Apart from this interesting glimpse of Gladstone, it shows the importance he attached to the work of the Society for Psychical Research. To the severely orthodox, who think no evidence of life after death should be sought outside “Revelation,” his opinion should appeal. Every increase of knowledge is a further “Revelation.” In the Bible we are told of one resurrection, and there is certainly no reason why we should not seek the evidence of others. We should not shut our eyes and close our ears to new Revelation.
The Society has been thirty-eight years in existence and is still insufficiently appreciated. Hodgson said in The Forum, 1896 “There are so many ways of looking at the world. It may be a speck in space, or a huge cauldron with a graveyard for its crust, a place in which to get a hunger and satisfy it, the fighting ground for a while of dragon or ape, of Trojan or Turk, an evolutionary drama that must end in ice or fire. Many things it means to different men. One is busy with earthworms, another with stars, another with the splendour of the day or the strivings of the human soul. Numerous investigators are hunting for further proofs that we came out of the mud, but very few are seeking indications, in any scientific spirit, of what may follow the toil and turmoil of our individual existence here.”
Myers says: “The question of the survival of man is a branch of experimental psychology. Is there, or is there not, evidence in the actual observed phenomena of automatism, apparitions and the like, for a transcendental energy in living men, or for an influence emanating from personalities which have overpassed the tomb? This is the definite question, which we can at least intelligibly discuss, and which either we or our descendants may some day hope to answer.”
Like clouds that rake the mountain-summits,
Or waves that own no curbing hand,
How fast has brother followed brother,
From sunshine to the sunless land!
Wordsworth (On the Death of James Hogg).