Up and Down

by E. F. Benson

I settled down with a book, and an electric light at my elbow, and a large fire at my feet, to the entrancing occupation of not doing anything at all. The blessed sixth morning of the week had arrived, when I was not obliged to go out to a large chilly office after breakfast, and I mentally contrasted the nuisance of having to go out into a beastly morning with the bliss of not having to go out, and found the latter was far bigger with blessing than the former with beastliness. I needn't read my book. I needn't do anything that I did not want to do, but very soon the book, that I had really taken up for fear of being surprised by a servant doing nothing at all, began to engross me. It was concerned with the inexplicable telephone to which Francis had alluded, and contained an account of the communications which had been made by a young soldier killed in France with his relatives. As Francis had said, London had got cracked on the subject....

After all, what wonder? Were there the slightest chance of establishing communication between the living and the dead, what subject (even the war) would be worthier of the profoundest study and experiment? Nothing more interesting, nothing more vitally important, could engross us, for which of the affairs in this world could be so important as the establishment, scientifically and firmly, of any facts that concern the next world? For there is one experience, namely, death, that is of absolutely universal interest. Everything else, from my little finger to Shakespeare's brain, only concerns a certain number of people; whereas death concerns the remotest Patagonian. However strongly and sincerely we may happen to believe that death is not an extinguishing of the essential self, with what intense interest we must all grab at anything which can throw light on the smallest, most insignificant detail of the life that is hereafter lived? Or, if your mind is so constructed that you do not believe in the survival of personality, how infinitely more keenly you would clutch at the remotest evidence (so long as it is evidence) that there is something to follow after the earth has been filled in above the body, from which, we are all agreed, something has departed. Without prejudice, without bias either of child-like faith or convinced scepticism, and preserving only an open mind, willing to be convinced by reasonable phenomena, there is nothing sublunar or superlunar that so vitally concerns us. You may not care about the treatment of leprosy, presumably in the belief that you will not have leprosy; you may not care about Danish politics in the belief that you will never be M.P. (if there is such a thing) for Copenhagen. But what cannot fail to interest you is the slightest evidence of what may occur to you when you pass the inevitable gates.

There are only two things that can possibly happen: the one is complete extinction (in which case I allow that the subject is closed, since if you are extinguished it is idle to inquire what occurs next, since nothing can occur); the other is the survival, in some form, of life, of yourself. This falls into three heads:

(i) Reincarnation, as an earwig, or a Hottentot, or an emperor.

(ii) Mere absorption into the central furnace of life.

(iii) Survival of personality.

And here the personal equation comes in. I cannot really believe I am going to be an earwig or an emperor. To my mind that sounds so unlikely that I cannot fix serious thought upon it. What shall I, this Me, do when I am an earwig or an emperor? How shall I feel? The mind slips from the thought, as you slip on ice, and falls down. Nor can I conceive being absorbed into the central furnace, because that, as far as personality goes, is identical with extinction. My soul will be burned in the source of life, just as my body may perhaps be burned in a crematorium, and I don't really care, in such a case, what will happen to either of them.

But my unshakeable conviction, with regard to which I long for evidence, is that I—something that I call I—will continue a perhaps less inglorious career than it has hitherto pursued. And if you assemble together a dozen healthy folk, who have got no idea of dying at present, you will find that, rooted in the consciousness of at least eleven of them, if they will be honest about themselves, there is this same immutable conviction that They Themselves will neither have been extinguished or reincarnated or absorbed when their bodies are put away in a furnace or a churchyard. There is the illusion or conviction of a vast majority of mankind that with the withdrawal from the body of the Something which has kept it alive, that Something does not cease to have an independent and personal existence.

Well, there has been lately an enormous increase in the number of those who seek evidence on this overwhelmingly interesting subject. The book which I have been reading and wondering over treats of it, and Francis has gone with his Aunt Aggie to seek it. There has been, too, it is only fair to say, an enormous increase in the exasperation of the folk who, knowing nothing whatever about the subject, and scorning to make any study of what they consider such hopeless balderdash, condemn all those who have an open mind on the question as blithering idiots, hoodwinked by the trickery of so-called mediums. Out of their own inner consciousness they know that there can be no such thing as communication between the living and the dead, and there's the end of the matter. All who think there possibly may be such communication are fools, and all who profess to be able to produce evidence for it are knaves.... They themselves, being persons of sanity and common-sense, know that it is impossible.

But other shining examples of sanity and common-sense would undoubtedly have affirmed thirty years ago, with the same pontifical infallibility, that such a thing as wireless telegraphy was impossible, or a hundred years ago that it was equally ridiculous to think that a sort of big tea-kettle could draw a freight of human beings along iron rails at sixty miles an hour. But wireless telegraphy and express trains happened, in spite of their sanity and common-sense, and it seems to me that if we deny the possibility of this communication between the living and the dead, we are acting in precisely the same manner as those same sensible people would have acted thirty and a hundred years ago.

Another favourite assertion of the sane and sensible is that if they could get evidence themselves (though they foam with rage at the very notion of attempting to do such a thing) they would believe it. That is precisely the same thing as saying you will not believe in Australia till you have been there. For the existence of Australia depends (for those who have never seen it) on the evidence of others. The evidence for the existence of Australia is overwhelming, and therefore we are right to accept it, even though we have not seen it ourselves. Kangaroos and gold, and Australian troops and postage-stamps, and the voyages of steamers, makes its existence absolutely certain; there is no doubt whatever about it. And the evidence in favour of the possibility of communication between this world and another non-material world is now in process of accumulation. It is being studied by people who are eminent in the scientific world, and it seems that there are fragments, scraps of evidence, which must be treated with the respect of an open mind by all who have not the pleasant gift of the infallibility that springs from complete ignorance. It is no longer any use to quote from Mr. Sludge the Medium....

There are a great many gullible people in the world and a great many fraudulent ones, and when the two get together round a table in a darkened room, it is obvious that there is a premium on trickery. But because a certain medium is a knave and a vagabond, who ought to be put in prison, and others are such as should not be allowed to go out, except with their minds under care of a nurse, it does not follow that there are no such things as genuine manifestations. It would be as reasonable to say that because a child does his multiplication sum wrong, there is something unsound in the multiplication table. A fraudulent medium does not invalidate a possible genuineness in those who are not cheats; a quack or a million quacks do not cast a slur on the science of medicine. In questions of spiritualism there is no denying that the number of quacks exposed and unexposed is regrettably large, and, without doubt, all spiritualistic phenomena should be ruthlessly and pitilessly scrutinized. But when this is done, it is only a hide-bound stupidity that refuses to treat the results with respect.