FUTURE LIFE

Hawera Star, Volume XLVII, 12 May 1928, Page 5

FUTURE LIFE

SIR A. KEITH’S STATEMENT. SIR OLIVER LODGE’S REPLY. CONTROVERSY IN ENGLAND, (UNITED PRESS ASSOCIATION—BY ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH—COPYRIGHT.) (AUSTRALIAN PRESS ASSOCIATION.) Received 10.10 a.m. LONDON, Mgy 11. . Sir Oliver Lodge has taken up immediately Sir Arthur Keith’s challenge tt> a belief in future life. “I.'think the brain is the instrument used by the mind physiologists, who think the. brain is the mind,” he. said. ‘‘lf'the brain is the mind, then wlien one is destroyed the other will be destroyed. A violin manifests Beethoven, but that is not the same thing as being Beethoven.- If we smash a violin we do not kill music; what .happens is that the instrument can no longer manifest it. I say that the brain, or any form of matter, cannot evolve Shakespeare or his sense or meaning but merely manifests it like a typewriter. Doctors know a terrible lot about the working of the. human machinery; it is the other aspect that they have not 'atitcmptekl to understand, wherein we agree to differ. They do not accept the evidence there is about the survival. of till© spirit; they look at it from another point of yiew. because they think the brain and. mind are one .and the same tiling.” Sir John Bland Sutton, a famous surgeon, supports Sir Arthur Keith, and says: “Death is the end of all—an endless sleep. Everybody who has studied it scientifically and deeply has ■coin© to the same conclusion.’* .. . Professor De Lisle Burns doubts whether Sir Arthur Keith has been looking at the evidence, and says: “It is undeniab’e that there are activities in experience which are not .the same type as materials and objects.”

Sir Richard Gregory says : Sir Arthur Keith weighs and measures brains in his laboratory, but he cannot measure or weigh' a spirit. Therefore he is not cncerned about it, and does not know of there is a spirit. I am certain in mv knowledge of Sir Arthur Keith; and his great ability that-, lie does not mean to deny the existence of . something] which cannot at present he demonstrated.”

Sir Arthur Keith, when it was pointed out to him that a controversy had been aroused by his statement, repeated the remark that there was no. evidence that the brain was a duel organ composed of substance and spirit, but he does not think his -statement destroys the belief in immortality. 1 ‘Religion has no bearing on ouo* teaching, we are simply out to discover and understand the human body and find the exact way of curing disease. All other thing's’ are side issues.”