THIS book is named after my son who was killed in the War.
I have made no secret of my conviction, not merely that personality persists, but that its continued existence is more entwined with the life of every day than has been generally imagined; that there is no real breach of continuity between the dead and the living; and that methods of intercommunion across what has seemed to be a gulf exist and are effective in response to the urgent demand of affection, that in fact, as Diotima told Socrates (Sympomsium). Love Bridges the Chasm.
Nor is it affection only that controls and empowers supernormal intercourse: scientific interest and missionary zeal constitute supplementary motives which are found efficacious ; and it has been mainly through efforts so actuated that I and some others have been gradually convinced, by direct experience, of a fact which before long must become patent to mankind.
Hitherto I have testified to occurrences and messages of which the motive was intellectual rather than emotional : and though much, very much, even of this evidence remains inaccessible to the public, yet a good deal has appeared from time to time by many writers in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, and in my personal collection called The Survival of Man. No one therefore will be surprised if I now further testify concerning communications which come home to me in a peculiar sense; communications from which sentiment is not excluded, though still they appear to be guided and managed with intelligent and on the whole evidential purpose. These are what I now decide to publish.
Messages of an intelligible though rather recondite character from 'Myers' began to reach me indeed a week or two before the death of my son ; and nearly all the messages received since his death differ greatly in character from those which in the old days were received through any medium with whom I sat. No youth was then represented as eager to communicate; and though friends were described as sending messages, the messages were represented as coming from appropriate people members of an elder generation, leaders of the Society for Psychical Research, and personal acquaintances. Whereas now, whenever any member of the family visits anonymously a competent medium, the same youth soon comes to the fore and is represented as eager to prove his personal survival and identity.
I consider that he has done so. And the family scepticism, which for the first few months was rather strong, is now, I may fairly say, overborne by the facts. How far these facts can be conveyed to the sympathetic understanding of strangers, I am doubtful. But I must plead for a patient hearing ; and if I make mistakes, either in what I include or in what for brevity I omit, or if my notes and comments fail in clearness, I bespeak a friendly interpretation : for it is truly from a sense of duty that in so personal a matter I lay myself open to harsh and perhaps cynical criticism.
It may be said Why attach so much importance to one individual case ? I do not attach special importance to it, but every individual case is of moment, because in such a matter the maxim Ex uno disce omnes is strictly applicable. If we can establish the survival of any single ordinary individual we have established it for all.
I myself considered that the fact of survival had been practically proven before, and that the proof had been clinched by the efforts of Myers and others of the S.P.R. group on the other side; but evidence is cumulative, and the discussion of a fresh case in no way weakens those that have gone before. Each stick of the faggot must be tested, and, unless absolutely broken, it adds to the strength of the bundle.
To base so momentous a conclusion as a scientific demonstration of human survival on any single instance, if it were not sustained on all sides by a great consensus of similar evidence, would doubtless be unwise; for some other explanation of a merely isolated case would have to be sought. But we are justified in examining the evidence for any case of which all the details are known, and in trying to set forth the truth of it as completely and fairly as we may.
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RAYMOND REVISED, A New and ABBREVIATED Edition OF "RAYMOND OR LIFE AND DEATH "
BY SIR OLIVER J. LODGE - 1922 in the public domain
