A Wayfarer's Faith: Aspects of the common basis of religious life

by T. Edmund Harvey

Can we then find any answer from physical science as to whether or no our life continues when the bodily change which we call death happens? Since life is always connected, as far as we are able to observe it, with certain physical conditions of the body, can it continue when those conditions are no longer present?

There have been many thinkers impressed by the sense of a universe governed by necessary and unchanging laws, who have felt that they could only answer that since life is in our experience always accompanied by certain material conditions, it must cease to exist when those conditions have been removed.

There is one great assumption, however, which consciously or unconsciously underlies this position, that the only universe which exists is one that is intelligible to our thought, and that something [p.121] which we cannot possibly understand, necessarily cannot possibly exist.

But there is yet another thought which seems to have escaped such a thinker: the possibility of the co-existence of more than one world and of life passing from one world to another. Mathematicians have already shown the possibility of this by discussing the existence of a fourth dimension, and even working out problems involving the assumption of the existence of this fourth dimension. The suggestion has been made especially easy to grasp in the remarkable anonymous romance "Flatland," published some thirty years ago, which pictures the world of two dimensions, wherein one person gets the notion of the existence of a third dimension, and the extraordinary results that follow his heresy, or madness, as it seems to his less enlightened fellows.

If the theory of the existence of another, or other dimensions be a tenable one, we can conceive of the existence of a number of worlds around us, co-existing with our own and including it, of which we are either wholly unconscious or only very dimly conscious, and that not by the faculties by means of which we have knowledge of our own world.

Now if we suppose that somewhere within us, at the centre of our lives, is some meeting-point, some door through which we may have contact with these other worlds and pass out into them, [p.122] we can also conceive of a development growing out from this point of contact into that larger life of which we should necessarily remain unconscious here, or even if our whole nature were suddenly to be filled by a consciousness of how its life extended beyond this universe into those other worlds, we should yet be unable to express in terms of our own world this wider life, or could only express it by symbols. The incapacity of our friends to understand our experience would be no proof that it was not true, nor would our own inability to express it in any way lessen the reality of that experience to us. If such a hypothesis be correct, what may happen at death may be that we pass out of the narrower world of three dimensions into the wider world, which includes this and much more.

Another way of looking at the problem has been to conceive of our various senses as channels through which we have entered into communication with the world without us. At present we most of us are only conscious of five such channels. We may conceive of the possibility of many other channels of which we have no experience (and indeed observation of certain living creatures has already led to the hypothesis of a sixth sense, different from any of our own), and we can also think of the channels as being one by one closed. So that at death we may conceive of all our existing lines of communication with the outer world being removed, and wholly new channels, with [p.123] what may seem like an entirely different world, being opened up.[29]

Such an explanation of the working of our universe is but a hypothesis. Yet after all, it may to some extent help us to understand phenomena otherwise very difficult to explain. Are not the mystics and seers, the inspired poets and prophets, just those whose lives are more in touch than ours with a world we cannot see, often able only imperfectly to express themselves, but yet conscious of vast realities beyond our ken? And may we not to some extent look upon faith as such a faculty, or sixth sense, taking hold of the unseen and translating it into our own life?

But all have not this faith, it may be urged; it is strongest often when the intellectual powers are weak enough, and men of the greatest genius tell us they are wholly without it. Yet cannot we conceive of a community of people almost wholly devoid of one of our own five senses, say that of hearing? How difficult it would be for one of them whose ears were suddenly opened to explain to his friends the new world about him. Imagine these people watching a skylark, and looking on with astonishment at the joy of the one man who heard it singing. A dull brown bird flying aimlessly up into the air: why should he look on it [p.124] with such wonder? They see all that he sees, and if he should try to explain his feelings as he listens to its song, will they not one and all be convinced that he is mad, or that he is at best only recounting some subjective illusion? If he would convince them, let him translate into terms of sight these curious sensations. He cannot do it, and they can only pity his condition.

This may help us to realize how narrow a view that is of life which conceives of this world of our consciousness as the only one which exists. It may even help us to frame a physical hypothesis of another life; but this is not enough for our need. If we are to go to the centre of the problem we must turn not to physical difficulties, but to the moral and spiritual ones. It is above all in its failure to solve the problems of our inward life that the materialistic explanation of the world breaks down.