SPIRITUALISM.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVII, Issue 4928, 20 January 1926, Page 1

SPIRITUALISM.

RELATION OF MIND AND BODY.

(By Professor J. Arthur Thomson.)

A wise Germain theologian once s,aid : “If immortality is to be talked about, both.speakers and hearers ought to be in ,an exalted "inoodl-” Speaking for ourselves, we feel that difficulty keenly ; we should like to be on the top of a hill with a great prospect or on the open sea without too many fellow-travellers, or under the starry sky—anywhere away from the humdrum.

Yet there are times when to keep silence is to- be a coward, and the editor has asked up' to s,ay what we think of Sir James Marchant’s just published collective work entitled “Life After Death.” Our first .thought is that the book, which deals with the august problem from the Christian and from the Spiritualistic points of view, would have been stronger if it had contained a sympathetic statement of the difficulties which many reverent students of science have in regard to the religious conviction or hope of immortality. It ip true, however, that a, religious doctrine should never come before a scientific tribunal. unless the form in which it is expressed trenches on the concrete descriptions and empirical formulations of science. Thus the doctrine of the resurrection of the body is open—fatally open—to scientific criticisms which do not affect the core of the hope of immortality. THE DIVINITY IN MAN.

‘‘Thoughts of things which thoughts but tenderly touch.” These familiar words from Sir Thomas Browne’s “Religio Medici” echo in pur mind as, we read the wise confessions of faith which have been usefully brought together in the volume before us. We know many noble men and women whose “personality” is wprthy of the nti,me, a work of art .and of ages, the outcome of devout life and of discipline in high endeavour: does Lhits crumble away with the dust of the body ? “There is s,urely,” said Sir Thomas, “a piece of divinity in us; something that was before the elements and owes no homage unto the sun.” a . We can and do understand how this conviction will grow with the religious experience of the thoroughgoing Christian, linked as that is to the Founder who gave the world a new revelation of ,the possibilities of man. “The Kingdom of God is within you,” and He proved if. as it had never been proved before. It seems such a pity to play flippantly with the term “Superman,” for its idea, is one of tile intimations of immortability and one of the hopes of Evolution! We use this word “immortability,” which is not of our coining, because it suggests the idea worked out by one of our wisest philosophers and by one of our bravest biologists, that immortality—if it comes—will come not automatically or to all, but as the outcome of being striven for and firmly held. THE QUESTION OF QUESTIONSHas science as s,uch anything to say in regard to the persistence of the personality in a spiritual world after death ? It must say that in its own data it finds nothing to favour the pps sibility of personality existing apart from the living body. Whatever be our view ~of the relation of Mind and “Body,” which together make the organism or living creature, we do not know securely that thfe, inner life can ever separate itself from the life of the body. All are agreed that .the one is, thirled to the other in the closest correlation, but we do not know whether the physical and .the protoplasmic, the mental and the metabolic, are two, sides of one shield, or whether the "mind” gradually transcends its trammels and becomes to the body as a musician to his instrument.

If the second is the nwt'e correct it might lead one to hope for a. still further emancipation of the Psyche and a survival after deathi We once met a great man, well known for his' practical shrewdness, as well as, for his poetry, who told us in cold blbod in a crowded street that he had often seen fairies,; but, he added, you cannot see them without discipline. As we personally have not beedi able to undergo the required discipline we cannot prove from our experience that there are no fairies. •CONSERVATION OF MATTER.

There are two setts' of scientific facts that seem to us to point' in the direction of immortability. The first includes the doctrine of ,the conservation of matter and the doctrine of the conservation of energy—now subsumed in one principle. Nothing real is, ever lost, meaning by in this sentence what is physically measurable. There is mr reason to believe that conservation of the physically measurable does not apply to the body, and why should there not be conservation of what is the most real of all tilings to us — our. self ? The difficulty, however, is familiar, that while the matters a,nd energies of the body do continue after'death, the individuality is gone for ever. But the thoroughgoing Christian .answers that the integrated personality remains Integrated for those who have begun, in the here and now, to live the life eternal-

The other consideration is that the most outstanding fact in Organis Evolution is the increasing dominance of the mental aspect in the course of the ages as, life crept slowly upwai ds. There is a gradual dominance and an increasing emancipation of the Psyche. Who knows enough to set limits to its liberation ?