One of the most important scientific essays ever written: Sir Oliver Lodges The Mode of Future Existence This article by Sir Oliver Lodge was published in The Queen's Hospital Annual in 1933 (Birmingham). It is because this great scientist wrote articles and published books along these lines that he has been vilified by obscurants who have taken control of scientific teaching throughout the world.
...His great contribution to science has been deliberately played down solely because the powerful materialists are terrified that millions may find out he was correct in saying that we all survive death. The following are excerpts from his 1933 The Mode of Future Existence lecture: When we consider the question of Survival from the physical point of view we are up against the ancient problem of the connection between mind and body. The body is certainly made of matter, but matter is inert, it never does anything, it is completely controlled by the forces acting upon it, which forces exist in the empty space surrounding the atoms. Left to itself, matter merely continues in whatever state it was last made to accept. If it was spinning, it continues to spin with constant angular momentum. It has no power of changing its state or of stopping. If it was in a state of locomotion, that motion also continues unaltered. This is called the law of inertia, and to it all material atoms are absolutely obedient, whether they form part of an engine or of a clockwork mechanism or of an animated body. There is no exception. All matter is inert Energy only makes itself manifest by its effect on material bodies, but its main existence is in space. We have no sense organ for perceiving energy itself, our senses tell us of nothing but matter. We can see the results of energy as expended upon matter, but we have no direct apprehension of the energy. We are not acquainted with anything in the Universe save by its effect upon matter, and that is the origin of our tendency to philosophic materialism; we are liable to doubt whether things not apparent to the senses can have a real existence, though there is no justification for such a doubt It is only by observing the behaviour of material bodies that we can become aware of the existence of a field of force or of a seat of energy. Energy is constant in amount, but it takes various forms. The form with which we are best acquainted is the form of motion, and that is the only form ever associated with matter. All the other forms are hidden and make no impression upon us, save when they encounter material particles and thus display their existence We cannot understand the activity of the material Universe without taking energy into account, and this energy exists in the space between the particles. Matter is discontinuous, consisting of isolated particles, they are connected only through space. But inasmuch as this space is impregnated with energy, it must be something more than mere emptiness. It makes no impression on our senses, and yet it is full of energy, and is the reservoir of all activity; hence we have agreed to call it the Ether Every kind of physical action is really transmitted across space - that is, through the Ether - just as really, though not so obviously, as electric and magnetic attraction, gravitation, and light. Atoms and their constituents are never in contact. Ether forces or Ether strains have to be appealed to, when we try really to understand the most ordinary activities in daily life. Even a simple push is exerted through an infinitesimal layer of Ether. Every variety of potential energy exists in the Ether: matter has no energy except kinetic; and recently an ethereal explanation of even that kind of energy shows signs of emerging from the theory of relativity. Animated matter differs in no respect from every other kind of matter, except that it is subject to animation. So when we say that life only exists in a material organism, we ought to say that life only manifests itself in association with such an organism, and that when it is dissociated from matter we know nothing of its existence. We have no right to say that it is extinct. All that we know is that it is no longer manifest it has gone out of our ken. But the same may be said of every form of energy in itself, it has no power of becoming known to us but by its effect on material bodies. A body under the action of life can do many things, can initiate spontaneous movements, can build up an organism, can operate on the physical Universe, and leave structures behind it of interest and beauty, but it is not the material body that does these things; they are due to the life or animation of the body Life and mind never were functions of the material body, they only displayed themselves by means of the material organism. The organism was not essential to their existence, but only to their display - that is, to our apprehension of them. If they ever find means of operating in a novel or unusual manner on a physical organism, then they may still manifest their continued existence; and that is exactly what they do. Why should we decline to receive the evidence? A supplementary and semi-physical treatment of Survival is now becoming possible; a treatment which is well calculated to replace the old materialistic view that man had only a material body, and that when that body died and decayed, the animation, the personality, and the individual, necessarily ceased to exist. It is also well calculated to replace the popular idealistic notion that any spirit which survives the death of the material body must survive in an entirely disembodied condition, and be out of relationship with the physical Universe. Many people suppose that it then belongs to another order of existence, or, as some would say, of non-existence; that it is likely to be free from any relationship even with Space and Time, and must have departed entirely out of our ken; so that communication or intercourse with it is no longer possible, until perhaps at some future day when the material body shall have been somehow resuscitated and restored to its old function, in glorified form, so that the spirit can resume its active control. That this superstitious idea has been prevalent is testified to by popular modes of expression, such as: 'On the Resurrection morning, all their dead the graves restore. Father, mother, sister, brother meet once more.' This depressing notion of future existence - if it can be called existence in the interim - is not a scientific or psychological view at all; but it has been the religious, or at least the ecclesiastical, view through medieval times; hymns and liturgies are saturated with it, and it continues to this day the chief representation of what, by strictly orthodox people, is meant by Survival For we do not know how we control our bodies of matter, nor what the nature of the connection between mind and matter is. We know that we have muscles and nerves and brain centres. We can dissect and describe this part of the mechanism. But how a physiological instrument - how any kind of mechanism - can think and feel and plan and will and remember and hope and love, we certainly cannot explain. And probably we shall never be able to explain how such a thing can happen; for the thing to be explained does not happen, it is only imagined to happen through a misapprehension. The truth is that it is we ourselves who really do all the psychical things; we employ our bodies only as instruments for recording and transmitting our thoughts and for exercising muscular action on matter. The body itself neither thinks nor wills nor sees nor feels. It is an instrument, a channel, a medium As the Ether is not matter in the ordinary sense of the term, our ordinary units of measurement are inappropriate; but on the analogy of matter, the Ether is of the order a million million times as dense as water. All its properties are of supernormal magnitude. Its rate of vibration which enables us to see any ordinary object is five hundred million million per second: a number so great that to try to conceive such a number of vibrations per second simply dizzies us. The number of seconds which have passed since ancient geological periods of twenty million years ago is about this number. Yet we familiarly make use of these vibrations. Our wonderful organ, the eye, is constructed so as to cope with them, in the easiest possible manner. And most people are ignorant - as ignorant as are the animals - of the strange ethereal environment amid which we all live, and of which the vibrations convey to us so much information, and awaken so keenly our sense of beauty. Until instructed, we can hardly help thinking of matter as dense, and of Ether as tenuous, but that is a poetic illusion associated with the term 'ethereal'. It is an illusion based on the testimony of our senses, which, as so often happens, have to be corrected by deeper insight into the real nature of things. Matter appeals to us so strongly, not because it is anything but a gossamer-like or milky-way existence in the vast continuity of Ether, but because our obvious bodies are made of matter, and because our animal sense organs are specially adapted to existence in association with matter, and give us information about nothing else. Even light, which we know is an Ether vibration, tells us nothing about itself without study; what it tells us familiarly is - not about light, but - about the material objects which have emitted or scattered or differentially absorbed it. We get this information by lifelong, indeed age-long, inherited and instinctive experience. We interpret the luminous indications without difficulty, and we forget the strangely complex nature of the processes which underlie all our channels of information; we only find their true nature out when phenomena are fundamentally analysed and seriously cross-questioned. When we have pursued this line of investigation for many years, we find that the important thing in the physical Universe is Ether, and that matter is trivial in comparison. Yet we can freely admit that matter takes such splendid and beautiful forms that it is worthy of the continued study of generations of scientific men; and we need not wonder that they become so enthusiastic over its properties that they are able to imagine it the sole reality in existence. That, however, is a mistake; it constitutes a mechanism actuated and wielded by mental and spiritual power, which is dominant and supreme. Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com
