PROFOUND SUBJECTS

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 189, 31 October 1927, Page 13

PROFOUND SUBJECTS

PSYCHIC AND MENTAL BRITISH ASSOCIATION MEETS Profound and controversial subjects were touched on by speakers at the British Association’s meeting at Leeds. Dr. T. W. Mitchell, past president of the Psychical Research Society, speaking on “the phenomena of spiritualistic trance,” said: “The bare statement that knowledge is sometimes acquired in a super-norma 1 manner—that is to say, acquired otherwise than through the known organs of the senses—is in my opinion a statement of a fact of nature which men of science can no longer deny, and should no longer neglect.” Survival of bodily death, he added, was not and did not imply immortality. There were recorded cases which pointed to the possibility, if | they did not compel the belief, that i after death of the body some part of | the mind continued to exist, for a, time at least. I Sir Oliver Lodge said he believed It was time that the subject should no longer be ignored by the British Association. The type of scientific man he I objected to was the one who went about with blinkers on, like a horse, so that he should not shy at unpleasant facts on the road. It had been suggested that tele? pathy might account for the claimed, communication between the dead and the living, but to his mind this did not carry them all the way to account J for Tacts of which there was no doiibt. Brain Work for Health Professor J. S. Haldane, in a discussion on the effect of mental stress, said that in his opinion men who did much mental work were very healthy. Alental stress was no more evident anywhere than in the legal profession, where, when men got to the age of i 70, they began to be fit to be judges, and an old judge was an exei*dingiy * shrewd person. He was able to stop the flow of blood to other parts of the body, and concentrate it on the brain. There will be joy among schoolboys at the statement by Professor E. T. Whittaker, professor of mathematics in Edinburgh University, that Euclid is a back number. Euclidean geometry' was, he said, i deposed from its old position of ! priority and from acceptance as a valid i representation of space. Its whole spirit was alien to modern physics. Professor Whittaker referred to the j search for a new geometry compatible with Einstein’s theory of general relativity. “Gravitation,” he added, ■j “simply represents a continual effort i of tho universe to straighten itself out. This is general relativity in a single sentence.”