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II
MESSAGES FROM BEYOND THE
GRAVE
1
SIR OLIVER LODGE is one of
the most distinguished men of learning in our day. He is also one of the
oldest, most active and most prominent members of that well-known Society for
Psychical Research which, founded in 1882, has ever since striven to study with
irreproachable scientific precision all the wonderful, inexplicable, occult and
supernatural phenomena which have always baffled and still elude the
comprehension of mankind. In addition to his purely scientific works, of which,
not being qualified to judge, I do not speak, he is the author of some
extremely remarkable books, such as Man
and the Universe, The Ether of Space and The Survival of Man, in which the loftiest and most daring
metaphysical speculations are constantly controlled by the most prudent, wise
and steadfast common sense. Sir Oliver Lodge, therefore, is at the same time a
philosopher and a practical, working scientist, accustomed to scientific
methods which do not readily allow him to go astray; he has, in a word, one of
the best-balanced brains that we could hope to meet; and he is convinced that
the dead do not die and that they are able to communicate with us. He has tried
to make us share his conviction in The
Survival of Man. I am not sure that he has quite
succeeded. True, he gives us a certain number of extraordinary facts, but they
are facts which, in the last resort, can be explained by the unconscious
intervention of intelligences other than those of the dead. He does not bring
us the irrefutable proof, such as we should consider, for instance, the
revelation of an incident, a detail, a piece of information so absolutely
unknown to any living creature that it could come only from a spirit no longer
of this world. We must admit, however, that such a proof is, as he says, as
difficult to conceive as to provide.
2
Sir Oliver's youngest son,
Raymond, was born in 1889, became an engineer and enlisted for
the duration of the war in September, 1914. He was sent out to Flanders early in
the spring of 1915; and, on the 14th of September of the
same year, before Ypres, while the company under his command was leaving the
frontline trench, he was hit in the left side by a splinter of a shell; and he
died a few hours later.
He was, as a photograph
shows us, one of those admirable young British soldiers who are the perfect
type of a robust, fresh, joyous humanity, clean and bright, and whose death
seems the more cruel and the more incredible as it annihilates a greater
aggregate of strength, hope and beauty.
His father has dedicated to
his memory a volume entitled, Raymond, or
Life and Death; and we are at first somewhat bewildered at seeing that it
is not, as one might expect, a book of lamentation, regrets and tears, but the
accurate, deliberately impassive and at times almost cheerful report of a man
of learning who thrusts aside his sorrow so that he may see clearly before him,
wrestles with the thought of death and beholds the rising dawn of an immense
and very strange hope.
3
I will not linger over the
first part of the volume, which aims at making us acquainted with Raymond
Lodge. It contains some forty letters written in the trenches, the testimony of
his brother-officers' devotion to him, details of his death and so on. The
letters, I may say in passing, are charmingly vivid and marked by a delicate
and delightful humour whose only object is to reassure those who are not
themselves in danger. I have not time to dwell upon them; and they are not what
most interests us here.
But the second part, which
Sir Oliver Lodge calls Supernormal
Portion, passes from the life that exists on the surface of our earth and
introduces us into a very different world.
In the very first lines, the
author reminds us that he has "made no secret of his conviction, not
merely that personality persists, but that its continued existence is more
entwined with the life of every day than has been generally imagined; that
there is no real breach of continuity between the dead and the living; and that
methods of intercommunion across what has seemed to be a gulf can be set going
in response to the urgent demand of affection; that in fact, as Diotima told
Socrates (Symposium, 202 and 203),
'Love bridges the Chasm.' "
Sir Oliver Lodge, then, is
persuaded that his son, though dead, has not ceased to exist and that he has
not gone far from those who love him. Raymond, in fact, seeks to communicate
with his father as early as eleven days after his death. We know that these
communications or so-called communications from beyond the grave -- let us not
prejudge the issue for the moment -- are made through the agency of a medium
who is or believes himself to be inspired or possessed by the deceased or by a
familiar spirit speaking in his name and repeating what the latter reveals to
him. The medium conveys his information either orally or by automatic writing,
or again, although this is very rare in the present instance, by table-turning.
But I will pass over these preliminaries, which would carry us too far, and
come straight to the communication which is, I think, the most astonishing of
all and perhaps the only one that cannot be explained, or at least is
exceedingly difficult to explain, by the intervention of the
living.
About the end of August, 1915, that is to say, not
many days before his death, Raymond, who, as we have seen, was near Ypres, had
been photographed with the officers of his battalion by a travelling
photographer. On the 27th of September following, in the course of a sitting
with the medium Peters, the spirit speaking by Peters' mouth said, suddenly:
"You have several
portraits of this boy. Before he went away you had a good portrait of him --
two, no, three. Two where he is alone and one where he is in a group of other
men. He is particular that I should tell you of this. In one you see his
walking-stick."
Now at that time the members
of Sir Oliver Lodge's family did not know of the existence of this group. They
attached no great importance, however, to the revelations but in subsequent sittings,
notably on the 3rd of December, before the photographs had arrived, before they
were seen, more detailed information was received. According to the spirit's
statements, the photograph was of a dozen officers or more, taken out of doors,
in front of a sort of shelter (the medium kept drawing vertical lines in the
air). Some were sitting down and some were standing up at the back. Raymond was
sitting; somebody was leaning on him. There were several photographs taken.
