MODE OF LIFE AFTER DEATH

 THE general public has been led by psychic research to hope that we all survive death, and it has tolerated our laborious and tedious investigations with the expectation that we should soon announce our conclusions about the nature of another life. But no word has come from investigators to give assurance of anything except that we survive. It is the character of the future life, however, that interests most people far more than evidence of continued existence without any information as to what it is like. When the assertion is made that we live after death, the average man wants to know what that life offers in the way of enjoyment.

 But those who look at the subject in this way understand neither the scientific problem nor the difficulties in the way of satisfying their desires. The evidence which proves the fact may not reveal a single feature of its nature. We simply observe facts which cannot be accounted for by ordinary explanations. Supernormal knowledge obtainable only by the continued activity of deceased persons justifies the inference that consciousness continues, but does not reveal the nature of the life thus implied. The problem of determining this nature is very complex, and no hasty demands can be made upon the scientific man to satisfy the natural desire to know what the transcendental world really is.

 It is sense-perception that gives us a clear idea of what reality is or appears to be in normal experience. We react to physical stimuli affecting the sensory end-organs. These experiences attest for us the existence of an external physical world, even when they may not reveal its true nature. Whatever theories we may hold about sense-perception, it is the means of learning that we have to reckon with something else than ourselves and is the only means of intercommunication with one another. For all practical purposes, it serves to define the nature of reality, though by that nature we may mean no more than uniformity of effect on the sense-organs. Its constancy and our dependence on it for our adjustments in life make sense-perception the standard of our ideas, especially of such as can be communicated to other men. All conceptions that have no such reference are considered subjective or abstract. Ideas not expressible in terms of sense-perception are vague and not communicable to others. Most people, when listening to statements about a future life, must naturally try to conceive or picture it by means of sensory images, which make it intelligible to them. The Book of Revelation, for instance, which gives at least one form of the Christian conception, describes the spiritual world in terms of sensory pictures of physical realities. Even though we try to interpret the representation as symbolic, the details of the description are dependent on material analogies. The doctrine of the physical resurrection assumes that the spiritual world is like the physical. But the philosophic mind can never be made to believe this. To it the spiritual is the antithesis of the material. It even goes so far as to deprive spirit of every attribute of matter, leaving it a spaceless point of force. This theory is neither intelligible nor interesting to the average man, who conceives all reality by means of sensory images. A spiritual world that is not a "world" at all, but the absence of everything that constitutes what we call a world, does not appeal to him as worth either proving or having. That is to say, the tendency is to conceive the spiritual world as resembling the physical, even when we acknowledge that it is different in certain fundamental aspects.

 The paradox of the ordinary view of a spiritual world lies in definition of spirit as opposed to matter, while at the same time the spiritual world is described in terms of that very matter which has been excluded. Such a view offers a good butt for ridicule; often the accounts of life in a spiritual world include so complete a duplication of all that goes on in the physical world, when we are supposed to have been divested of the conditions that made such aids necessary, that the skeptic may be excused for his contempt. He takes the antithesis between matter and spirit in earnest, while the believer does not. When we are told that spirits wear clothes, partake of banquets, have the same vocations there as here, are teachers, artists, manufacturers, merchants, and perhaps farmers, we are listening only to the logical consequences of making the spiritual world exactly like our own. But such economic arrangements are superfluous when we are rid of the body. Why all the useless machinery of an earthly life when it serves no imaginable purpose in a "spiritual" world? The accounts on these points are not always consistent. Some deny the existence of any conditions such as I have mentioned, and others tell us that we can form no conception of the future life.

 We may say, however, that it is much easier to defend the physical view of the spiritual world from the standpoint of physical science than is at first apparent. Physical science with all its boasted dependence on sense­perception for its standard of reality pays no attention to this standard when it seeks explanations. It deals with supersensible realities quite as extensively as does theology or religion or spiritualism. Its atoms, ions, electrons, corpuscles, ether, X-rays, N-rays, and even the vibrations supposed to cause light, are as unrepresentable in sense-perception as spirit can possibly be to any one who refuses to conceive it in terms of sensory properties. The real physical world of the scientists, though it is called "matter," is quite as truly beyond sense-perception as spirit is. The original notion of matter is of a substance which affects the senses. Atoms, ions, and electrons are not sensible objects of knowledge. Why, then, are they called matter?

