also claim that their perceptions are extended beyond ours. Now if this be a fact we can well imagine that transmission might overcome space limitations as well as perception. Accepting this fact they might be, the instant transmitters of thoughts which they receive from the living either in the vicinity or at a distance, and their success would depend upon the variable conditions affecting the percipient and the question of voluntary and involuntary messages. But in spite of this possibility we have not yet obtained secure evidence that it is the general fact. There is some evidence that it is the fact in certain instances, but we lack a criterion for determining whether the cases not exactly like them come under the same law.

"I

CHAPTER VI

THE POSSIBILITY OF A FUTURE LIFE

F a man die shall he live again?" That was the question of Job and we are often told that it has never been answered. A part of it has been answered by all human experience and that is that man dies. But what is death? If we were sure of the answer to that question we could easily say whether he "lived" again. Some tell us that life as we know it is not worth while, but neither they nor those whom they would have adopt that creed have the courage to commit suicide and the riddle remains with us. But what is the problem before our attention?

When people ask whether we shall survive death they do not often indicate what they expect from an affirmative answer. In fact the answer varies with the degree of intelligence which men show. The outline of the different beliefs in the world shows this. The savage takes it very literally often, but not any more so than the believers in a physical resurrection. Others adopt

a philosophy which makes the soul so supersensible as to escape all physical tests of its existence and nature, and can thus picture a state of existence which excludes the physical from its representation. The theosophist represents this type of believer. He stands midway between the pure materialist and the believer in the bodily resurrection. But both of them have to contend with the materialist who denies that there is any soul to survive and thus throws the whole burden of proof upon the man who believes in the affirmative.

Now, just to say merely that we survive death carries very simple and imaginative conceptions to most people, but no definite meaning to many others except that it may happen to derive that meaning from the prevailing philosophy of the time. When Plato asserted the immortality of the soul, it was meant in terms of the Platonic philosophy and what that was not was clearly indicated by what he called the mythical view of the next life. He could not tell clearly what he meant by it. Christianity adopted a clear view of it when the doctrine of the resurrection was put forward. Its clearness did not make it true, but it did make the belief accord with normal experience regarding the relation between consciousness and the organism. It simply invoked Providence to restore a relation which it saw as a fact. But science and philosophy departed from so crude a view and we were left with Platonic ideas for it, or the acceptance of materialism as the only alternative.

There are just two ways in which we can approach such a subject as survival after death. They can be put in the questions: What are the facts? What is the nature of the soul? The latter ultimately cannot escape dependence on the answer to the first question which is the scientific query and the second is philosophic.

The first broad fact before the human mind is the fact that we "die," whatever we mean by that term. We come into the world at birth, and death removes all visible evidence of our existence. If we are but a physical body with functions we undoubtedly perish. So far as death marks a fact of change there is no question about it. But men have always insisted, when they really refused to accept the manifest appearance of things, that there was something accompanying the body which did not perish with it. In that way they endeavored to limit the meaning of death as a fact

and to cover a belief that something continued to exist after the dissolution of the body. There is the question. Is there anything possible that may survive? Is there adequate reason to believe that we have a soul, something other than the brain, that may survive the dissolution of this brain?

But suppose there is something else than the brain required to explain consciousness, how will that fact help us? Would it follow that a soul continued after death if we had one? Some say it would, some say it would not. The Epicureans and materialists of that day admitted the existence of a soul, an ethereal organism accompanying the body, but they maintained that it perished with the body. But they obtained this view only by virtue of the suppositions (1) that all complex organisms perished and (2) that the soul was a complex organism. But they never claimed to prove that the soul was a complex organism. They simply assumed this a priori, affirming this nature of all things except the imperishable atoms. These simple bodies were assumed to be indestructible. Their compounds were assumed to perish. It was an observed fact that organisms which were compounds did dissolve and perish. But this was an empirical observation, not a necessity.

When investigation was set afoot, it was found that all dissolution required its causation. That is to say, complex things did not perish without a cause or reason for it. They, too, might be imperishable, so far as the "necessity" of things was concerned. In fact, conformity to nature would require them to be as imperishable as simple bodies as long as inertia was made the nature or essential attribute of material objects. They could not of themselves change their condition and could be changed only by action from without. So death would not take place without some cause. It was not an inherent attribute of the complex subject. The reason for it was not the law of events, but the

causes which determined the effect. So it was a merely observed fact, not a necessity that complex organisms perished. Where no causes acted to dissolve them they remained imperishable. For instance, the human body left to its normal condition, as we understand that term, after death soon dissolved into its elements. But when embalmed it may still exist after many centuries still undissolved. Certain rocks left to the inclemencies of the weather, heat and cold, will dissolve. But free from all disturbing influences they may be immortal, though complex, as that term goes. It is not complexity, therefore, that insures death, but the causes which act on the subject destined to perish, if I may use such a phrase as "destined" in this connection.

Hence the Epicurean materialists simply set up as a necessity what was only an empirically observed fact and that not universally observed. Besides there was no reason to assure them that the causes which dissolved the physical body also dissolved the soul whose existence they admitted. It might still persist when the body had perished. It was pure speculation that led them to deny survival and this is proved by their attitude when Christianity came forward with an alleged fact to prove survival. Christianity called attention to a case of resurrection, and it makes no difference for us whether that resurrection be regarded as physical or ethereal, the revival of the body, or the observation of the ethereal organism. The materialists, instead of admitting that they were worsted about immortality, gave up the hypothesis of the ethereal organism, and stood by the denial of immortality by making consciousness a function of the physical organism instead of being a function of the ethereal organism. Materialism admitted it was worsted in the matter of a soul, but rather than admit survival, it yielded on the existence of a soul. There were moral reasons for this. It did not wish to believe in survival