PERSONALITY SURVIVES

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 129, 3 June 1933, Page 17

PERSONALITY SURVIVES

"I am a surgeon; and I have seen patients paralysed up to their necks, with their hearts still beating, and their lungs kept going by the long nervo Wire which runs direct down to those bits of machinery from tho brauu These people always told me thoy Wore tho same personality," says Sir Wilfred Grenville, in his book, "Forty Years in Labrador.*' "Why they Should cease to bo a person at all because I nick through: one niore nerve thread, little thicker than a piece of cotton, I cAnndt say. ; Anyhow, until that last nick takes place, a Magistrate will aeedpt on oath that the person is exactly the same, though he may bo 'dead' below* the_ cervical vertebrae, which means his neck. Everyone knows that the brain is not ourselves. It is mine exactly as is my jack-knife, or my boot. I make one side of my brain learn ■ French. A doctor can destroy the few cells-which I have educated, and 1 know nO French. But I can go to Work and educate-the cells on the other side , and learn French again. Everybody, can know that no part of my body is (X,' only that it and its wives and cells relate mo to this material w»rld., I havo eeen the accidont Called death of the body more than once, but I never saw any reason to believe iri the death of personality. Every possible evidence of personal life after death that can eorne to human beings I should say comps through other channels than tho five senses that I am conscious of."