James
H. Hyslop
> Life after Death: Problems of the Future Life and its
Nature
Secretary of the American Society for
Psychical Research and formerly Professor of Logic and Ethics in Columbia
University
New York
1918
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PREFACE
MOST of the material in this book is
new. Two chapters and a part of a third are reproductions of previously
published matter, and they are incorporated because they are so relevant
to the main object of the work. But the rest of it has been suggested
by the need of discussing some problems which are sequels of the scientific
collection of facts with which psychic research has so long occupied
itself in the effort to ascertain whether man survived bodily death
or not. I have not taken the pains in this work to quote the facts which
tend to prove such a claim. The material is too plentiful and voluminous,
as well as complex, to take the space for it. The publications of the
various Societies for Psychical Research supply the evidence in such
quantity and quality that it would require a volume by itself to quote
and explain its import. I assume here sufficient intelligence on the
part of most people who have done critical reading to see the cogency
of it and to accept the proof of survival in it, though there are associated
problems not so well secured against difficulty. The trouble with most
people is that, in estimating the evidence, they take with them certain
preconceived ideas of what a spirit is and so adjudge the evidence accordingly,
The scientific man, however, assumes
nothing about a spirit except that it is a stream of consciousness existing
apart from the physical body. How it may exist, he does not inquire,
until he is convinced that there is evidence of the fact of it, and
then a large number of associated problems arise. I have under taken
here to discuss these connected problems and so I assume that survival
has sufficient evidence for its acceptance to make a tentative effort
to satisfy some curiosity about the further questions that have more
interest than the purely scientific problem of the continuity of life.
At the present day there is the
usual, perhaps more than the usual, passion to know whether, if a man
die, he shall live again, and it takes the form of an intenser interest
in the nature of the life after death than in the scientific question
of the fact. This problem is discussed at some length in this work.
It is not easy to satisfy inquirers on this point. Most of them suppose
that, if we can communicate with the discarnate, they can easily tell
us all about the transcendental world. But this is an illusion and the
sooner that we learn that there is a very large problem before us in
that matter the better for our intellectual sanity. It is comparatively
easy to prove survival, when you have once eliminated fraud and subconscious
fabrications. But it is a very different matter to determine just what
we shall believe or how we shall conceive the nature of the existence
beyond the grave. It will be a matter of long investigation and all
that I can hope to do in this work is to suggest the considerations
that must be taken into account when discussing the problem.
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