to the act of love is in my opinion connected with the depths of spirit attained by certain of the eastern Holy Men. The Westerner is often shallow beside the Easterner. Which only goes to show the truth of one of my lifelong thesesthat a healthy sexual life is the prerequisite of a healthy spirit. What do I mean by “spirit”? To that question I shall offer at least part answer in the next chapter.
I shall end here by saying that I believe Keats could be called as a witness for the defense of my point of view. Who can recall the lines of Ode on a Grecian Urn, an ode to the beauty of Greek youth, and still disagree?
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with breed
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed:
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity
And he ends rightly with:
Beauty is truth, truth beautythat is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
I thought of Keats quite frequently while on my travels. Burma struck me at once as a country whose gorgeous vegetation would have held magnificence for this most lush of English poets.
CHAPTER IV
In my quarter of a century in London there were at least two men of conspicuous ability who came to the front by proclaiming the certainty of life after death. The one was a Mr. Sinnett who preached in a new magazine entitled Broad Views. “I know people,” he said boldly, “who not only remember their past lives, but are in a position, if it were worthwhile, to write a complete diary of every day of those antenatal lives. For all persons the faculty in due course of time will come.”
Every soul now being born into the world, Mr. Sinnett insisted, went out of the world from 1,500 to 2,000 years ago. We are therefore all contemporaries of the Apostles and the Caesars, and the antenatal autobiographies of some of us ought to be worth reading. Dr. Anna Kingsford believed she was a reincarnation of Plato, and Mrs. Besant is said to be Hypatia come to life again, but these are mere assertions.
Mr. Sinnett sets forth “what happens to the soul after the death of the body. The experiences that come on first when a human soul is emancipated from the prison of the flesh are not of a very exalted order. As consciousness fades from the physical vehicle, it carries with it the finer sheath of astral matter which has interpenetrated the coarser physical vehicle during life, and in this ethereal but still quite material envelope, it exists for a time in the region commonly called the astral plane.
“On the astral plane the soul, in a vehicle of consciousness which is insusceptible to heat or cold, incapable of fatigue, subject to no waste, and therefore superior to the necessity of taking food, continues an existence for a variable period which in many of its aspects is so like the life just abandoned that uninstructed people who pass over find it impossible to believe that they are what is called dead. But that state of things, though, as it grows familiar, and as the field of view is enlarged, may be agreeable enough, and may be associated with the renewal of friendships and affections interrupted for a time by death, is not the stage of things that corresponds to the Heaven of religious teaching.
“Nothing that has ever been said from the religious point of view concerning the blissful condition of the soul in Heaven involves any exaggeration. On the contrary, the basic fact connected with existence on the plane of nature corresponding to the Heaven of theology is bliss, absolute, complete and unalloyed.”
But surely the methods of nature provide for all cases, and not merely for those of the spiritual aristocracy. What are we to think of the condition in Heaven of, let us say, a drunken coal heaver, whose earthly life has been anything but meritorious. Mr. Sinnett might reply that even in such a man's life there may have been some little gleam of spiritual feeling, something resembling love for a woman or a child.
Mr. Sinnett concludes by declaring that this theory of his “is not theory at all, but a living fact of consciousness' still to most of us as yet it is only a theory and hardly even plausible.
Plainly the whole hypothesis depends on the antenatal biographers and they are conspicuous by their absence.
The second person to preach Eternal Life was a Frederic Myers who was much more scientific than Sinnett, if I may be forgiven for using such a word to describe either of these dreamers. His book, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, is, he tells us, the result of thirty years' close study and serious thought.
Myers declares that “messages of the departing and departed have actually proved: a) Survival pure and simple; the persistence of the spirit's life as a structural law of the universe; the inalienable heritage of each several soul. b) In the second place, these messages prove that between the spiritual and the material worlds an avenue of communication does in fact exist, that which we call the dispatch and the receipt of telepathic messages, or the utterance and the answer of prayer and supplication. c) In the third place, they prove that the surviving spirit retains, at least in some measure, the memories and the loves of earth. Without this persistence of love and memory should we be in truth the same?” Finally he declares that “every element of individual wisdom, virtue, love, develops in infinite evolution toward an ever-highering hope, toward Him who is at once thine innermost Self and thine ever unattainable Desire.”
But all this is founded on the slightest basisis indeed mere assertion. The whole theory is as fantastic and absurd as that of Sinnett. It only shows the intense human desire to live again after this life, but after thousand of years of study we have not the slightest proof of any such existence.
A little later there was much stronger testimony: Sir Oliver Lodge who succeeded Frederic Myers as President of the Society for Psychical Research and a few years later as Head of the British Association, made some startling statements which his position rendered extremely important. He stated boldly that “personality persists beyond bodily death.” Bergson made as positive an assertion to the same effect only a short time before in an address to the Society for Psychical Research. But Lodge went further and his words carried weight. He said: “The evidence to my mind goes to prove that discarnate intelligence, under certain conditions, may interact with us on the material side, thus indirectly coming within our scientific ken, and that gradually we may hope to attain some understanding of the nature of a larger, perhaps ethereal, existence and of the conditions regulating intercourse across the chasm. A body of responsible investigators has even now landed on the treacherous but promising shores of a new continent. Yes, there is more to say than that. The methods of science are not the only way, though they are our way, of being piloted to truth.”
He was asked if he could tell of his investigations. “Not yet,” he answered, “one must wait a little longer; but I am convinced that those on the other side are trying to speak to us, and that they are doing all in their power to help us.”
And he went on: “When the time comes in which men not only think or hope that they survive death, but when they know it, know it is a fact of life, then many of our problems will solve themselves. For it is inconceivable that men thus convinced of Immortality should lack the spirit of fellowship; inconceivable, surely, that they should depress each other, struggling for material enjoyments which entail suffering on their fellow creatures. One believes, as Christ believed, that Brotherhood among men absolutely depends upon faith in a divine Fatherhood; the whole labor of Christ's teaching was to persuade men to believe in the existence of a God in order that they might live on the earth as the sons of one Father. Because we have grown to be incurious about life after death, life here and now has assumed the dangerous characteristics which are at present troubling the politicians. Social existence is organized almost entirely on an animal basis; struggle for existence is still one of our main conditions; the dignity of life tends to disappear more and more with the stability of the social order; men are not now so concerned about character, about real values, as about money and enjoyment. This is why I regard the labor of psychical research as so well worthwhile; it is a labor which ought to result in restoring to mankind a sense of Infinitythat sense of
