow, with Bergson and others, that the roots of consciousness, in its lower grades, go deep down into the animal, and even perhaps into the vegetable, kingdom; he has no patience with those who associate elementary consciousness and freedom and indeterminateness not merely with human life but with all life, and who detect rudiments of purpose and intelligence in the protozoa. Nor, on the other hand, does he approve the dogmatic teaching of the 'ultra-scientific' school, which, being obsessed by the idea of man's animal origin, interprets human nature solely in terms of protoplasm. He opposes the possibility of this by saying:
On the more interesting of the above-mentioned alternatives Dr. Chalmers Mitchell expresses himself thus:-
And soon afterwards he continues:
Let it not be supposed for a moment that this distinguished biologist is in agreement with me on many matters dealt with in the present book. If he were, he would, I believe, achieve a more admirable and eloquent work than is consistent with the technically 'apologetic' tone which, in the present state of the scientific atmosphere, it behoves me to take. To guard against unwelcome misrepresentation of his views, and yet at the same time to indicate their force, I will make one more quotation:-
My own view, which in such matters I only put forth with diffidence and brevity, is more in favour of Continuity. I do not trace so catastrophic a break between man and animals, nor between animal and vegetable, perhaps not even between organised and unorganised forms of matter, as does Dr. Chalmers Mitchell.
I would venture to extend the range of the term 'soul' down to a very large denominator,- to cases in which the magnitude of the fraction becomes excessively minute,- and tentatively admit to the possibility of survival, though not individual survival, every form of life. As to Individuality and Personality - they can only survive where they already exist; when they really exist they persist; but bare survival, as an alternative to improbable extinction, may be widespread.
Matter forms an instrument, a means of manifestation, but it need not be the only one possible. We have utilised matter to build up this beautiful bodily mechanism, but, when that is done with, the constructive ability remains; and it can be expected to exercise its organising powers in other than material environment. If this hypothesis be true at all (and admittedly I am now making hypothesis) it must be true of all forms of life; for what the process of evolution has accomplished here may be accomplished elsewhere, under conditions at present unknown.(1) So I venture to surmise that the surroundings of non-material existence will be far more homely and habitual than people in general have been accustomed to think likely.
(1) I wish to emphasise this paragraph, as perhaps an important one.
And how do I know that the visible material body of anything is all the body, or all the existence, it possesses?
Why should not things exist also, or have etherial counterparts, in an etherial world? Perhaps everything has already an etherial counterpart, of which our senses tell us the material aspect only. I do not know. Such an idea may be quoted as an absurdity; but if the evidence drives me in that direction, in that direction I will go, without undue resistance. There have been those who do not wait to be driven, but who lead; and the inspired guidance of Plotinus in that direction may secure more attention, and attract more disciples, when the way is illuminated by discoverable facts.
Meanwhile facts await discovery.
Passages from Plotinus, it may be remembered, are eloquently translated by F. W. H . Myers, from the obscure and often ungrammatical Greek, in Human Personality, vol. ii. pp. 289-291; and readers of S.P.R. Proceedings, vol. xxii, PP. 08-172, will remember the development by Mrs. Verall of the KCLI ak& obpa;,& dK61Awy motto prefixed to F. W. H. Myers's post-humously published poem on Tennyson in Fragments of Prose and Poetry.
My reference just above to teachings of Plotinus about the kind of things to be met with in the other world, or the etherial world, or whatever it may be called, is due to information from Professor J. H. Muirhead that, roughly speaking, Plotinus teaches that things there are on the same plan as things here: each thing here having its counterpart or corresponding existence there, though glorified and fuller of reality. Not to misrepresent this doctrine, but to illustrate it as far as can be by a short passage, Professor Muirhead has given me the following translation from the Enneads:
The reason why this strange utterance or speculation is reproduced here is because it seems to some extent to correspond with curious statements recorded in another part of this book; e.g. in Chapter XIV, Part II.
I expect that it would be misleading to suppose that the terms used by Plotinus really signify any difference of locality. It may be nearer the truth to suppose that when freed from our restricting and only matter-revealing senses we become aware of much that was and is 'here' all the time, interfused with the existence which we knew - forming part indeed of the one and only complete existence, of which our present normal knowledge is limited to a single aspect. We might think and speak of many interpenetrating universes, and yet recognise that ultimately they must be all one. It is not likely that the Present differs from what we now call the Future except in our mode of perceiving it.
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