THE QUICK AND THE DEAD

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle will undoubtedly attract wide interest in his series of lectures on spiritualism; and almost as surely, he will attract a large amount of criticism. For spiritualism, almost more than any other subject, has been exploited for long centuries; in Sir Arthur's wake there will almost certainly spring up a number of fraudulent mediums. This is apparently an evil which necessarily accompanies any kind of popular interest in an idea difficult to understand. In which last category all new ideas fall; the astrologers, phrenologists, palmists, and quack doctors who pursue their business profitably even in this 'enlightened' period, indicate that spiritualism is not the only subject which has its take progenitors.

There are some who disagree, however, not only with practiced quackery but with Sir Arthur himself. Spiritualism has been debated from the time of the Orphics and before, and views on life after death vary in degree from the tenets held by the absolute agnostic to the painted heaven and fiery hell of the hide-bound theologian. The great obstacle to any scientific discussion of the question is terminology; Sir Arthur is necessarily handicapped by attempting to express spiritual theory in material fact-words. It is about as difficult to use a rather paradoxical analogy, describing a football game in the language of integral equations. But whatever the wordology, there are some who are violently opposed to any idea of life after death; if these people thought there really was such a life, they would probably seek a pill with which they could commit eternal suicide. "If charnel houses and our graves do send Those that we bury back, our monuments Shall be the maws of kites".

Nevertheless, it is indisputable that great poets such as Keats and Tennyson felt the need of some sort of belief in a life after death. So did the philosophers Plato and Socrates; the only difference being that those men worked the problem out spiritually, in and for themselves, while Sir Arthur has in addition employed the method of experiment and observation. Life after death is not proved scientifically, any more than it has been disproved. Among the majority of those who are its present advocates, conviction rests chiefly upon belief and a species of intuition. But as yet few psychologists are willing to risk their reputations by definitely announcing proof, for which they have up to the present found no basis. And until the experts in the peculiarities of the mind, conscious and subconscious, find proof irrefutable, all the layman can do is maintain an unprejudiced attitude.