WHEN we consider the question or Survival from the physical point of view we are up
against the ancient problem of the connection between mind and body. The body is
certainly made of matter, but matter is inert, it never does anything, it is
completely controlled by the forces acting upon it, which forces exist in the
empty space surrounding the atoms. Left to itself, matter merely continues in
whatever state it was last made to accept. If it was spinning, it continues to
spin with constant angular momentum. It has no power of changing its state or of
stopping. If it was in a state of locomotion, that motion also continues
unaltered. This is called the law of inertia, and to it all material atoms are
absolutely obedient, whether they form part of an engine or of a clockwork
mechanism or of an animated body. There is no exception. All matter is inert.
If any change is observed in atomic or material
behaviour, it is
a sign of some activity, some energy apart from matter, demonstrating its
existence by acting upon matter, and causing some acceleration or retardation
proportionate to the force exerted. This is called the second law of motion.
Furthermore, every kind of energy known to us exists in the empty space between
the atoms and exerts equal force upon the boundary atoms at either end of that
space, so that every action is accompanied by an equal opposite reaction. This
is called the third law of motion, or it might be called the law of energy.
Energy only makes itself manifest by its effect on material bodies, but its main
existence is in space. We have no sense organ for perceiving energy itself, our
senses tell us of nothing but matter. We can see the results of energy as
expended upon matter, but we have no direct apprehension of the energy. We are
not acquainted with anything in the Universe save by its effect upon matter, and
that is the origin of our tendency to philosophic materialism; we are liable to
doubt whether things not apparent to the senses can have a real existence,
though there is no justification for such a doubt.
The physical Universe does not consist of matter alone. If it
did, it would be absolutely inert, no change would ever occur. Experience shows
us constant change, constant activity, and, when analysed, the source of this
activity is always found in the field or space between the atoms. That is where
the energy exists, that is where it is stored; and we can gradually realise that
it is through interaction between the void and the material particles that every
change or activity is accomplished. A field of force always exists in what we
call vacuum or Ether, what the Ancients called 'void'; never does it exist in
matter. Yet force is only made manifest by matter. It is only by observing the
behaviour of material bodies that we can become aware of the existence of a
field of force or of a seat of energy. Energy is constant in amount, but it
takes various forms. The form with which we are best acquainted is the form of
motion, and that is the only form ever associated with matter. All the other
forms are hidden and make no impression upon us, save when they encounter
material particles and thus display their existence. No one, for instance, could
experience a magnetic field without a bit of iron to test it with. No one has
any knowledge of the broadcast waves which now surround us unless he has a
suitable detecting apparatus in the form of a wireless set and a telephone. And,
strange to say, we can only appreciate light when it impinges upon some piece of
matter and thence is deflected into the eyes. When we see a lighthouse or
searchlight beam tracking its way across space, it is not the beam that we
observe, but the dust particles which are illuminated by it. We can only see
material objects : we have no sense for radiation itself, nor for an electric
current, only for its activity in affecting various kinds of matter. These are
only instances of a quite general law.
We cannot understand the activity of the material Universe
without taking energy into account, and this energy exists in the space between
the particles. Matter is discontinuous, consisting of isolated particles, they
are connected only through space. But inasmuch as this space is impregnated with
energy, it must be something more than mere emptiness. It makes no impression on
our senses, and yet it is full of energy, and is the reservoir of all activity;
hence we have agreed to call it the Ether. A magnetic field exists wholly in the
Ether, iron fillings are only used to demonstrate it and map it out. An
electric, a gravitational, field is in the same predicament. Cohesion, too, and
indeed every action between material particles, is an affair of the Ether. In no
other way can one piece of matter act on another. Every kind of physical action
is really transmitted across space - that is, through the Ether - just as
really, though not so obviously, as electric and magnetic attraction,
gravitation, and light. Atoms and their constituents are never in contact. Ether
forces or Ether strains have to be appealed to, when we try really to understand
the most ordinary activities in daily life. Even a simple push is exerted
through an infinitesimal layer of Ether. Every variety of potential energy
exists in the Ether : matter has no energy except kinetic ; and recently an
ethereal explanation of even that kind of energy shows signs of emerging from
the theory of relativity.
Animated matter differs in no respect from every other kind of
matter, except that it is subject to animation.
So when we say that life only exists in a material organism, we
ought to say that life only manifests itself in association with such an
organism, and that when it is dissociated from matter we know nothing of its
existence. We have no right to say that it is extinct. All that we know is that
it is no longer manifest it has gone out of our ken. But the same may be said of
every form of energy in itself, it has no power of becoming known to us but by
its effect on material bodies. A body under the action of life can do many
things, can initiate spontaneous movements, can build up an organism, can
operate on the physical Universe, and leave structures behind it of interest and
beauty, but it is not the material body that does these things ; they are due to
the life or animation of the body.