 The fact is that very soon in its development physical science extended its conception of matter to include supersensible forms. The atomists set up the atoms, the earlier thinkers set up elements which were only adumbration of the atoms. Though the atoms were no more the objects of sense than are spirits, yet because they were supposed to comprise complex sensible wholes, organic or inorganic, because they were regarded as the material cause of what we can see or feel, the "stuff" out of which these things were made, the term "physical" or "material" was applied to them. From that time on science had the ineradicable habit of including the supersensible in the conception of matter as well as of spirit, though it continued its hostility to the latter!

Now if there can be a supersensible world of matter why may there not also be a supersensible world of spirit? The very philosophers who thus extended the conception of matter held that spirit was itself a fine form of matter; they simply regarded it as a supersensible type of matter. It was much later that the difference between matter and spirit was developed into a complete antithesis.

 This antithesis was probably occasioned by the change in the definition of matter. The extension of the term to cover supersensible realities at the basis of the sensible made it necessary to abandon sensible qualities as part of the definition, for all but practical purposes. Hence to the modern physicist matter is that which manifests inertia, gravity and impenetrability. These properties are supposed to apply to its supersensible as well as its sensible forms. After this conception of matter was accepted, spirit lost its ancient meaning of a fine form of matter and was described by qualities that bear no resemblance to those of matter. In the conceptions of Leibnitz and Boscovitch it is spaceless and characterized only by intelligence or consciousness. This radical dualism, not characteristic of ancient thought, is what has made incredible the statements in which a spiritual world is given material characteristics and habits of action. The advocate of spirit is perhaps as much to blame as his opponents for this predicament. At any rate it arose, and involved the difficulty of believing any description of a transcendental world that is only matter disguised and yet is called "spiritual," when the spiritual supposedly has none of the qualities of the material. The mere acknowledgment of supersensible reality, therefore, does not imply the spiritual, if so extreme a conception of it be taken. Yet it opens such a vista of possibilities that scientific and materialistic dogmatism has no ground for assurance on its side. When matter can assume supersensible forms—that is, lose such properties as make it accessible to sense-perception—may it not further change its form so as to lose even those properties by which science now recognizes it even in its supersensible forms? May there not exist either a kind or a condition of matter in which it may lose inertia, gravity and impenetrability, or any one or two of these properties, and may manifest consciousness? I am far from believing this theory, as there is neither evidence for it nor justification in the mere desire to save spiritistic philosophies. But I am not so dogmatic as to say that it is impossible. We merely know that analogies to this transformation exist in physics and chemistry, and we may keep our minds open to such possibilities, if qualitative unity in nature be required. The fact is, however, that we do not require any such unity. We do not know the limits of the multiplicity of nature. It is only the desire for what is called monism that leads men to eliminate spirit from nature. But there is multiplicity enough within every system of monism, materialistic or otherwise, to include all that goes by the name of spirit.

 The conception of spirit by radical dualism as the opposite of matter, tends to make us think that matter and spirit cannot exist side by side nor interact. Even the ancients took this position, though perhaps for other reasons. The Epicureans, though materialists, admitted the existence of the gods, but placed them in the intermundia where they could exercise no influence nor causal action on the course of nature. The Epicurean theory of "material causes" eliminated mind as a cause of anything, cosmic or individual. Other philosophers placed mind back of the cosmic order, but postulated an eternal substance besides mind. The materialists who admitted the existence of mind or soul, gave it neither causal action on the body nor survival after death. How they could compass its destruction consistently with their theory of the permanence of other things is not easy to understand.

 Modern materialism cut the Gordian knot by abandoning the existence of soul and explaining its apparent activities as functions of the brain. But it gives no further definition of consciousness; it does nothing to reduce it to physical types; it leaves its nature as mysterious as before. There are, then, at least two and perhaps three considerations which may be urged upon physical science to show the possibility of a spiritual world like the physical world we know, though not wholly described in terms of our sensory life.

There is, first, the concession of a supersensible world even of matter.

 There is, second, the fact that even materialism has to admit the existence of consciousness as an irreducible phenomenon, though only as a function of matter, and thus assumes that something different from matter can exist side by side with it. It concedes that matter can be known by consciousness and yet not participate in its nature; that is, not have the properties by which matter is known.

 A third and more important point of view is the following: If we have evidence enough to justify the belief that consciousness survives death, we prove at the same time that consciousness or the soul existed side by side with matter before death. That is, the physical world is not incompatible with the presence of a soul whether defined as a fine form of matter or as the absolute antithesis to matter.

