Raymond; or, Life and Death / With examples of the evidence for survival of memory and affection after death.

by Sir Oliver Lodge

The modern superstition about the universe is that, being suffused with law and order, it contains nothing personal, nothing indeterminate, nothing unforeseen; that there is no room for the free activity of intelligent beings, that everything is mechanically determined; so that given the velocity and acceleration and position of every atom at any instant, the whole future could be unravelled by sufficient mathematical power.

The doctrines of Uniformity and Determinism are supposed to be based upon experience. But experience includes experience of the actions of human beings; and some of them certainly appear to be of a capricious and undetermined character. Or without considering human beings, watch the orbits of a group of flies as they play; they are manifestly not controlled completely by mechanical laws as are the motions of the planets. The simplest view of their activity is that it is self-determined, that they are flying about at their own will, and turning when and where they choose. The conservation of energy has nothing to say against it. Here we see free-will in its simplest form. To suppose anything else in such a case, to suppose that every twist could have been predicted through all eternity, is to introduce præternatural complexity, and is quite unnecessary.

Why not assume, what is manifestly the truth, that free-will exists and has to be reckoned with, that the universe is not a machine subject to outside forces, but a living organism with initiations of its own; and that the laws which govern it, though they include mechanical and physical and chemical laws, are not limited to those, but involve other and higher abstractions, which may perhaps some day be formulated, for life and mind and spirit?

If it be said that free-will can be granted to deity but to nothing lower, inasmuch as the Deity must be aware of all that is going to happen, I reply that you are now making a hypothesis of a complicated kind, and going beyond knowledge into speculation. But if still the speculation appears reasonable, that only the Deity can be endowed with free-will, it merely opens the question, What shall be included in that term? If freedom is the characteristic mark of deity, then those are justified who have taught that every fragment of mind and will is a contributory element in the essence of the Divine Being.

How, then, can we conceive of deity? The analogy of the human body and its relation to the white corpuscles in its blood is instructive. Each corpuscle is a living-creature endowed with the powers of locomotion, of assimilation, and, under certain conditions now being inquired into, of reproduction by fission. The health and polity of the body are largely dependent on the activity of these phagocytes. They are to us extremely important; they are an essential part of our being.

But now suppose one of these corpuscles endowed with intelligence—what conception of the universe will it be able to form? It may examine its surroundings, discourse of the vessels through which it passes, of the adventures it encounters; and if philosophically minded, it may speculate on a being of which perhaps it and all its like form a part—an immanent deity, whose constituents they are, a being which includes them and includes all else which they know or can imagine—a being to whose existence they contribute, and whose purposes they serve or share. So far they could speculate, and so far they would be right. But if they proceeded further, and entered on negations, if they surmised that that immanent aspect of the universe in which they lived and moved and had their being was the sole and only aspect, if they surmised that there was no personality, no feeling, no locomotion, no mind, no purpose, apart from them and their kind, they would greatly err. What conception could they ever form of the manifold interests and activities of man? Still less of the universe known to man, of which he himself forms so trivial a portion.

All analogies fail at some point, but they are a help nevertheless, and this analogy will bear pressing rather far. We ourselves are a part of the agencies for good or evil; we have the power to help or to hinder, to mend or to mar, within the scope of our activity. Our help is asked for; lowly as we are, it is really wanted, on the earth here and now, just as much wanted as our body needs the help of its lowly white corpuscles—to contribute to health, to attack disease, to maintain the normal and healthy life of the organism. We are the white corpuscles of the cosmos, we serve and form part of an immanent Deity.

Truly it is no easy service to which we are called; something of the wisdom of the serpent must enter into our activities; sanity and moral dignity and sound sense must govern our proceedings; all our powers must be called out, and there must be no sluggishness. Impulses, even good impulses, alone are not sufficient; every faculty of the human brain must be exerted, and we must be continually on guard against the flabbiness of mere good intentions.

Our activity and service are thus an integral part of the Divine Existence, which likewise includes that of all the perceptible universe. But to suppose that this exhausts the matter, and that the Deity has no transcendent Existence of which we can form no idea,—to suppose that what happens is not the result of his dominant and controlling Personality, is to step beyond legitimate inference, and to treat appearance as exhaustive of reality.

Always mistrust negations. They commonly signify blindness and prejudice—except when thoroughly established and carefully formulated in the light of actual experience or mathematical proof. And even then we should be ready to admit the possibility of higher generalisations which may uproot them. They are only safe when thrown into the form of a positive assertion.