(Discusses the survival of personality from the moral point of view: that is, have we any claim upon life, entitling us to live forever?) As we explore the deeps of the subconsciousness, our own and other people's, we find ourselves confronting the strange question: Is it all our own mind, and that of other living people, or are we by any chance dealing with the minds of those who are dead? A great many earnest people, and some very learned people, are fully convinced that the latter is the case, and we have now to consider their arguments.
When I was a little boy I used to read and hear ghost stories, and would shudder over them; but I was given to understand that all this was just imagination, I must not take ghosts seriously, any more than fairies or dragons or nymphs or satyrs. For an educated person to take ghosts seriously—well, such a person would be almost as comical as that supremely comical person, the flying-machine man. Would you believe it, in those days there actually were people who believed they could learn to fly in the air, and spent their time manufacturing machines for this purpose! There was a scientist in Washington who had this "bug," and built himself a machine and started to fly, and fell into the Potomac river. We all laughed at him—we laughed so long and so loud that we killed the poor man; and then, a few years later, somebody took that machine of Professor Langley's and actually did fly with it! But that was after I had grown up a bit more, and was not quite so ready to laugh at an idea because it was new.
I remember vividly my first meeting with a man who believed in ghosts. He was a Unitarian clergyman, the Reverend Minot J. Savage of New York. I was sixteen years old, and just breaking out of my theological shell, and Doctor Savage helped to pry me loose. He was a grave and kindly man, of great learning and intelligence, and I remember vividly my consternation when one day he told me—oh, yes, he had seen many ghosts, he was accustomed to talk with ghosts every now and then. There was no doubt whatever that ghosts existed!
He told me many stories. I remember one so well that I do not have to go back to his books to look up the details. It was in the days before the Atlantic cable, and he had a friend who took a steamer to England. One night Doctor Savage was awakened and found the ghost of his friend standing by his bedside. The ship had gone down off the Irish coast, so the ghost declared, but the friend did not want Doctor Savage to think that he had suffered from the pangs of drowning; he had been struck on the left side of the head by a beam of the ship and had been killed instantly. Doctor Savage wrote down these circumstances and had them witnessed by a number of people, and two or three weeks later he received word that the body of his friend had been found on the Irish coast, with the left side of the head crushed in.
So then, of course, I studied the subject of ghosts. I have studied it off and on ever since, and have read most of the important new discoveries and arguments of the psychic researchers. To begin with, I will mention the contents of two large volumes, Gurney's "Phantasms of the Living." In this book are narrated many hundreds of cases, of which Doctor Savage's story is a type. It appears that persons at the moment of death, or in times of great mental stress, do somehow have the power to communicate with other people, even at the other side of the world. A few such cases might be attributed to coincidence or to fraud, but when you have so many cases, attested in minute detail by so many hundreds of otherwise honest people, you are not being scientific but simply stupid if you dismiss the whole subject with contempt.
Gurney discusses the phenomenon and its probable causes. We know, of course, that hallucinations are among the most common of psychic phenomenon. Your subconscious mind can be caused to see and hear and feel anything; likewise it has power to cause you to see and hear and feel anything. In practically all cases of multiple personality some of the split-off personalities can cause the others to see and hear and feel. And the consciousness, you must understand, takes these things to be just as real as real things; there is no way you can tell an hallucination from reality—except to ask other people about it. And if we admit the idea of telepathy, we may say that phantasms are hallucinations caused by this means; that is, the subconscious mind of your wife or your mother or your friend who is ill or dying, transmits to your subconscious mind some vivid impression, which causes your own subconscious mind to present to your consciousness a perfect image of that person, walking and talking with you, and your consciousness has no way of telling but that the image is real.
So much for phantasms of the living. But are there any phantasms of the dead? Are there any cases in which the time of the appearance can be proven to be subsequent to the time of death? Even this would not prove survival, of course; it is perfectly possible that the telepathic impulse might be delayed in our own minds, it might not flash into consciousness until our own state of mind made it possible. Can we say that there are cases in which the facts communicated are such as to convince us that the person was already dead, and was telling us something as a dead person and not as a living one?
Before we go into this question, let us clear the ground for the subject by discussing the survival of personality from a more general standpoint. What is it that we want to prove? What are the probabilities of its being true? What would be the consequences of its not being true? Have we any grounds, other than those of psychic research, for thinking that it is true, or that it may be true, or that it ought to be true? What, so to speak, are the morals of the doctrine of immortality?
Well, to begin with, the survival of the soul after death and forever is one of the principal doctrines of the Christian religion. Many devout Christians will read this book, and I will seem to them blasphemous when I say that this argument does not concern me. I count myself one of the lovers and friends of Jesus, I am presumptuous enough to believe that if he were on earth, I would understand him and get along with him excellently; but I do not know any reason why I should believe this, that, or the other doctrine about life because any religious sect, founded upon the name of Jesus, commands me so to believe. I see no more reason for adopting the idea of heaven because it is a Christian idea than I see for adopting the idea of reincarnation because it is a precious and holy idea to hundreds of millions of Buddhists. I have some very good friends who are Theosophists, and are quite convinced of this idea of reincarnation; that is, that the soul comes back into life over and over again in many different bodies, thus completing itself and renewing itself and expiating its sins. My Theosophist friends have a most elaborate and complicated body of what they consider to be knowledge on this subject; yet I have to take the liberty of saying that I cannot see that it has any relation to reality. It seems to me as completely unproven as any other fairy story, or myth, or legend—for example, the seven infernos of Dante, and the elaborate and complicated torments that are suffered there.
But, it will be argued, Jesus rose from the dead, and thus proved the immortality of the soul. Now, in the first place, there are many learned investigators who consider there is insufficient evidence for believing that Jesus ever lived; and certainly if this be so, it will be difficult to prove that he rose from the dead. Again, it was a common occurrence for crucified men not to die; sometimes it happened that their guards allowed them to be spirited away—even nowadays we have known of prison guards being bribed to allow a prisoner to escape. Again, the events of ............