 Now in the present discussion the existence and survival of a soul is taken as scientifically proved. We need not determine its nature in relation to matter. The fact remains that consciousness is not a function of the brain, that spiritual realities exist in the present physical order. Death then may be only the separation of the spiritual form from the sensory form of the physical, or the sensory manifestation of the physical, and the soul's environment after death may be the same physical world in its supersensible aspects. That is, the spiritual world may be like the physical with out being any more accessible to sense-perception than the supersensible world of physical science is now.

 Now we come to the experiences which at least appear to point in just this direction. These are of two types: (1) apparitions, and (2) mediumistic communications. Apparitions represent spirit in the spatial form of physical reality. They probably gave rise to the Epicurean doctrine of the "ethereal organism" and the Pauline "spiritual body," and the "astral body" of the theosophists, though this last term is sometimes given a more technical meaning. But they imply a reality in certain respects like matter, though not visible to normal sense-perception. The natural interpretation is, that we see spirits when we see apparitions. If we accept that interpretation, there at least seems to be a decided resemblance of the spiritual world to the physical, even in the very nature and form of spirit itself. In support of this theory are frequent statements through mediums, which may not be conclusive, but have weight and make it imperative that we should investigate their meaning fully. Both of these sources imply that the spiritual world is like the physical, at least in its form and appearance, though it may differ from the physical world as known to the senses, as much as the supersensible physical world differs from the sensible. It may thus be a world in which the supersensible is without inertia, gravity and impenetrability, and yet has the apparent form of matter.

 The only difficulty in urging this view is that many apparitions are simply phantasms produced either by telepathy between the living or by telepathy between the dead and the living. Mediumistic communications, whether conclusive or not, are more cogent as evidence. But when we consider that a pictographic process is the frequent or constant method of communication from a transcendental world, and that the interpretation of the mental pictures by the subconscious minds of the mediums may distort their Significance as representations of spiritual realities, we may have to suspend judgment.

 But phantasms and appearances represented in mediumistic messages, regardless of supposed distortion in their transmission to us, may still correctly represent the nature of a spiritual world, as the image on a photograph plate or the retina represents the object producing it.

 I am far from regarding all this argument as proof of the doctrine, but it clears away the perplexities which attend the radically dualistic theory. If apparitions and mediumistic communications attest the existence of spirit, and if we are willing to recognize the possibility that the apparitions correctly represent reality, we may then have recourse to other methods for ascertaining how far the resemblance to the physical world extends. We raise no questions whether spirit is material or immaterial. We decide first that it can exist independently of matter as we know it sensibly, or even supersensibly, and then investigate in other ways its further nature. For all that we know, therefore, the next world or life may be very like the present one, despite apparently very radical differences. No man is in a position scientifically to deny such a possibility. The scientific evidence for the existence of spirit establishes such a, world, whether we chose to regard it as objectively similar or dissimilar to our physical world.

 We may conceive the next life, then, as having the same physical cosmos to deal with, but as not perceiving it in the same way. The spiritual world may be simply the supersensible side of what is now sensible to us. How we may be related to it as we are to matter in our physical embodiment is not conjecturable, as facts to indicate the relation have not yet been discovered. But it is entirely conceivable that it should be the same world and yet not appear to be the same, since the stimulus on spirit after death may be very different from present stimuli on the physical sense-organs. It may be the same world even without our directly knowing it at all, though existing in it; for only one aspect of it appears to us now. The soul's activities may be more active or creative in the spiritual than in the terrestrial life. But we do not know. There are many possibilities which await further investigation.

 But there is one more important objection or difficulty with which we have to deal: the contradictions in the messages descriptive of the future life. Though they speak of it as if it were the same physical world as that known to sense, hardly any two writers or communicators represent it in the same way. One may tell us that spirits wear clothes and another may modify this statement by saying that the clothes are "creations of thought." One represents the dead as living in houses, and others deny that they do so, while still others mediate between these two extremes by making the houses products of thought or purely imaginary. Some tell us that we could not understand any statement about the spiritual world. All these contradictions imply either differences of opinion about the other life or the distortion of messages by the subconscious of the medium, or perhaps both combined. In any case, the statements are so different and apparently so contradictory that we cannot unreservedly trust any communication as correctly des scribing the nature of that life.

