ABSTRACT
In most religions a fundamental doctrine, making the strongest of appeals to the hopes and fears of believers, has been assurance of an immortality of happiness or punishment. From traces of burial customs widely practised by primitive man it seems evident that belief in some kind of survival after death was normal, if not universal. It may be said, while a prospect of continued spiritual evolution through further modes of experience is more in accord with the trend of modern thought than the old ideas of Heaven and Hell, there is one respect in which it fails to satisfy either thought or feeling. In challenge to the negative attitude of science, experimental proofs of survival after death have been offered in the experience of persons susceptible to abnormal happenings which they attribute to spiritual agency.
