ABSTRACT
The human mind has from time immemorial been haunted by the idea that life here is complemented by existence of another kind. Indeed, belief in existence after death may be said to be the most characteristic and fundamental of all human cravings. It is the slender bond which unites the most divergent races, and the most divergent individuals of any given race. It is in the mind of the little Eastern woman who claps her hands and rings a bell at the wayside shrine to attract the attention of the Dweller within; and equally it is in the mind of Monsignor, as he assists at High Mass in a prosaic European capital. At every turn in the road the serpent, or knowledge-man, awaits the unwary, and asks: “Is this thing true; hath God said?" And the man who does not immediately repel these insinuations and turn a deaf ear to the charmer will, whether he knows it or not, probably have cause to rue the trafficking with his own unbelief before the sands of his hour-glass have run out. Nietzsche is a great warning. Is our insistent belief in an after-life a superstition which we have to outgrow?—or is it a part of the eternal constitution of that Great Unknowable which we call Life, to the understanding of which all our conquests in science may bring us nearer if the revolt subject in us is only treated with straightforward honesty, and turned into an ally instead of being allowed to remain a hidden enemy or a dreaded adversary? The young man who, when his own dreams were being discussed with him on Freudian principles, exclaimed: "Is the world, then, not rational?" was voicing something quite stupendous. At the time I asked myself anxiously what he could mean; but as I had only undertaken psychology to do, as I put it, donkey work for my medical friends, I suspended judgment and awaited results.
