The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

BOOK 8

BORDERLAND

CHAPTER 9

SCIENCE AND

THE QUESTION OF PERSONAL SURVIVAL

The Theory of Body-Soul-Spirit.

I. 3. Clairvoyance,

fyoreo

§ 2. Dream Anticipation and Telepathy. Table-tapping, and Telekinesis. ctoplasm. § 5. Mythology of the Future Life. § 6. The Survival of the Personality

§ 4. Materialization and

After Death.

§ 1 The Theory of Body-Soul-Spirit

OR the larger part of this work we have

confined ourselves to facts and generalizations that would be regarded as “ scientific * by the majority of scientific workers. Only in the last three or four chapters have we invoked the introspective evidence of psychology, and even then we have done our nest to keep the very metaphorical quality of its phrasing in view and to correct it by frequent reference to Behaviourist methods and ideas. Upon evidences universally acceptable and verifiable we have built up our picture of the co-ordinated realities we call “life ** in which our own consciousness floats.

We have attempted no philosophical nor metaphysical “explanations.” We have dealt with facts, and our picture is a presentation of fact. It is not in the sphere of science to offer fundamental “‘ explanations.” Science is simply a scrutiny and a putting together of scrutinized facts. Mind has come into our picture and we have traced its entry phase by phase. We have observed this new side of existence becoming more important in the scale of being until in ourselves it has the effect of an inner world reflecting all the processes of the material world, and conscious. We have shown reason for supposing that our own consciousness, so elaborate, so intensely and clearly focused upon the realization of self, is only the culmination of a series of developments closely correlated with the material evolution of living things. We have suggested that the stuff of consciousness may be co-extensive with the material stuff out of which life has elaborated itself. As our material bodies have been evolved so this stuff has been gathered together into the unity of our minds. But that is only a suggestion, a way of putting it. It is difficult to see how it can ever be more than a working hypothesis. Life we observe about us abun-

dantly and freely ; consciousness only in ourselves.

In this account of life we have avoided as far as possible certain ancient controversies and time-honoured theories. There is a very ancient theory that a human being consists of three distinct and _ separate factors, the body, the soul, and the spirit. We have troubled our readers very little with this concept of our fundamental triplicity, either to deny or discuss it, because it has been possible to render our account of life without it. It is not apparent in the ordinary facts of life. What we have said about it hitherto will be found in the Fourth Chapter of this Book, on Consciousness. And here we will make no attempt to give a definition of these three alleged factors nor say where one is supposed to end or the other begin.

Those who hold this theory of our threefold nature are apt to be loose in their use of the words “soul” and “spirit”? and run them together very confusingly. But they seem to agree that in the case of human beings, and possibly also of dogs, cats, parrots, and other creatures, there is something detachable, a twofold or onefold something—the soul-spirit or ghost, let us call it—which includes the consciousness, memories, and an indefinable multitude of characteristics constituting the individual difference or personality. This soul-spirit can operate beyond the body and by other than material means, and may possibly persist for an indefinite time or for ever after the material body, the body of fact, has been destroyed.

It is difficult to say whether this immortal part is supposed to exist before the conception or hatching or birth of the individual. If it does so, it must be without individual characteristics. So far as these go, it is clearly a synthetic product. It is what the assemblage of genes has made it. It arises and develops these characteristics, and once it has achieved this, then, from this ancient

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