If, then, we can adduce any evidence that life or mental
activity exists in space, and only sporadically makes itself evident by some
material activity, the state of our present knowledge of physics renders our
acceptance of the fact entirely harmonious. We have to do no violence to our
physical conceptions if we admit the fact of survival. Life and mind never were
functions of the material body, they only displayed themselves by means of the
material organism. The organism was not essential to their existence, but only
to their display - that is, to our apprehension of them. If they ever find means
of operating in a novel or unusual manner on a physical organism, then they may
still manifest their continued existence ; and that is exactly what they do. Why
should we decline to receive the evidence?
Telepathy shows that mind can act on mind without the use of any
bodily organs, hence certain people may have a faculty of apprehending a
spiritual world direct ; and this may account for genius and inspiration. This
has been well argued by F.W.H. Myers, and I shall not labour it now.
If you have evidence of the existence of a spiritual world, a
world of help and guidance and sympathy, then you can hold to it in spite of
every denial of the materialists, who can only base their denial on the absence
of any sensory stimulus to their material organism. Such a world may exist all
round us, and yet can only be spiritually discerned. The faculty of discernment
does exist in some people, and their positive evidence overweighs a wilderness
of negation from people whose perceptions are limited to the bodily senses. One
of the most elementary forms of discernment is (rather absurdly) called
Psychometry. An object put into their hands may convey more information than the
senses can give : a psychometrist can tell something of its history, something
of its association, something of its possessor. By special faculty they can tell
far more than could be arrived at by chemical tests. They can tell, for
instance, that a bit of stone has formed part of a pyramid, or that a ring has
taken part in a scene of slaughter, or that a piece of writing or drawing has
been done by a certain person normally quite unknown to them, and can even tell
what the circumstances of that person were at the time, and what they were
doing.
The existence of a spiritual world throughout the depths of
space is becoming to me a great and fundamental, even a physical, reality. The
manifestation of that world in connection with material organisms on one or
other of the planets is a comparatively trifling and temporary episode, of great
importance doubtless in the history of evolutionary development, but our real
existence is not dependent on a material organism. Our spiritual and real home
is in the Ether of space.
Chemists and biochemists are liable to limit themselves unduly
to the purely material aspect of things. A chemist's business is to deal with
matter in its various forms ; that is his job, and he need not be expected to go
beyond it. A physicist takes into account the Ether as well, though he may, for
a time, prefer to call it space. He is not limited to material particles, but
studies the fields of force which connect them and make them active. The
psychologist goes further still, and studies the action of the mind. I would I
could say that the biologist is a student of life, but at present the tendency
is for him only to study animated organisms and their behaviour, limiting his
attention to what is manifested by the material processes brought about by life,
and not thinking that life has any existence apart from its instrument of
manifestation. We shall never understand the Universe by attending to matter
alone and ignoring everything which makes it active and interesting. We cannot
even understand the bending of a steel spring or the fall of a raised weight
without implicitly taking the Ether into account. We are continually making
experiments on the Ether and realising the consequences of its abundant
qualities. If we make the assumption that it is a physical vehicle of life and
mind too, we are only extending our generalisation in the same direction.
A supplementary and semi-physical treatment of Survival is now
becoming possible ; a treatment which is well calculated to replace the old
materialistic view that man had only a material body, and that when that body
died and decayed, the animation, the personality, and the individual,
necessarily ceased to exist. It is also well calculated to replace the popular
idealistic notion that any spirit which survives the death of the material body
must survive in an entirely disembodied condition, and be out of relationship
with the physical Universe. Many people suppose that it then belongs to another
order of existence, or, as some would say, of non-existence ; that it is likely
to be free from any relationship even with Space and Time, and must have
departed entirely out of our ken ; so that communication or intercourse with it
is no longer possible, until perhaps at some future day when the material body
shall have been somehow resuscitated and restored to its old function, in
glorified form, so that the spirit can resume its active control. That this
superstitious idea has been prevalent is testified to by popular modes of
expression, such as :
'On the Resurrection morning, all their dead the graves restore.
Father, mother, sister, brother meet once more.'
This depressing notion of future existence - if it can be called
existence in the interim - is not a scientific or psychological view at all ;
but it has been the religious, or at least the ecclesiastical, view through
medieval times ; hymns and liturgies are saturated with it, and it continues to
this day the chief representation of what, by strictly orthodox people, is meant
by Survival.
A modern theory which seeks to provide the emancipated spirit
with any kind of organism related to the physical world might thus be ranked as
a return to a modified form of materialism. For though, when properly
understood, the view I advocate ought to emancipate us from materialistic
bugbears, and although it wholly condemns the idea that flesh and blood or any
particles of terrestrial matter are revivified and inherit Eternal Life, yet
popular ignorance of what is meant by the Ether, and of the certain fact that
the Ether is a part of the physical Universe and has definite properties which
can be experimented on and ascertained, may well suggest all manner of
difficulties in understanding the hypothesis I am trying to expound. Wherefore
it will probably be considered unsatisfactory, both by the scientific
materialist and by the theologian; possibly also by some spiritualists.
The necessity for some kind of organ or instrument or habitation
for an emancipated spirit has been intuitively felt by many inspired writers.
