PASSING ON

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 786, 13 August 1954, Page 5

PASSING ON

Sirx-Replying to correspondents in July 30 issue; Mr. Thornton makes some large essumptions about the "life which informs the lower kingdoms" and is entitled to his opinion, though I think his assumptions cannot be demonstrated. He also says that "the urge for further experience causes the self to assume another personality." If that is 80, it is obviously not the personality who died that returns for the further experience. He says both mind and matter are "expressions of the Logos." But nobody knows what the Logos is or does. "Eternal Beauty" does not realise that the Christian faith includes "com-. forting illusions" about death. Let an eminent Christian testify. The late Dean Inge, who spent his life as a Christian clergyman, said at the end of his life: "I know as much about the after life as you-nothing. I don’t even know there is one -in the sense in which the Church teaches it, I have no

vision of ‘heaven’ or a welcoming God." As for a "distinction between mind and matter," the celebrated — philosopher John Dewey says: "If mind and matter are radically different stuff, every phase of their relation is a problem, if not a mystery. But what if there is no such entity as ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness’? What if, instead of thinking and talking of bodies having minds, we think of organisms that function physically and mentally?" The plain fact remains that for us, no lost loved one ever returns to walk this earth with us again and to tell us what really lies beyond the portals of death. I have said, and I believe, that so long as they have a place in our hearts and in our thoughts, those we have lest never reallv die.

J. MALTON

MURRAY

(Oamaru).

(This correspondence is now closed.

Ed.