By A. P. SINNETT, the well-known Occultist

To everyone who may, like myself, have been for half a long lifetime in familiar touch with those conditions of human life lying beyond the change commonly called death, there is something inexpressibly ludicrous in the grave discussion presented in this little book as to whether there is or is not any continuity of consciousness for us after we have each done with our respective physical bodies. The matter has nothing to do with opinions or arguments. For vast multitudes all over the civilised world the continuity of life in the case of friends who have passed on - the invariable operation of the laws which govern the immediate future - is personal knowledge gained by the exercise of faculties of superphysical sense which, though not yet exercised by all, are so frequently available that all who have enough intelligence to do so can profit by them. One of the writers says: "Physical science can have nothing to do with the question one way or the other, as consciousness lies beyond its domain." True, as the words stand, but leave out the word "physical," and the statement is grotesquely untrue. Super-physical science is just as scientific as that which relates merely to the low aspects of natural law, and Dr. Max Nordau's comic impudence in describing as "a vain and inane delusion" what multitudes of better-informed people know from their own experience to be a fact, reminds me of what Sir Oliver Lodge somewhere once wrote, to the effect that in these days an expression of "disbelief" in clairvoyance was not so much a declaration of opinion as an exhibition of ignorance.

The subject of what happens after death need no longer be concerned with arguments based on reason, though these are overwhelmingly in favour of continued life in worlds beyond the physical, since we have definite testimony to work with from the large numbers who now, as human evolution goes on, are exercising the superphysical senses to which the phenomena of the next world are as apparent as those of this one to the limited comprehension of people like Dr. Max Nordau.

To begin with, in the middle of the last century superior wisdom guiding the evolution of human intelligence started Spiritualism to give the current generation proof of a kind it could understand that there was a life after this, and another plane of consciousness. Millions availed themselves of the opportunities afforded, and other millions were silly enough to think that because a fringe of imposture gathered round the manifestation, there was no reality within the fringe. But Spiritualism was not designed to do more than establish the broad fact. Later developments led to the expansion of Occult Science, which showed how it was possible to range the next plane of existence while still in the body, and bring back definite information. A vast envelope of subtle matter surrounds this earth. Physical senses cannot apprehend it, but finer senses rapidly developing among us do. That is the next world in which we all of us first awaken after shedding the physical vehicle of consciousness, and all who are earnest in pursuit of knowledge will find abundant satisfaction in the literature of Theo-sophy, which has grown to such magnificent proportions during the last thirty years.

Life "beyond the grave," to use an old-fashioned phrase, is much more certain than life beyond the Channel for all crossing over from Dover to Calais, and many of us know much more about it than the untravelled majority know about France. But to go into detail it is necessary to write books (as I have done several times), not merely to contribute a few remarks to a controversy which ought to be regarded as no less out of date than a dispute as to whether the earth is round or flat.