A friend of mine tells me that psychical articles are always
interesting, "because so many people die and go somewhere". Presumably,
those who remain here feel a natural curiosity as to where the departed
have gone, partly for the latter's sake, and partly because they
themselves would like to know, so that they will know what to expect
when their own time comes.
The teaching of religion on this point is admittedly either rather
vague, or, if definite--as with the Augustinian theology--no longer
credible. We have progressed in sensitiveness and humanity, and can no
longer believe that a good God will inflict everlasting torment in a
lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, even on the most wicked of
His creatures. Still less can we believe in such punishment being
inflicted for the "sin of unbelief", for we now know well enough that
"belief", being the net outcome of our total experience and character,
is not under the control of the will. Consequently, a God who punished
creatures for not believing, when He knew all the time that He had so
constructed most of them that they could not believe, would be either
wicked or insane. This inability to believe "to order" is plainly
perceived if we reflect on what our feelings would be if a Mohammedan
implored us to believe in Allah and in Allah's Prophet, as the only way
of salvation. We should decline, saying perhaps that we knew better;
but the real reason of our disbelief would not lie in our knowledge but
in our general makeup. We could not believe in Mohammedanism if we
tried. We have grown up in a different climate, and have taken a
different form.
But, putting aside the vindictive hell-god of Augustine, Tertullian,
Calvin, and the rest--for not even an earthly father would punish a
child for ever--and taking Christianity at its best, we do not find any
very specific eschatological teaching. And this very absence is a good
feature. If a man tries to be good merely in order to avoid hell and
gain heaven--in other words, because it will pay--his goodness is not
much of a credit to him. It is only selfishness of a far-sighted kind.
Religion, on the other hand, when at its best, seeks to influence
character, not by threats and promises, but by encouraging moods and
attitudes and habits of thought from which good actions will flow
spontaneously, without any profit-and-loss calculations. Modern
Christianity is therefore perhaps right in touching much more lightly
on the future state than was customary in earlier centuries.
Nevertheless, we cannot repress a little curiosity. People die and go
somewhere, as my friend says. Where do they go? Modern Religion having
avoided definite answer, we turn to Science. And Science, much as it
would surprise such fine old gladiators as Huxley and Tyndall to hear
it--has an answer, and an affirmative one.
Psychical research has, in my opinion, brought together a mass of
evidence strong enough to justify the following conclusions. I do not
say they are "proved." You cannot "prove" that the earth is round,
unless your hearer will at least study the evidence. You cannot even
prove to him that 2 plus 2 makes 4, if he refuses to add. Therefore I
do not say anything about proof. I say only that after many years of
careful study and investigation I am of opinion that the evidence
justifies the conclusions.
(1) Telepathy is a fact. A mind may become aware of something that is
passing in another mind at a distance, by means other than the normal
sensory channels. The "how" of the communication is entirely unknown.
The analogy of wireless telegraphy of course suggests itself, but is
misleading. The ether-waves employed in wireless telegraphy are physical
pulses which obey the law of inverse squares; telepathy shows no
conformity with that law, and has not been shown to be an affair of
physical waves at all. I believe that it is not a physical process; that
it occurs in the spiritual world, between mind and mind, not primarily
between brain and brain. And, if so--if mind can communicate with mind
independently of brain--the theory of materialism at least is exploded.
If mind can act independently of brain, mind may go on existing after
brain dies.
(2) Communications, purporting to emanate from departed spirits, are
sometimes so strikingly evidential that it is scientifically justifiable
to assume the agency of a discarnate mind. For example, in a case known
to me, a "spirit" communicating through a non-professional medium--a
lady of means and position--referred to a recipe for pomatum which
the communicator said she had written in her recipe book. No one knew
anything about it; but, on hunting up the book, the deceased lady's
daughters found a recipe for Dr Somebody's pomade, which their mother
had evidently written shortly before her death. They confirmed that
"pomatum" was the word which their mother used. The points to be noted
are: That the medium was not a professional; that no one who knows her
has doubted her integrity; that she was not acquainted with either
the deceased lady or her daughters; that the knowledge shown was
not possessed by any living (incarnate) mind, and is therefore not
explainable by telepathy; and, finally, that the case was watched and
reported on by one of our ablest investigators--a lecturer at Newnham
College--who found no flaw in the evidence.[1] I repeat that I do not
claim this to be "proof". I give it merely as an illustration, and will
give a few more detailed cases in a later chapter. For the present I
must be content to say that the mass of evidence known to me justifies
the belief that minds survive what we call death.
