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CHAPTER VII

DIFFICULTIES OF THE PROBLEM

E shall have to give illustrations of statements regarding the nature of another life, but we cannot do so without first warning readers of the difficulties under which we labor in determining their value. We have not expressed any certain conviction as to the nature of a spiritual world and its life; while we did indicate indifference to what it might be as long as it had no definite relation to our ethical obligations in this life. If rational at all, it must have some such relations, but they remain still to be determined. We have made only slight progress as yet in regard to the questions involved, except that of mere survival. The public forgets or is ignorant of what the great problems are, and so assumes that it is enough if we prove survival to carry with it any idea it pleases about the nature of the life which makes it possible. It has not discriminated between two wholly distinct problems, and the different methods involved in solving them.

The two problems are (1) that of survival and (2) that of the nature of the world in which we survive. The first of these is very easy of solution compared with the second, and from the painfully slow progress before the public of the first problem, we can imagine what the second will be. The solution of the first of the problems is effected by satisfying three requirements. (a) The exclusion of fraud and secondary personality from the facts which claim to be

communication from the dead. (b) The acquisition of supernormal information bearing upon the personal identity of the dead. (c) The exclusion of the telepathic hypothesis in explanation. Now I regard it as a comparatively easy task to satisfy each and all of these conditions. Those who have not investigated the subject live in the blissful illusion that it is extremely difficult to satisfy any one or all of these conditions. But this illusion grows out of ignorance and indolence. If they knew in the least how to experiment, they would find it a very easy thing to exclude every condition tending to discredit the facts. It is respectability only that enables the skeptical attitude to linger and persist in its difficulties. I regard it as perfectly easy to prove survival and I shall here take it as proved with sufficient clearness to justify ignoring the objectors to it. The evidence is clear and conclusive, and indeed so overwhelmingly plentiful that concession to ignorance and skepticism is no longer justifiable.

But when it comes to the second problem I would express a calmer judgment. That is not so easy. It involves complications which the other does not have. Had the means been supplied for experiment in this field the second problem would not be so hard as it seems. The difficulty in getting the public to see what it is and what the funds needed for it are is a greater problem apparently than that of experiment. It would be an easy task to perform had the experimenter the means and the help to carry out the necessary experiments, but most people, scientific men as well as laymen, expect the case to be decided over night and by accepting the messages in accordance with the ordinary interpretations of language, and so approve or disapprove of the "revelations" according to their prejudices for or against the case. This is another inexcusable delusion on the part of both sides.

Now let us examine something of the method involved

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in settling whether personal consciousness survives death. We start with the assumptions which the materialists teach us; namely, that consciousness is a function of the brain and that all knowledge is derived by normal sense perception. Now telepathy negatives the latter and shows that some knowledge can come to us independently of normal sense perception. But it does not prove survival. We must obtain intelligent messages bearing on the personal identity of deceased persons not known to the percipient or subject through whom such messages come.

Now it is perfectly easy to obtain conditions under which all normal knowledge of particular persons has been excluded. All that we have to do is to take a total stranger to a psychic and make a verbatim and complete record of what is said or occurs there, and then determine whether the contents are possibly due to guessing or chance coincidence, whether conscious or subconscious, and whether they articulately represent facts once known to the alleged deceased person. That is perfectly easy to do and it is just as easy to exclude any known telepathy from the explanation. But in securing this evidence of personal survival we do not require to raise any questions regarding the conditions for communicating the messages. It suffices to know that they represent supernormal information, after excluding all possible sources of normal explanation. We do not require to know anything about even the physiological conditions that affect the result, any more than we require to know anything about the spiritual processes by which the result is produced. It is the facts that exclude normal explanations which decide the case, provided the incidents relate to the personal identity of the dead. The subconscious of the medium may color them as much as you please or bury them up in its own chaff, provided only that they are evidently not of its own creation and give

evidence that they are not such. We do not need to know how the thing is done. The facts when supernormal demand an extraneous source, whatever their relation to processes by which they are produced.

But when it comes to accepting statements about the nature of a spiritual world it is a different matter. We have then to understand something about the conditions under which information about it comes to us. This general principle is even true about intercourse between the living about the material world, though the difficulties are not so numerous or so perplexing to overcome. When a man tells us that he has made a new discovery in science we require to know how he did it and to ascertain whether the conditions under which he announces the discovery make it truthful or not. And this in a world where we have a tolerably easy command over things. But when it comes to telling us about a transcendental world it is not so easy. It is not enough to get statements about it. We have to confirm them and to know something of the conditions by which they get to us. In proving personal identity it does not make any difference whether communications are distorted or not, so we can recognize that they are not primarily products of the living mind. We are trying, in deciding that issue, only to ascertain whether personality in some way survives, and we do not require to know whether this personality requires a bodily connection of any kind or not. It may be anything you please in so far as that limited issue is concerned. But when we ask whether personality has a spiritual body or not; whether it is a functional stream in the universal energy of the cosmos, or whether it is an attachment of a spaceless point of force, we have a very different situation confronting us.

The difficulties which we encounter in the endeavor to ascertain the nature of a spiritual world manifest themselves even in proving survival; for the messages

are not all of them evidential. They are, many of them, not only non-evidential, but so clearly subconscious that we have to accept the evidential matter under the handicap of subliminal coloring. I have never known a spirit message to come without this coloring. The language and limitations of the medium are always apparent in the best of material. This liability is conceded by spiritualists themselves, but they rarely if ever reckon with it in their treatment of the facts. Besides they do not adequately distinguish in most cases between evidential incidents and subliminal chaff that can make no pretense whatever of spiritistic origin. The conditions may not wholly prevent transmission, but they serve in most cases as a restriction on free communication. What they are we do not know as yet and can only conjecture them along the broadest lines. We can imagine that the analogies of normal experience may enter into them. Thus the individual has to begin at birth to gradually acquire power to move his own organism and after years of patient endeavor to obtain such facility in it as we observe in normal experience. When an accident to the body occurs, like paralysis or illness of any kind that weakens control of the organism, even the living have gradually to recover that power. This is a fact so familiar to all of us that it does not require discusson. Now it is conceivable that a discarnate intelligence, having severed its connection with its own body would encounter tenfold, perhaps a thousandfold, greater difficulties in acquiring power to control a new organism, with other connections and experiences belonging to a living soul, than it would have with its own organism, and these were great enough there, especially when the normal conditions were affected by accident or disease.

Now if we will only add to this difficulty the next one; namely, the necessity, perhaps, that all messages

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