The most ancient classical idea was that of a condition rather melancholy -
unhouseled, wistful, shadowy and sad - but this notion was improved upon even in
later classical times. And towards the end, 'Not unclothed, but clothed upon,'
'God giveth it a body,' are modes of expression very familiar to modern ears.
The existence of a spiritual body is an idea, in one form or
another, at least as old as St. Paul. It has been upheld by some of the Greek
Fathers of the Church ; it has been vaguely in the mind of many modern
investigators ; sundry obscure and super-normal facts seem to lend it strong
support. And recently an etheric version of such a body has been approved - and
if not inculcated, at any rate, regarded as a step in the right direction - by
some of the more thoughtful and philosophically minded communicators 'on the
other side'.
What they know by experience is that, though discarnate, they
are certainly not disembodied ; they feel no more disembodied than we do. They
tell us that they still have substantial instruments of manifestation which
serve for intercourse among each other, and that it is through this permanent
instrument that they are able, occasionally and under certain conditions, to
operate indirectly, through our organisms, on the matter of this planet. They
operate with more difficulty than in the old days, partly because they have to
make use of other people's mechanism; but still, subject to many restrictions,
they exert influence in a somewhat similar way, and thereby are able
occasionally to know what we are doing ; and they claim sometimes to succeed in
helping and stimulating us, not only mentally but physically.
Now, although the departed may not understand fully and
completely of what their present body is composed, or how they operate on it so
as to produce the results they desire and aim at, they are still only in the
same predicament as they were when here, and as we are now. For we do not know
how we control our bodies of matter, nor what the nature of the connection
between mind and matter is. We know that we have muscles and nerves and brain
centres. We can dissect and describe this part of the mechanism. But how a
physiological instrument - how any kind of mechanism - can think and feel and
plan and will and remember and hope and love, we certainly cannot explain. And
probably we shall never be able to explain how such a thing can happen ; for the
thing to be explained does not happen, it is only imagined to happen through a
misapprehension. The truth is that it is we ourselves who really do all the
psychical things ; we employ our bodies only as instruments for recording and
transmitting our thoughts and for exercising muscular action on matter. The body
itself neither thinks nor wills nor sees nor feels. It is an instrument, a
channel, a medium.
Although full explanations about our method of controlling of a
body are not yet forthcoming - either on this side or on that - yet those 'on
the other side' are quite willing to accept the suggestion that their bodies,
which to them feel so substantial, and all the surroundings in which they exist,
are related to the thing which we here call the Ether, very much in the same way
as they used to be related to the familiar thing known as Matter.
That Ether is a very substantial entity, far denser than any
form of matter, has been gradually becoming clear to physicists. At first, we
only said that it must be denser than lead or gold or platinum, but now we find
that it must be out of all proportion denser. I have made an estimate of its
density, in the light of electromagnetic theory, and it comes out inevitably
huge. Every cubic millimetre contains as much substance as what, if it were
matter, we should call a thousand tons. As the Ether is not matter in the
ordinary sense of the term, our ordinary units of measurement are inappropriate
; but on the analogy of matter, the Ether is of the order a million million
times as dense as water. All its properties are of supernormal magnitude. Its
rate of vibration which enables us to see any ordinary object is five hundred
million million per second : a number so great that to try to conceive such a
number of vibrations per second simply dizzies us. The number of seconds which
have passed since ancient geological periods of twenty million years ago is
about this number. Yet we familiarly make use of these vibrations. Our wonderful
organ, the eye, is constructed so as to cope with them, in the easiest possible
manner. And most people are ignorant - as ignorant as are the animals - of the
strange ethereal environment amid which we all live, and of which the vibrations
convey to us so much information, and awaken so keenly our sense of beauty.
Until instructed, we can hardly help thinking of matter as
dense, and of Ether as tenuous, but that is a poetic illusion associated with
the term 'ethereal'. It is an illusion based on the testimony of our senses,
which, as so often happens, have to be corrected by deeper insight into the real
nature of things. Matter appeals to us so strongly, not because it is anything
but a gossamer-like or milky-way existence in the vast continuity of Ether, but
because our obvious bodies are made of matter, and because our animal sense
organs are specially adapted to existence in association with matter, and give
us information about nothing else. Even light, which we know is an Ether
vibration, tells us nothing about itself without study ; what it tells us
familiarly is - not about light , but - about the material objects which have
emitted or scattered or differentially absorbed it. We get this information by
lifelong, indeed age-long, inherited and instinctive experience. We interpret
the luminous indications without difficulty, and we forget the strangely complex
nature of the processes which underlie all our channels of information; we only
find their true nature out when phenomena are fundamentally analysed and
seriously cross-questioned. When we have pursued this line of investigation for
many years, we find that the important thing in the physical Universe is Ether,
and that matter is trivial in comparison. Yet we can freely admit that matter
takes such splendid and beautiful forms that it is worthy of the continued study
of generations of scientific men; and we need not wonder that they become so
enthusiastic over its properties that they are able to imagine it the sole
reality in existence. That, however, is a mistake; it constitutes a mechanism
actuated and wielded by mental and spiritual power, which is dominant and
supreme.
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