ABSTRACT
Spiritualism, Morse explained while himself in trance, was 'really a method by which you are enabled to solve the problem of death without dying', Christianity, he went on, had originally been an excellent bridge to the next world, but was now crumbling. The new bridge was spiritualism: 'if were to admit that communication could be received from the next life, its occupation would be gone'. Such claims might lead us to expect plebeian - which, as with Morse here, meant self-consciously post-Christian spiritualism to be at its most distinctive in this area. As people will now see, though, the pattern was more interesting. The chapter also discusses the deathbeds and funerals. Spiritualists were not alone in believing the human personality would survive death. Some plebeian spiritualists were at least aware of new conceptual trends. Take a term such as the 'subliminal self', developed from the 1880s by F. W. FI. Myers and his circle.
