(D) Death; As Irrevocable Self-Projection Of The Spirit

Then when the last change comes, and we ask ourselves with what added ground for speculation we now strain our gaze beyond that obscurest crisis, we find, I think, two considerations which the study of subliminal powers has suggested; one of them in harmony with the highest thought of philosopher and poet; the other, not indeed positively inconsistent therewith, but still recalling us to the psychology of the Stone Age, and the crude animism of hardly human men.

For first we shall say that in estimating what there is in our being which may conceivably survive the tomb, we can now claim to have discerned something within us which belongs to an environment which is exempt from earthly conditions, and which may antecede at once and interpenetrate our material scheme of things. Those ancient views, therefore, which represent the soul's immortality as determined by its very nature and origin find themselves now as never before supported and reinforced.

I refer especially to such cases as those described in Chapter VI (Sensory Automatism). of "projection of thought," or - as I there called it - "psychical invasion," which show some kind of energy or perception exercised by the spirit at a distance from its physical base of operation, - telepathically upon other minds, telaesthetically in other parts of space. In "telepathic clairvoyance," the percipient seems to himself to be present in the scene where the so-called agent actually is at the time. And in reciprocal cases, not only is the percipient conscious of invading the agent's presence, but the latter is in some way aware of the invasion. Further, the descriptions of several cases of experimental self-projection concur in the impression felt of spiritual transportation, of tethering connection with the body, of return thereinto with a shock.1 And two narratives of animation suspended to the verge of death (Dr. Wiltse and M. Bertrand, see 713 A), have dwelt on that crisis as an apparent escape of the spirit from the body, to which it is ultimately retracted by a remaining psychical link of attachment.

These cases begin like some of the cases which we class as "hallucinations experimentally produced"; they remind us, as they proceed, of narratives of "travelling clairvoyance"; and they reach a point where the new centre of perception seems within an ace of altogether superseding the old.

These singular and possibly purely subjective cases are no actual proof of anything whatever. But they deserve notice here, where we are taking stock of any such indications of the true nature of death as can be gathered from evidence which does not even pretend to come from departed spirits, or to rest on anything beyond the personal experience of living men.

- "with a rush it hurried forth" - says Homer of the issuing spirit, - whose significance for him still hung between breath and soul. Homer may be too old a witness, and Dr. Wiltse too new; but, indeed, what other intelligible conception can we find in the ages between them ? What, save the ghastly monkish dream - ghastly though enshrined, this also, in world-shaking verse - of the sleep in the charnel-house, and the trump that echoes per sepulcra regionum and summons into a new concretion the dust of the dead?

At least we have done with that; and, pausing here before we review such evidence as may seem to have come to us from behind the veil, we may at least feel that it is a spiritual entity and not a re-integrated skeleton, which we now follow with dim anticipation upon its unknown solitary way.

1 See Proceedings S.P.R., vol. x. p. 29, and pp. 270 sqq.