On the 7th of December, the
photographs arrived at Mariemont, Sir Oliver's house near Edgbaston. There were
three copies, all differing slightly, of the same group of twenty-one officers, those in the back row standing up, the others seated. The group
was taken outside a sort of temporary wooden structure, such as might be a
hospital shed, with six conspicuous nearly vertical lines on the roof. Raymond
was one of those sitting on the ground in front; his walking-stick, mentioned
in the first revelation, was lying across his feet. And a striking piece of
evidence is that his is the only instance where one man is leaning or resting
his hand on the shoulder of another, in two of the photographs, or, in the
third, his leg.
This manifestation is one of
the most remarkable that have hitherto been obtained, because it eliminates
almost entirely any telepathic interference, that is to say, any subconscious
intercommunication between the persons present at the sitting, all of whom were
absolutely unaware of the existence of the photographs. If we 'refuse to admit
the intervention of the deceased -- which should, I agree, be admitted only in
the last resort -- we must, in order to explain the revelation, suppose that
the subconsciousness of the medium or of one of those present entered into
communication, through the vast mazes and deserts of space and amid millions of
strange souls, with the subconsciousness of one of the officers or of one of
the people who had seen these photographs whose existence there was no reason
for suspecting. This is possible; but it is so fortuitous, so prodigious that
the survival and intervention of the deceased would, in the circumstances, seem
almost less supernatural and more probable.
4
I will not enter into the
details of the numerous sittings which preceded or followed this one; nor will
I even undertake to summarize them. To share the emotion aroused, we must read
the reports which faithfully reproduce these strange dialogues between the
living and the dead. We receive the impression that the departed son comes daily
closer and closer to life and converses more and more easily, more and more
familiarly with all those who loved him before he was overtaken by the shadows
of the grave. He recalls to each of them a thousand little forgotten incidents.
He remains among his own kindred as though he had never left them. He is always
present and prepared to answer. He mingles so completely in their whole life
that no one any longer thinks of mourning his loss. They question him about his
present state, ask him where he is, what he is, what he is doing. He needs no
pressing; he at once declares himself astonished at the incredible reality of
that new world. He is very happy there, reforming himself, condensing himself,
so to speak, and gradually finding himself again.
The existence of the intelligence and of the will,
disencumbered of the body, is freer, lighter, of greater range and diffusion,
but continues very like what it was in the flesh. The environment is no longer
physical but spiritual; and there is a translation to another plane rather than
the break, the complete overthrow, the extraordinary transitions which we are
pleased to imagine. After all, is it not fairly plausible? And are we not wrong
in believing that death changes everything, from one day to the next, and that
there is a sudden and inconceivable abyss between the hour which precedes
decease and that which follows it? Is it in conformity with the habits of
nature? Is the life-force which we carry within ourselves and which doubtless
cannot be extinguished, is that force to so great a degree crippled and cramped
by our body that, when it leaves this body, it becomes, then and there,
entirely different and unrecognizable?
But I must set a limit to
speculation and, lest I exceed the limits of this essay, I must pass by two or
three revelations less striking than that of the photograph, but pretty strange
notwithstanding. Obviously, it is not the first time that such manifestations
have occurred; but these are really of a higher quality than those which crowd
several volumes of the Proceedings. Do they furnish the proof for which we ask? I do not think so; but will any
one ever be able to supply us with that compelling proof? What can the
discarnate spirit do when trying to establish that it continues to exist? If it
speak to us of the most secret, the most private incidents of a common past, we
reply that it is we who are reviving those memories within ourselves. If it aim
at convincing us by its description of the world beyond the grave, not all the
most glorious and unexpected pictures of that world which it might trace are
worth anything as evidence, for they cannot be controlled. If we seek a proof
by asking it to foretell the future, it confesses that it does not know the
future much better than we do, which is likely enough, seeing that any
knowledge of this kind implies a sort of omniscience and consequently
omnipotence which can hardly be acquired in a moment. All that remains to it,
therefore, is such little snatches of evidence and uncertain attempts at proof
as we find here. It is not enough, I admit; for psychometry, that is to say, a
similar manifestation of clairvoyance between one living subconsciousness and
another, gives almost equally astonishing results. But here as there these
results show at least that we have around us wandering intelligences, already
enfranchised from the narrow and burdensome laws of space and matter, that
sometimes know things which we do not know or no longer know. Do they emanate
from ourselves, are they only manifestations of faculties as yet unknown, or
are they external, objective and independent of ourselves? Are they merely
alive in the sense in which we speak of our bodies, or do they belong to bodies
which have ceased to exist? That is what we cannot yet decide; but it must be
acknowledged that, once we admit their existence, which at this date is hardly
contestable, it becomes much less difficult to agree that they belong to the
dead.
This at least may be said:
if experiments such as these do not demonstrate positively that the dead are
able directly, manifestly and almost materially to mingle with our existence
and to remain in touch with us, they prove that they continue to live in us
much more ardently, profoundly, personally and passionately than had hitherto
been believed; and that in itself is more than we dared hope.
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