 But there is a way to establish unity in this apparent chaos of inconsistencies. We have found by experience that subconscious states produce a far more distinct appearance of reality than does normal imagination. The subconscious, in dreams, delirium, hallucinations, and hypnosis, gives apparent physical reality to its objects. Mental creations appear to be physical or objective realities. Now as such creations are often independent of normal physical stimuli, we may suppose that these functions are those that survive bodily death; and, if this be true, they would often produce apparent physical realities, just as they do in our subconscious. If they did so, and we could not introspect nor analyze any more than we can in sleep or hypnosis, we should take them for reality. If some spirits should continue the exercise of subconscious activities, whatever the cause, temporary or permanent, they might take the result to be real; but, even if they did not, the transmission of pictures to the living through subconscious functions might stimulate reality. We should then find the statements about the spiritual world as various as the experiences and opinions of the communicators. At least a part of the after life may be mental, a subjective creation, though taken as physically real either by the spirit or by the medium through which the messages come.

 Perhaps the matter can be somewhat clarified by approaching it through what every one knows of normal mental action. Our knowledge or experience is divided into two types, both perfectly familiar to every one. The first is sensation, the response to physical stimuli. The second is reflection or self-consciousness, the inner mental states, so to speak. These may not be representable in terms of external things, but are as clearly known as sensations. Their peculiarity is that they have a degree of independence of sensory states and of external stimuli or physical objects. We can think when we are not having sensations and we can always think about sensations. These acts of mind go on whether we are responding to external physical impressions or not. In fact these inner states, especially the emotions, are the representatives of value in experience, and appear to us to be the most important. Sensory phenomena are important only as signals in our relation to the physical world. If we could free ourselves from this relation, we might go on with the inner life without reference to an external world. When death destroys the sensory functions it may leave the reflective functions to continue their action; that is, it may simply make them more independent of matter than they are in the bodily life.

 A further support of this view comes from study of the subconscious activities of the mind. These are manifestly more nearly independent of normal stimuli than is ordinary self-consciousness. They are going on all the time. We have evidence that sleep does not suspend them in the least and that the dreams we know are but fragments of the images produced in sleep. In healthy conditions they are concealed from us altogether, and only when some derangement is present do they invade normal activities and cause all sorts of hysterias and dissociations. They produce images that are taken for realities—for instance, hallucinations. Often a dream is so vivid that the subject can easily and clearly distinguish between it and ordinary dreams, which are more like the products of imagination, known to be unreal. Assuming, as did Mr. Myers, that the subconscious functions, freed from sense domination, adumbrate the nature of the future life and themselves survive in independence of sensory stimuli, we have a theory that explains all the contradictions in the revelations of the next life. Different persons have different interests and tastes, and these interests are preserved with their personal identity. If they continue to use the functions represented in subliminal activities, creating apparent reality as in dreams, somnambulism, hallucinations, and hypnosis, they will differ as much as men differ now in their thoughts and ideals. When in contact with living psychics, these states will be transferred as pictographic images, consciously or unconsciously, by the communicator and accepted by the psychic as representing at least a quasi-physical reality. In such a situation all sorts of confusion might arise. The earth-bound, Who are those mostly interested in the memories and experiences of a physical life, would reflect states that belonged to their past sensory lives, and, in the course of communication by the pictographic process, create the impression that the spiritual life simply duplicates the physical.

 A life of mere thinking and dreaming may not appear very inviting to most people, but I am not concerned with what we like or dislike. Science has to accept the universe as it is, and to find out what it is doing, not necessarily to gratify human desires. If the next life consists of day-dreaming, we shall have to accept it whether we like it or not. But I am not sure that this conception rightly represents the facts. We have not evidence enough to show what the transcendental world is in its entirety. I have already said that it may be only the other side of our own world, with a little more subjective or creative independence than normal consciousness now has. We discover in the confused statements about it, especially the paradoxical assertions of the earth-bound and the occasional explanation of their mental states as illusions and hallucinations in the frequent admission that thought and creative influences are more dominant there than here; in the views of Swedenborg, which anticipated all that the pictographic process reveals—in all these we discover traces of a mental world which has much more freedom for activity than when it is hampered by bodily wants and subjected to physical influences. It is certain, if a future life has been proved or rendered probable at all, that, at least in the first period of life after death for many people, the creative functions of consciousness play a part in the representation of the spiritual world. Only the knowledge that subconscious influences in the living media of transmission may distort the message or make it fragmentary will induce us to state the conditions cautiously and with the reservation that the point of view above taken is at most a tentative and partial account of the facts.

