THE SURVIVAL OF MAN.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9706, 31 January 1910, Page 4

THE SURVIVAL OF MAN.

Sir Oliver Lolge's new dook on "The Survival of Man" gives some idea as to the mo- direct and immediate kind of foi<;i lation on which in the future the odlief that man survives his bodily death will be scientifically established, and the statements made are very remarkable coming from one of our foremost men of science. "The boundary between the two states—the known and the unknown —is still substantial, but it is wearing thin in places; and like excavators engaged in boring a tunnel from opposite ends, amid the roar of water and other noises, we are beginning to hear now and again the stroke of the pickaxes of our comrades on the other side. "What we have to announce is no striking novelty, no new method of communication, but only the reception, by old and developing methods, of carefully-constructed evidence of identity more exact and more nearly complete than perhaps ever before. Carefully constructed evidence, I say. The constructive ingenuity exists quite as much on the other side of the partition as on our side; there has been distinct cooperation between those on the material and those of the immaterial side, and we are at liberty, not, indeed, to announce any definite conelusion, but to adopt as a working hypothesis the ancient doctrine of a possible intercourse of intelligence between the material and some other, perhaps ethereal, order of existence. "Meanwhile," asks Sir Oliver, "is there anything that provisionally and tentatively we can say that is earnestly taught to those who are willing to make the hypothesis that the communications are genuine." "The first thing we learn," he replies, "perhaps the only thing we clearly learn in the first instance, is continuity. There is no sudden break in the conditions of existence as may have been anticipated, and no break at all in the continuous and conscious identity of genuine character and personality. Essential belongings, such as memory, culture, education, habjts, character, and affection—all these and to a certain extent testas and interests—for better for wone, are retained. Terrestrial accretions such as worldly possessions, bodily pain and disabilities, these for the most part naturally drop away.