AFTER DEATH

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 702, 29 June 1929, Page 27

AFTER DEATH

“Modified Personality,” Says Professor PSYCHOLOGIST’S VIEW Professor William MeDougall, perhaps the best-known and most distinguished of contemporary British psychologists, delivers a formidable attack upon the modern materialist and his version of evolution in a new book. Materialism, he says, in the literal sense has gone, never to return; but science still renders ail account of man and the universe which, if not positively hostile, is yet adverse to every form of religion . . . and obstructive to every form of moral effort. Man is not a machine, he maintains, and the evidence that he is not a machine is growing yearly in strength. The machine differs profoundly in all-important respects. It does not grow; it is put together. If its parts are deranged, it cannot rectify its working. If any part is destroyed, it cannot restore it. Evidence of Telepathy Even more damaging to the theories j of materialism is the evidence of telepathy, which, says the author, seems irresistible by any competent person who may consider it comprehensively and impartially. And this evidence again strengthens the case for the immortality of the soul or the survival by the personality of bodily death: The results attained (by physical research) are neither negative nor negligible. They may best be summarised in the assertion that they place the unbiased inquirer before a dilemma. Either personality is not in all cases utterly dissolved with the destruction of the body or telepathic communication of a most far-reaching and improbable kind occurs. "Man’s Soul Survives” The survival must be that of a modified personality: Impartial consideration leads inevitably to the view that whatever of personality may survive must be in many respects different from the personality that was manifested in the flesh. And this, of course, is tho popular, the orthodox, perhaps one ! might say, the theological view. Thus the tendency of the newest philosophy and the most critical thought is to emphasise the conclusion that “life is not the product or slave of

any cliemotactic forces, but their maker and steersman,” that man’s soul survives the grave, and that the universe is not the result of “blind chance.” Professor MeDougall, who is 58, is Professor of Psychology in Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. He was formerly a professor at Harvard. Before going to the United States he was for a time a Fellow of Corpus Christi College and Reader in Mental Philosophy at Oxford.