 To quote the evidence in support of this contention would require a volume or two. Much of the material could not be regarded as satisfactory evidence. Only sporadic and unconscious remarks in the course of discussion of other problems indicate to us a mental world analogous to that of dreams, except that it is more rational and systematic. Even on the other side, irrationality may be met with often enough in those unadjusted to their environment or obsessed with sensory memories and desire.

 I am willing to admit that the expression "mental world" will not convey much information or be clear to most people, and I do not pretend that it indicates very much even to me. It is a barren phrase to most people and hardly less so to myself. But it affords a point of contact with philosophic idealism, and it also enables us to make a psychological approach to the problem through the subliminal processes and the inner life of reflection, which do not wholly depend upon sense-experience for their meaning. That is, those functions of mind that exhibit activities other than sensory may be the basis for conceiving the initial stages of a transcendental world independent of sense-perception. Hence "mental world" expresses the group of activities that may constitute a life a little more independent of stimuli than is life in our physical embodiment.

 As I have already indicated, the next world may only be the supersensible form of the physical world, and we may react to it as we do to the present, with something corresponding to sensation. But the conception of spirit as independent of the senses' is better represented by the subjective functions of the mind. The severance of our connection with the physical world as known to sense, may leave us nothing to start with except the inner functions of the mind, memories and subliminal faculties, which will have to create their own realities or apparent realities, as in dreams, poetizing, reverie, and day-dreaming, at least until some power at present unknown may enable us to respond to the new environment. This response may come sooner or later in our development on the other side. With some it may be instantaneous or not even interrupted by death, and with others much intervening time may elapse. The failure to have any but terrestrial memories to live upon, with their attachment to sensuous interests, gives rise to what is called the earth-bound condition, a state in which, as in delirium and dreams, we take our own mental states for physical realities. We may have to pass beyond this stage in order to become adjusted to our environment; the eradication of purely terrestrial memories may be necessary before we can feel and appreciate the nature of a spiritual world just as purely sensuous activities here have to be restrained., if we are to realize what is called spiritual life within us.

 The various contradictions about the next life make scientific and intelligent people doubt the assertions so frequently made about it. It is human nature to suppose that, if we accept messages as proof of continued personal identity, we should also accept the statements made about the future life. It is not, however, the veracity of communicators that secures the belief in their existence, but the evidence we have among the living that their statements are true.

No message is accepted because it claims a transcendental origin, but only because we have proof that the psychic through whom it came was ignorant of the facts announced, and because we can verify it on the testimony of the living. We do not assume the veracity of a spirit until it has been proved by the same methods as those used among the living to justify trust in their statements. Even if proved to be honestly meant, the communications may not be true. They may be the result of mistaken judgment. More than honesty is required to guarantee truth. Intelligence is quite as important as veracity. The consequence is that we can accept nothing purporting to come from spirits except what we can prove. This statement is especially important in this connection because the conditions for communicating are not the same as those between the living. They are much more complex, so complex that we have to reckon with liabilities of error, even though both the veracity and the intelligence of the communicator have been established. The distortion of messages in transmission is an important factor in the result; and when we recognize also the likelihood of error in the impersonations, we may well doubt statements concerning the nature of the next life.

 The contradictions are so numerous that it is hopeless to try to accept a superficial interpretation of the phenomena. One set of communicators—it makes no difference whether they are real or merely subconscious personalities—tells us that life in the spiritual world duplicates the physical life exactly, including food, dress, trade, art, "cigar manufactories," "whiskey sodas," and the whole gamut of objects and employments that we indulge in. Another set totally denies this and tells us that we cannot conceive what the world is like. Some tell us that reincarnation is true; others deny it. Some teach orthodox religious views, others the opposite. Some believe in God and some do not. Some claim to live in houses and others do not. There is no sort of unity in such claims except on the theory that the after life, as Swedenborg maintained, is one of mental states. Every one is free to think as he desires; and, if he can create his own world, as is constantly asserted in communications, that world will take as many forms as there are variant minds to create it, just as the subjective existences of living people differ. Landing in the spiritual world with personal identity and the memories of a terrestrial life, most of them sensory, and with the inherent tendency of the subliminal functions to produce the appearance of physical reality, spirits might well give discrepant accounts of the life. The conception of a world of mental states brings a certain consistency into the phenomena, to which we may hold while we pursue investigations, until we have positive evidence of the nature of the environment that constitutes objective life in the spiritual world.