Life After Death: Problems of the Future Life and Its Nature

THIS book is, in part, historical, and historically sound, the first three chapters concerning themselves with the record of primitive conceptions of a future life, and the pre-Christian ideas of civilized nations. After this point. Dr. Hyslop assumes the survival of the spirit of man after bodily death, referring the reader to the "plentiful and voluminous" material in the publications of the various Societies of Psychical Research as evidence, and then attacks the further problems, such as the nature of this existence after death (Chapter IV), the process of communication between this world and discarnate spirits. There is a chapter on the dissociation or disintegration of personality, which is a familiar feature of psychic research; and skeptics may find cause for skepticism in an account of the obsession of Doris by the spirit of Count Cagliostro, who was finally induced to go into a monastery or hospital in charge of Anselm, the eleventh-century Archbishop of Canterbury (p. 303). "Good evidence" of a spirit's personal identity seems somewhat too readily accepted by the author. Dr. Hyslop's attitude throughout is uncompromising: "I regard," he says, "the existence of discarnate spirits as scientifically proved, and I no longer refer to the skeptic as having any right to speak on the subject. Any man who does not accept the existence of discarnate spirits and the proof of it is either ignorant or a moral coward"-an attitude very different from that of the late Lord Rayleigh, when investigating similar phenomena.

-The Monist, Volume 30