Is a man then to pass from this world bodiless, as some of the ancients thought? To be able to offer a tentative answer to this question we must go back to one of our earlier chapters and remind ourselves of the ether which, the physicist says, interpenetrates all the molecules of our body now, and is the medium of communication everywhere through the systems of the worlds. May I think of the ether, then, as being in my body the medium of communication between me, as spiritual life and consciousness, and the material elements and structures of my body? If the comparatively coarse granular matter of the chemist's colloids and the protoplasmic speck shows such a congruity with my life as makes it fit to live in me and be the bearer to me of ancestral habits, may I not think that a still closer congruity exists between this ether and my life? And, again, is it not possible, or even likely, that it is through the ether of my body that I influence its matter and its matter influences me? If these things are so, then my ether-body is more fully mine and more closely bound to me than is my matter-body. I think of myself passing at death into, or discovering myself in, an ethereal country where my ethereal body shall serve me even better than my matter-body serves me in this matter-country. And if this thought seems the plain man's plain thought about the physicist's hypothesis and is condemned for that, I retort that the plain man through his rejection of constraint by specialism, and by ideal or abstract schemes which flout the wholeness of experience, is coming now into his own in science, in philosophy and in religion. He has his rights and is taking possession of them in a new fashion and with new significance.
One thing more I think of. The physicist says that what he calls 'bound ether,' that is ether within the spaces of a material thing, differs in its character from the free ether of the interstellar spaces. He has been able to prove this, he says, by experiments on the transmission of light through ether 'bound' in water.
What more do I want? The ether changes in character from association with matter in a body. I see it in my mind's eye changed by constant association with my brain and limbs and with my active consciousness as it could never be changed in water. Am I right, I wonder? Shall I see some day how it has been changed? Shall I see my more intimate body revealed and know it and myself raised to high estate?
However this may be, the life that made for itself body after body on earth, conquering the habits and reluctances of matter that it might use it for a spiritual purpose, is possessed of a creative and organizing power to which no man should dare to set bounds, and which by me at least shall be trusted to the end. That which builds from the egg the chicken, and from the first jelly-specks all the races of the globe, must still be capable of looking after me—if I am worth it.... I am bold enough and plain man enough to say with the poet,—
'Into the audience hall by the fathomless abyss
where swells up the music of toneless strings I shall
take this harp of my life.'
CHAPTER VIII
The soul needs only to open the door.