flashes its messages here in this present life, is a fact attested by
too great an array of evidence to be doubted or denied. Now the
spiritual being who is released from the physical body is infinitely
more sensitive to impression, more responsive to mental call, than was
possible in conditions here. The experimental research and investigation
in psychology, as shown in such work as that of Professor Muensterberg of
Harvard in the university laboratory, reveals increasingly that the
brain is an electric battery of the most potent and sensitive order;
that it generates electric thought waves and receives them. Does it lose
this power by the change called death? Is this power only inherent in
the physical structure? On the contrary, Professor William James has
demonstrated with scientific accuracy in his book called "Human
Freedom," that this is not the case. If, then, intellectual energy
survives the process of death,--and if it does not then there is no
immortality,--the communication between those in the Unseen and those in
the Seen is as perfectly natural as is any form of companionship or of
social life here.
As all kinds of people live, so all kinds of people die, and the mere
fact of death is not a transforming process, spiritually. He who has
not developed the spiritual faculties while here; who has lived the mere
life of the senses with the mere ordinary intelligence, or without it,
but never rising to the nobler intellectual and moral life--is no more
desirable as a companion because he has died than he was before he died.
And the objection to any of the ordinary _seance_ phenomena is, that
whatever manifestations are genuine proceed very largely, if not
entirely, from this strata of the crude and inconsequential, if not the
vicious, with whom the high-minded man or woman would not have
associated in life, and after death their presence would be quite as
much to be deplored. Granted all these exceptions. One may sweep them
off and clear the decks. Then what remains? There remains the truth of
the unity of the spiritual universe; of the truth that the mere change
of death is not a revolutionary one, transforming the individual into
some inconceivable state of being and removing him, in a geographical
sense, into some unrevealed region in space; there remains the truth
that life is evolutionary in its processes; that there is no more
violent and arbitrary and instantaneous change by the event of death,
than there is in the change from infancy into childhood, from childhood
into manhood. There remains the truth that the ethereal and the physical
worlds are inter-related, inter-blended; that man, now and here, lives
partially in each, and that the more closely he can relate himself to
the diviner forces by prayer, by aspiration, by every thought and deed
that is noble and generous and true, and inspired by love, the more he
dwells in this ethereal atmosphere and is in touch with its forces and
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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