MR. DUNNE AGAIN

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 134, 3 December 1938, Page 27

MR. DUNNE AGAIN

TIME AND IMMORTALITY

Reviewing "The New Immortality" by J. W. Dunne, a writer in 'The Times Literary Supplement" says that Mr. Dunne shows in his latest book the bearing on survival after death of the theory of "serial time" developed by him in "An Experiment with Time" and "The Serial Universe." So far as the philosophy and the mathematics are concerned, it depends upon those earlier works —except that Professor Miller's experiments on the velocity of light are held to provide additional confirmation of "Serialism." The main theory is left precisely ias it was left by those earlier books, but as there are few topics of more perennial interest than survival Mr. Dunne's readers will be grateful for this extension.

The theoretical basis of the book is the idea of abstraction. Mr. Dunne considers the implications of measuring a piece of wood by a bootmaker's recording foot-rule. The piece of wood and the foot-rule are "observed by you and regarded by you as real things existing indepedenfcly in one and the same world." There is "discovered by the foot-rulei and by you confining your at tention to the foot-rule's records," a length, which is an abstraction from the piece of wood by the ruler.

On this Mr. Dunne bases his argument about the nature of immortality. The argument is difficult to summarise, certainly inconclusive and perhaps temerarious. But in the course of it Mr. Dunne uses several illustrations of great value and some beauty. In particular,' he illustrates the futility of a life that just goes on and on by an ascending chromatic scale, while he illustrates the richness of true immortality by the variety and range of such compositions as Solveig's song in "Peer Gynt" or Mendelssohn's "Spring Song"; and he proclaims himself "scientifically certain" that the "Hand of a Great Conductor will become manifest, and we shall discover that we are taking part in a Symphony of All Creation." .