TALK OF DEATH

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 28, 1 August 1930, Page 9

TALK OF DEATH

♦ . .. MUCH TOO COMMON PEOPLE SHOULD LIVE LONGER Sir Oliver Lodge, the famous scientist and spiritualist, is now 79 years old. He was born at Penkhull, Staffordshire, and is now living at Lake, near Salisbury. "I am not longer interested in birthdays," he told the "Daily Mail" "I am going up to London, though, to give a talk over the wireless, but apart from that I think tho day will be quite uneventful." Yet in his long life there have been few uneventful days, for no one has delved more than he has into the mysteries of life, both from tho scientific and spiritual point of view. Sir Oliver said: "We are only at the beginning of things and hardly civilised yet. It is an intensely interesting perod, and sometimes I wish I were young enough to tako a full and vigorous part, instead of only admiring what other people are doing. "We talk too much about death and tho grave. I am absolutely convinced that human oxistenco is not limited to the material body and does not cease with the death of the brain. Wemake too much of the brain. It is the mind, and not the brain, that designs and plans. ' • "I know by direct experionce that those whom we call dead are not dead, but have just been separated from their bodily mechanism. I have been in touch with tho minds of certain people who havo parted from their bodies'and yet havo preserved their memories, characters, and affections." Sir Oliver remarked that a spirit communication with his son Raymond, who was killed in the war, was the moans of finding a lost will. "People ought to live at least 100 years. The old Psalmist has done a lot of harm by talking about throe score years and ten. In those days there was no sanitation, but with the improvements of medicine, sanitation, and the more wholesome habits of life, we ought to be quite young at seventy," Sir Oliver suggested as one of. the means of prolonging life that all the merely mechanical things ought to be done by machincry,)but for any artistic or thoughtful work human hands alone aio suitable.