LAST MESSAGE

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXIV, Issue 3239, 6 December 1930, Page 3

LAST MESSAGE

LIFE, DEATH AND SPIRITUALISM. AS THEY APPEARED TO SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE. Shortly before his death Sir Arthur Conan Doyle granted an interview to George Sylvester Viereck, in which he expounded the following views on life and death printed in the South African "Rand Daily Mail." I believe that the soul is born and reborn many times. I am not sure that it ever dons again the human form after it has discarded that garment, but my thoughts incline that way:

The aim of life is not experience but spirituality. Experience may help us to obtain spirituality. Again, it may not. It may leave us sodden sensualists and gluttons. If you take experience right, it makes you a better man. If wrong, you set your face backward on the road of the soul's progress. TIRED OF WORDS. I am not satisfied with vague Pantheism. I am tired of being fed on words, words, words. The human soul wants concrete individual manifestations of God. I find these manifestations in Spiritualism. It is possible that we are simply cells in a body of some prodigious being. It is possible that the world itself is alive. But all this is too fantastic, too remote. Spiritualism is nearer and more real.

I was brought up as a Catholic. Subsequently I became a Rationalist. I could not imagine a God with a preference for any religious or racial group. I cannot picture to myself an Almighty who confines salvation to a clique. My rationalism was largely the outgrowth of my medical studies. I expressed my Rationalist philosophy in the "Stark-Munroe" letters." That book is largely autobiography. Dissatisfied with Rationalism, I studied literature and philosophy. Spiritualism threw a light across my pa+h like that which Paul saw on the road to Damascus. I visited the people who wrote about Spiritualism. I studied the case of Spiritualism where others denied the new knowledge a priori or dismissed it with a contemptuous gesture. My studies, extending over 40 years, have convinced me that independent intelligences exist who call to us from the other side of the wall. The survival of personalities is the basis for all religions, but all, with the exception of the reincarnationists and the Spiritualists, are silent upon the nature, of the survival. The antagonists of Spiritualism assert that when the dead speak to us they have little to say. .The most important thing to say is that they exist at all. But hot all messages are trifling. Did you read the "The Psychic Recollections of a Musician," or did you see "Is This Wilson?" written by Mrs. C. A. Dawson Scott? Both Wilson's style and his idealism are unmistakable in this book. The "Psychic Utterances of Oscar Wilde," by Mrs. Travis Smith, is another instance. I knew Oscar Wilde when he was living. In that book I recognise poetic and epigrammatic passages which are as characteristic as anything that bears his imprint. If I were preparing an anthology of Wilde's works I would include several passages from this post-mundane work. Messages that seem trivial are often not trivial to the person addressed. If my son, who died during the War, had come back and postulated some vague philosophical hypothesis, I would not be convinced. But when he reminded me of some match in which I had to wear two right boots, having lost one in the course of the game—a fact unknown to anyone else because of its very triviality—l was overwhelmed. One of our writers, Vale Owen, has published messages from the other world, with calculations too intricate for me, which seems to point in the general direction of the Einstein theory.

If we ask the spirits for some technical point, such as a problem in wireless, they reply: "You must work out your own salvation. Do not come to us with such things. Our help takes the form of inspirations. We slip ideas into your mind, but you must toil and labour to work them out.' Science moves in our direction. The atom, the ion, radiation, relativity, etc., have conspired to . make scientists less cocksure than of old. In many great universities in Europe Spiritualism is studied. In the beginning, when I knew less about Spiritualism, I was inclined to say to myself: 'lf the dead have nothing better to do than rap on tables, death must be a vulgar experience." During the War, when we lost eight members of our family, including my son, I realised that this table rapping is like the knock of a friend on the door. If you hear him rap you must ask him in. Many soldiers who have been through the fiery oven of war have reached the same conclusion. Our mind must be attuned to receive a message. We must have a medium —a telephone connecting us with the other world. The conditions must be perfect. There must be somebody willing to talk to you

on the other side and you must be willing to listen. Spiritualism is either rot or madness or the most important thing in the world. For me it has blotted out everything else. I have lectured on Spiritualism in Africa, Australia, America and at Home. Faith in Spiritualism is strong everywhere. The spirits may live in the same world as we, governed by another rate of vibration. The land of the spirit may be simply a fourth, fifth, sixth or seventh dimension. Einstein says that modern mathematicians include in their calculations an infinite number of dimensions. Einstein merely expressed what every Spiritualist knows.

Spiritualism is not inimical to other religions. The spirit of the universe manifested itself on the earth in Buddha, Moses, Christ and Mohammed. It manifests itself today in the new movement. There is nothing in Spiritualism that is irreconciliable with the Sermon on the Mount. The new knowledge fills the old forms and gives a new reality to religion. Religion is half-dead to-day. It can be resuscitated only by Spiritualism. The Jew, the Catholic, the Protestant, the Mussulman, the Hindu—all believe that life is continuous. But they do not all realise that communication with those who have passed on is possible. Spiritualism is the most important contribution to religious thought. No other religion tells us definitely what happens after death. The pagans did not know. They went to the oracles as we go to fortunetellers, but they lacked spiritual in sight. I heard it stated that probably by such figures as Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger will posterity remember me. In the unlikely case of my being remembered at all a hundred years from now, people will speak of me as a pioneer of Spiritualism. Maybe people will say: "This man also wrote fiction." It is always the things of the spirit that survive.