Where Are the Dead?

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 413, 23 July 1928, Page 14

Where Are the Dead?

CHURCH AND SCIENCE DIFFER

Eminent Thinkers’ Opinions

IN the ordinary sense of the word there are no dead. This startling assertion is made by Mr. Arnold Bennett who, with many other leading’ thinkers of the day, has given the “Daily News” his views on the age-old question, “Where are the dead?”

“Atoms are indestructibly alive; they are the most alive things we know; they probably comprise the potentialities of all intelligence and all progress, according to the manner in which they combine and recombine. Nothing can be destroyed—no quality of mind, no beauty, no kindliness. The elements of that which we have loved will in some new and probably finer form reappear to us or to our descendants. Everything is from everlasting to everlasting. “And in the ordinary sense of the word there are no dead. “I well realise that the theory of the inseparableness of body and soul is only a theory, and that it can be attacked by arguments many of which are now unanswerable and some of which will be for ever unanswerable. But every other theory concerning death is and always will be in the same case.

farther hack than Sir Arthur Keith does. The problem of Mind is bound up with the fact of life. And if brain activity did not cre:%:e life is it likely that brain activity controls the cessation of life- The life process is controlled by a definite end. In the life of man, who is the goal of the evolutionary process, does the End which controls him at his best n this world demand for him a world beyond? “The End which controls man at his highest is Moral. We know that goodnes, truth and love are worth living for. And such moral realities cannot be explained apart from their ultimate source in a Person who is good. If the scientist or the philosopher demurs to this statement, and tells me that I am taking a leap and claiming objective reality for moral values, I answer that I am capable of testing my moral experience.

“I am as convinced as I am of anything that we shall never know what death signifies and involves. (And we shall never cease to try to know.) It is best for us that we should never know. If we knew, the importance of what we call life might diminish to nothing, and the scheme of evolution would be most gravely disorganised. Human ignorance of the future is more than bliss; it m an ordinance of the divine wisdom.” Sir Arthur Keith “If the spirit of truth is the kernel of religion, then men of science are truly religious beings. They not only believe in the immortality of man, but they are convinced that this immortality is material. And believing so they work for the betterment of the world and of humanity; this is the most essential part of their daily religion. “But the one thing the man of science insists upon above all others is that his currency be struck in the mint of truth and that each coin must carry on its face the stamp of veritable truth. Once let the human fancy free to wander at will, untrammelled by fact and the markets of the scientific world will be flooded with debased coin. When a scientific man calls upon spirits, mysterious essences, and uncertain shadows to explain phenomena of the living and of the dead world, he is drawing cheques upon imaginary banks.” Mr. G. K. Chesterton “An inquirer writes to the ‘Daily News’ gravely asking how there can he room in eternity for all the souls enjoying immortality. Apparently he has read the great text about ‘many mansions’; and supposes they are all limited and numbered like Artillery Mansions or Overstrand Mansions. I do not know how many commodious flats, with kitchen and bathroom, he will permit Omnipotence to erect, before it becomes necessary to announce in the headlines that there is a Housing Problem in Heaven. That is the sort of philosophical doubt which we are apparently called upon to ‘meet nowadays. . . . “Men are endlessly repeating (and that repetition is itself a mark of the degeneration) that this or that has shaken the foundations of faith. What I complain of is that it has shaken the foundations of doubt. It has altered, and very much lowered, the grounds even of unbelief. The criticisms sound like the cries of children or savages, compared with the wary and well-poised consistency of some of the old masters of negation. . . . “There must he something very queer and deleterious at work in the world, when this unreason saps, as it does sap, the minds of very acute and brilliant men, as well as those merely receptive. I am not at ail disturbed about the future of the Faith; but I am disturbed about the future of the doubters, and the prospect of such very unphilosophic doubt; in which the very blasphemies have grown feeble and even stark nothing cannot remain unclouded or unconfused.” Dr. Henry Townsend “The question really is, Did the chemical action of the brain cells create life This pushes the inquiry

“I am as entitled to trust my selfconsciousness of God as the controlling End of life as I am to trust my judgment of the sun and the moon and the stars. My moral consciousness is a fact, and convinces me that moral values are not disintegrated into dust and ashes. And because moral values are conserved I am entitled to believe that personal values are conserved. The moral consciousness implies and demands both God and the survival of the self.” Professor Julian Huxley “This world is getting crowded enough; hut the thought of a next world with a population of immortal spirits running into tens of billions is not to be seriously faced. Personal Immortality was a good deal easier to believe in before geology and astronomy had enlarged our time-scale. “I can think of something being given off which would bear the same relation to men and women as a wireless message to the transmitting apparatus; but in that case ‘the dead’ would, so far as one can see, be nothing but disturbances of different patterns wandering through the universe until either they were destroyed or came back to actuality of consciousness by making contact with something which could work as a receiving apparatus for mind. “And I can think of our personalities being lost, blended, taken up into some general reservoir of mind and spirit. In that case, presumably, the dead would not be anywhere in particular, but would become part and parcel of something universal and all pervading. Perhaps that universal reservoir of spirit transcends Space and Time —is it not true that we in our minds can hold in a single mental grasp the near and the distant, the present and the past? And if so, the question, ‘Where are the dead?’ will need no answer.” The Rev, Dr. R. J. Campbell “I have been a member o the Phychical Research Society for more than 30 years without attending any of its regular meetings, my object in belonging to it being primarily that of studying them month by month; and I here solemnly affirm that I believe the case for survival is proved. “Nine-tenths of the supernormal phenomena which point in this direction may be otherwise explained—perhaps ninety-nine hundredths. But there is a residuum which cannot be otherwise explained. I believe that communication between the living and the so-called dead does occasionally take place. "The society as such has not committed itself to this view, but many of its most distinguished members have done so. A society which has included among its presidents such men of eminence as the present Earl of Balfour, the late Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge and Professor Gilbert Murray has to be treated with respect, and if its methods seem too slow and cautious for some of its adherents, this is a fault on the right side. . . . When these men tell us that they are convinced by the sheer force of evidence that the soul survives death, neither Sir Arthur Keith nor anyone else has the right to deny that evidence without examining it.”