"How often have men thus feared that Nature's wonders would be degraded by being closelier looked into! How often, again, have they learnt that the truth was higher than their imagination; and that it is man's work, but never Nature's, which to be magnificent must remain unknown!"—F. W. H. M., Introduction to Phantasms of the Living OUR actual experience is strangely limited. We cannot be actually conscious of more than a single instant of time. The momentary flash which we call the present, the visual image of which can be made permanent by the snap of a camera, is all of the external world that we directly apprehended. But our real existence embraces far more than that. The present, alone and isolated, would be meaningless to us; we look before and after. Our memories are thronged with the past; our anticipations range over the future; and it is in the past and the future that we really live. It is so even with the higher animals: they too order their lives by memory and anticipation. It is under the influence of the future that the animal world performs even the most trivial conscious acts. We eat, we rest, we work, all with an eye to the immediate future. The present moment is illuminated and made significant, is controlled and dominated, by experience of the past and by expectation of the future. Without any idea of the future our existence would be purely mechanical and meaningless: with too little eye to the future—a mere living from hand to mouth—it becomes monotonous and dull. Hence it is right that humanity, transcending merely animal scope, should seek to answer questions concerning its origin and destiny, and should regard with intense It is no doubt possible, as always, to overstep the happy mean, and by absorption in and premature concern with future interests to lose the benefit and the training of this present life. But although we may rightly decide to live with full vigour in the present, and do our duty from moment to moment, yet in order to be full-flavoured and really intelligent beings—not merely with mechanical drift following the line of least resistance—we ought to be aware that there is a future,—a future determined to some extent by action in the present; and it is only reasonable that we should seek to ascertain, roughly and approximately, what sort of future it is likely to be. Inquiry into survival, and into the kind of experience through which we shall all certainly have to go in a few years, is therefore eminently sane, and may be vitally significant. It may colour all our actions, and give a vivid meaning both to human history and to personal experience. If death is not extinction, then on the other side of dissolution mental activity must continue, and must be interacting with other mental activity. For the fact of telepathy proves that bodily organs are not absolutely essential to communication of ideas. Mind turns out to be able to act directly on mind, and stimulate it into response by other than material means. Thought does not belong to the material region: although it is able to exert an influence on that region through mechanism provided by vitality. Yet the means whereby it accomplishes the feat are essentially unknown, and the fact that such interaction is possible would be strange and surprising if we were not too much accustomed to it. It is reasonable to suppose that the mind can be more at home, and more directly and more exuberantly active, where the need for such interaction between psychical and physical—or let us more safely and specifically say between mental and material—no longer exists, when the restraining influence of brain and nerve mechanism is removed, and when some of the limitations connected with bodily location in space are ended. Experience must be our guide. To shut the door on On the Possibility of PrognosticationI do not wish to complicate the issue at present by introducing the idea of prognostication or prevision, for I do not understand how anticipation of the future is possible. It is only known to be possible by one of two processes— (a) Inference—i.e. deduction from a wide knowledge of the present; (b) Planning—i.e. the carrying out of a prearranged scheme. And these methods must be pressed to the utmost before admitting any other hypothesis. As to the possibility of prevision in general, I do not dogmatise, nor have I a theory wherewith to explain every instance; but I keep an open mind and try to collate and contemplate the facts. Scientific prediction is familiar enough; science is always either historic or prophetic (as Dr. Schuster said at Manchester in the British Association Address for 1915), "and history is only prophecy pursued in the negative direction." This thesis is worth illustrating:—That Eclipses can be calculated forwards or backwards is well The real truth is that, except for unforeseen contingencies, past, present, and future are welded together in a coherent whole; and to a mind with wider purview, to whom perhaps hardly anything is unforeseen, there may be possibilities of inference to an unsuspected extent. Human character, and action based upon it, may be more trustworthy and uncapricious than is usually supposed; and data depending on humanity may be included in a completer scheme of foreknowledge, without the exercise of any compulsion. "The past," says Bertrand Russell eloquently, "does not change or strive; like Duncan, after life's fitful fever it sleeps well; what was eager and grasping, what was petty and transitory, has faded away; the things that were beautiful and eternal shine out of it like stars in the night." My ignorance will not allow me to attempt to compose a similar or rather a contrasting sentence about the future. Reference to Special Cases
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