TALKS WITH THE DEAD

Greymouth Evening Star, 6 November 1931, Page 12

TALKS WITH THE DEAD

SIR 0. LODGE’S DISCLOSURE. OXFORD, September 4. Sir Oliver Lodge, speaking at the Modern Churchmen’s Conference here to-day, disclosed that he had made arrangements in connection with a spirit communication which he hoped to convey after death. Spirit communications ought not to be rejected because they appeared trivial, for this, he said, was part of their merit.

“If I myself find an opportunity of communicating,” he proceeded, “1 shall try to establish my identity by detailing a perfectly preposterous and absurdly childish peculiarity which I have already taken the trouble to record with some care in a sealed document deposited in the custody of the English Society for Psychical Research. I hope to remember the details of this document and relate them in no unmistakable fashion. “The value of the communication will not consist in the substance of what is communicated, but in the fact that I have never mentioned it to a living soul, and no one has any idea what it contains. People of sense will not take its absurd triviality as anything but helpful in contributing to the proof of the survival of personal identity.”

We have to dp no violence to our physical conceptions if we admitted the fact of survival. Life and mind never were functions of the material body; they only displayed themselves by means of the material organism. If they ever found means of operating in a novel or unusual manner on a physical organism, then they might still manifest their continued existence, and that was exactly what they did. Telepathy showed that mind could act on mind, without the use of any bodily organs. Hence certain people might have a faculty of apprehending a spiritual world direct, and this might account for genius and inspiration.

ETHER DENSITY. Sir Oliver referred to the mistaken impression that the ether was something tenuous, which, he said, was a poetic illusion associated with the term “ethereal.” That ether was a very substantial entity, far denser than any form of matter, had been gradually becoming clear to physicists. According to an estimate he had made in the light of the electromagnetic theory, every cubic millimetre contained as much substance as what, if it were matter, we should call a thousand tons. On the analogy of matter, the ether was of the order of a million times as dense as water.

Its rate of vibration, which enabled us to see any ordinary object, was five hundred million million per second. Yet we familiarly made use of these vibrations. Our wonderful organ, the eye, was constructed so as to cope with them in the easiest possible manner.

“The revolution in physical science which has been going on all through this physical century has had the effect of directing our main attention away from material bodies and concentrating it on the multifarious happenings in space. In my belief this process will go further, for that is where our real existence lies, and there is our spiritual home.”

Asked whether he had had correspondence with prominent Spiritualists who had passed over, Sir Oliver replied: “I have had a good deal of guidance and help from people on the other side —from my wife, who died two years ago, and from my son, Raymond, who has frequently given me assistance, advice, or information.” Answering another question, Sir Oliver said that it was very difficult to tell what would be remembered “on the other side” and what would not.