[1] _Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research_, vol. xvii,
pp. 181-3.
The question then arises: What is the nature of the after life? And here
we are faced with great difficulties. We can ask the returning spirits,
but we cannot verify their statements. If my uncle John Smith purports
to communicate, I can test his identity by asking him to tell me
intimate family details which I can verify by asking his widow, who
still lives; but I cannot thus check his statements about his spiritual
surroundings. Still, if he has proved his identity--particularly if
telepathy seems excluded--we may perhaps feel fairly safe in accepting
his other statements as true, or at least in admitting their possible
truth. And of course we can obtain the statements of many different
spirits, and can compare them. This has been done. The result is a
striking amount of uniformity. The various spirits agree, on the main
points.
First of all, they are surprisingly unorthodox! They tell of no heaven
or hell of the traditional kind. There is no sudden ascent into
unalloyed and eternal bliss for the good--who, as Jesus pointed out,
are not wholly good--and no sudden plunge into eternal fires for the
bad--who, similarly, are not unqualifiedly bad. There is much of bad in
the best of us, and much of good in the worst of us. Accordingly, the
released soul finds itself not very different from what it was while in
the flesh. It has passed into a higher class of the universal
school--that is all. Tennyson has the idea exactly:
"No sudden heaven, nor sudden hell, for man,
But through the Will of One who knows and rules--
And utter knowledge is but utter love--
Aeonian Evolution, swift or slow,
Thro' all the Spheres--an ever opening height,
An ever lessening earth."
I have said that this view is unorthodox, and so it is, if compared with
the orthodoxy of Calvin or Edwards or Tertullian. But it is pleasant
to find that orthodoxy to-day is a different thing, and that the
Tennysonian notion is backed up in high quarters. The Bishopric of
London is the highest ecclesiastical office in England, after the
Archbishoprics of Canterbury and York, and we find the present Bishop
of London (Dr Winnington-Ingram) speaking as follows:
"Is there anything definite about death in the Bible? I believe there
is. I think if you follow me, you will find there are six things
revealed to us about life after death. The first is that the man is the
same man. Instead of death being the end of him, he is exactly the same
five minutes after death as five minutes before death, except having
gone through one more experience in life. In the second place the
character grows after death; there is progress. As it grows in life
so it grows after death. A third thing is, we have memory. 'Son,
remember', that is what was said to Dives in the other world. Memory for
places and people. We shall remember everything after death. And with
memory there will be recognition; we shall know one another. Husband and
wife, parents and children. Sixthly, we still take great interest in the
world we have left".
The good Bishop gets all this out of the Bible, and quite rightly. We
hope no heresy-hunter will accuse him of "selecting" his texts and
ignoring the hell-fire ones.
So far as earth-language can go, the foregoing represents the probable
truth regarding the after life. If we inquire for details, we shall
get nothing very satisfactory. If we ask a spirit concerning what he
does--how he occupies himself--he will either say he "cannot explain so
that you will understand" or will tell about living in houses, going
to lectures, teaching children, and the like. All this is obviously
symbolical. Any communications that a discarnate entity can send must,
to be intelligible to us, be in human earth-language; and this language
is based on sense-experience. After death, experience is different, for
we no longer have the same bodily senses--eyes, ears, etc.: consequently
no explanation of the nature of spiritual existence can be more than
approximately true; yet such expressions as living in houses, going to
lectures, and the like, may be as near the truth as earth-language can
get. If a bird tried to describe air-life to a fish, the best it could
do would be to say it is something like water-life, but there is more
light, more ease of movement, more detail, more things of interest
and beauty. Of the wonders of sound--skylark's song, human choruses,
instrumental symphonies--no idea could be conveyed to the fish. Probably
our friends in the next stage of existence have, in addition to the
experiences which they can partly describe, other experiences of which
they can give us absolutely no idea. They have been promoted. Their
interests and activities have become wider, their joys greater. Yet they
are the "same" souls, as the butterfly is the "same" as the chrysalis
from which it has arisen. But to know exactly what it feels like to be a
butterfly, the caterpillar and chrysalis have to wait Nature's time. So
must we.