Many people did not fully realize this when they bore down heavily and contemptuously on the description of the next world which is given in Raymond. The deceased young officer had a "nice doggie," which he brought along with him when he strolled to the medium's shop to send a message to his distinguished father. Presently the medium added a "cat," though she said nothing about a cats'-meat man. Raymond had also what I believe young officers call "a bird"—a young lady acquaintance on spiritual terms. There were cows in the spirit meadows and flowers in the gardens. Our "damaged flowers," we are told, pass over to the other side and raise their heads once more gloriously. Why they flower if there are no bees, whether they have chlorophyll circulating in their leaves, whether the soil is sandy or clayey, etc., we are not told. The information comes in chance clots, as if Raymond were too busy with ethereal billiards to study the natural history of ghostland very closely. We are told to picture Raymond in a real suit of clothes. He was offered the orthodox white sheet, which every right-minded spirit wears; but he had a British young man's repugnance to that sort of thing. So in the laboratories on the other side they made Raymond an ordinary suit, out of "damaged worsted" which we earthly wastrels had no use for. For other young officers, with less refined tastes, they manufactured whisky-and-soda and cigars. "Don't think I'm stretching it," Raymond observed to his father, through "Feda" and Mrs. Leonard. The father does not say what he thought.
Now, it is, as I said, quite wrong for Spiritualists to plant all this upon the authority of Sir Oliver Lodge. Does he not warn us in a footnote that he has "not yet traced the source of all this supposed information"? It would not take most of us long to do so, but the remark at least leaves open a way of retreat for Sir Oliver Lodge. On the other hand, we must not blame Spiritualists too severely. He assures them that this lady, Mrs. Leonard, is in undoubted communication with his dead son, and one may question whether he is entitled to take one part of the lady's message as genuine and leave other parts open. At all events, this puerile and bewildering nonsense was put before the world in an expensive book by Sir Oliver Lodge, with his personal assurance that Mrs. Leonard was a genuine medium.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle next gathered details from scores of revelations of this kind—they fell upon us like leaves in Vallombrosa after Sir Oliver Lodge's bold lead—and built them into a consistent picture of "Summerland." It is an ether world. Each of us has a duplicate of his body in ether. This is quite in harmony with science, he says, because some one has discovered that "bound" ether—that is to say, ether enclosed in a material body—is different from the free ether of space. From this slight difference Sir A. C. Doyle concludes that there is a portion of ether shaped exactly like my body; then, by a still more heroic leap of the imagination, he gathers that this special ether has not merely the contour of my body, but duplicates all its internal organs and minute parts; and lastly—this is a really prodigious leap—he supposes that this ether duplicate will remain when the body dissolves. On that theory, naturally, every flower and tree and rock that ever existed, every house or ship that was ever built, every oyster or chicken that was ever swallowed, has left an ether duplicate somewhere.
Well, when you die, your ethereal body remains, and is animated by your soul just as the body of flesh was. A death-bed is, on the new view, a most remarkable scene. Men and women weep round the ghastly expiring frame, but all round them are invisible (ether) beings smiling and joyful. When the last breath leaves the prostrate body, you stand erect in your ethereal frame, and your ethereal friends gather round and wring your ethereal hand. Congratulations over, one radiant spirit takes you by the hand and leads you through the solid wall and out into the beyond. Presumably he is in a hurry to fit you with one of the "damaged worsted" suits. Sir Arthur stresses the fact that they have the same sense of modesty as we.
The next step is rather vague. One gathers that the reborn man is dazed, and he goes to sleep for weeks or months. Sleep is generally understood to be a natural process by which nerve and muscle, which have become loaded with chemical refuse, are relieved of this by the blood. What it means in ghostland we have not the least idea. But why puzzle over details where all is a challenge to common human reason? You awaken presently in Summerland and get your bearings. This is so much like the paradise described by Mr. Vale Owen that we will put ourselves under the guidance of that gentleman. I would merely note here a little inconsistency in the gospel according to St. Conan.
One of the now discovered charms of Summerland is that the young rapidly reach maturity, and the old go back to maturity. The ether-duplicate of the stillborn child continues to grow—we would give much for a treatise from Professor Huxley (in his new incarnation) on this process of growth without mitosis and metabolism—and the ether-duplicate of the shrunken old lady of eighty smoothes out its wrinkles, straightens its back, and recovers its fine contour of adipose tissue. But here a difficulty occurred to Sir A. C. Doyle. In his lectures all over the kingdom he has had to outbid the preacher. I promise you, he told bereaved mothers, that you shall see again just the blue-eyed, golden-haired child that you lost. He even says this in his book. With all goodwill, we cannot let him have it both ways. If children rapidly mature, mothers will not see the golden-haired child again.
At the risk of seeming meticulous, I would point out another aspect of the revelation on which more information is desirable. Golden hair implies a certain chemical combination which is well known to the physiologist. Blue eyes mean a certain degree of thinness of pigment on the front curtains of the eye. Now, ether has no chemical elements. It is precisely the subtle substance of the universe which is not yet moulded into chemical elements. Are we to take it that Summerland is really a material universe, not an ether world?
As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has glowingly praised the revelations which have come through the Rev. Mr. Vale Owen, I turn to these for closer guidance, and I find that my suspicion is correct. The next world is a material world. Whether it has a different sun from ours is not stated, but it is a world of wonderful colour. Flowers of the most gorgeous description live in it perpetually. Whether they ever grew up or will ever decay, whether they have roots in soil and need water, the prophet has not yet told us. But the world is lovely with masses of flowers. People also dress like the flowers. They have beautifully coloured robes and gems (none of your "damaged worsted" for Mr. Vale Owen). In other words, light, never-fading light, is the grand feature of the next world. Since ether does not reflect light, it is obviously a material universe.
Music is the second grand element. Perhaps Mr. Owen would dispute this, and say that preaching is the outstanding feature. Certainly, everybody he describes preaches so constantly and so dully that many people will not like the prospect. Let us take it, rather, that music is the second great feature. They have great factories for musical instruments which make a mockery of Brinsmeads. The bands go up high towers and produce effects which no earthly musician ever dreamed of producing. It follows, of course, that the ghosts not only tread a solid soil, in which flowers grow, on which they build towers and mansions, but a very considerable atmosphere floats above the soil. Mr. Vale Owen, in fact, introduces streams and sheets of water; lovely lakes and rivers for the good ghosts and "stagnant pools" in the slums of ghostland. We will not press this. Mr. Owen forgot for a moment that it never rains in Summerland. But the atmosphere is an essential part of the revelation, as without it there will certainly be no music or flying birds. And an atmosphere means a very solid material world. Our moon, which weighs millions of billions of tons, is too light to possess an atmosphere and water. Consequently, there must be thousands of miles of solid rock and metal underfoot in ghostland.
It follows further that, since ghostland is very spacious, and since at least a billion humans (to say nothing of animals) have quitted this earth since the ape men first wandered over it, this other material universe must be very extensive. If all the inhabited planets in the universe have their Summerlands, or all pour their dead into one vast Summerland, one begins to see that modern science is a ridiculous illusion. We should not see the sun, to say nothing of stars a thousand billion miles away, or even remoter nebulæ. As to astronomical calculations of mass and gravitation....