Sir Oliver Lodge

“ Meanwhile, the very fact that we lament so sincerely this dire and man-caused fate serves to illustrate the view we inevitably take that the earth-body is not only a means of manifestation but is a real servant of the soul,—that flesh can in some sense help spirit as spirit can undoubtedly help flesh,—and that while its very weaknesses are serviceable and stimulating, its strength is exhilarating and superb. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For we, who might have continued to live, though without glory, choose a glorious death rather than bring reproach on you and your children, and rather than disgrace our fathers and all of our race who have gone before us, believing that for the man who brings shame on his own people life is not worth living, and that such an one is loved neither by men nor gods, either on earth or in the underworld when he is dead. ”

“ It was then I think we realised what a strong instinct there was in some of us—not to struggle madly for life—but to wait for something to come to us, whether it be life or death; and not to lose our personality and become like one of the struggling shouting creatures who were by then swarming up from the lower decks and made one's heart ache. ”

“ Part of our experience is the connexion of spirit with matter. We are conscious of our own identity, our own mind and purpose and will: we are also conscious of the matter in which it is at present incarnate and manifested. Let us use these experiences and learn from them. Incarnation is a fact; we are not matter, yet we utilise it. Through the mechanism of the brain we can influence the material world; we are in it, but not of it; we transcend it by our consciousness. The body is our machine, our instrument, our vehicle of manifestation ”

“ I would even venture to urge that, ever since the grant to living creatures of free will, there must be, in some sense or other, a real element of contingency,—that there is no dulness about it, even to the Deity, but a constant and aspiring Effort.
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Let us trust our experience in this also. The Universe is a flux, it is a becoming, it is a progress. Evolution is a reality. True and not imaginary progress is possible. Effort is not a sham. Existence is a true adventure. There is a real risk. ”

“ The things to be investigated are either true or false. If false, pertinacious inquiry will reveal their falsity. If true, they are profoundly important. For there are no half-truths in Nature; every smallest new departure has portentous consequences; our eyes must open slowly, or we should be overwhelmed. I once likened the feeling of physical investigators in the year 1889 to that of a boy who had long been strumming on the keyboard of a deserted organ into which an unseen power had begun to blow a vivifying breath. ”

“ Yes, truly, Christ was a planetary manifestation of Deity, a revelation to the human race, the highest and simplest it has yet had; a revelation in the only form accessible to man, a revelation in the full-bodied form of humanity.
Little conception had they in those days of the whole universe as we know it now. The earth was the whole world to them, and that which revealed God to the earth was naturally regarded as the whole Cosmic Deity. Yet it was a truly divine Incarnation.
A deity of some kind is common to every branch of the human race. ”

“ Feda sees a boy—not Raymond—half lying, half sitting at the door of the tent place, and he hasn't got a proper coat on; he's got a shirt thing on here, and he's like spreaded out. It's a browny-coloured earth, not nice green, but sandy-coloured ground. As Feda looks at the land, the ground rises sharp at the back. Must have been made to rise, it sticks up in the air. He's showing it as though it should be in some photograph or picture. Feda got wondering about it, what it was for. It's a funny-shaped tent, not round, sort of lop-sided. The door isn't a proper door, it flops. ”

“ It were preposterous to imagine an over-lofty conception in a creature. Reality is always found to exceed our clear conception of it; never once in science has it permanently fallen short. No conception is too great or too high. But also no devout conception is too simple, too lowly, too childlike to have an element—some grain—of vital truth stored away, a mustard seed ready to germinate and bud, a leaven which may permeate the whole mass.
I would apply all this to what for brevity may be called Human Immortality. ”

“ PEOPLE often feel a notable difficulty in believing in the reality of continued existence. Very likely it is difficult to believe or to realise existence in what is sometimes called "the next world"; but then, when we come to think of it, it is difficult to believe in existence in this world too; it is difficult to believe in existence at all. The whole problem of existence is a puzzling one. It could by no means have been predicated a priori. The whole thing is a question of experience; that is, of evidence. We know by experience that things actually do exist ”

“ Truly it is no easy service to which we are called; something of the wisdom of the serpent must enter into our activities; sanity and moral dignity and sound sense [ 387] must govern our proceedings; all our powers must be called out, and there must be no sluggishness. Impulses, even good impulses, alone are not sufficient; every faculty of the human brain must be exerted, and we must be continually on guard against the flabbiness of mere good intentions.
Our activity and service are thus an integral part of the Divine Existence, which likewise includes that of all the perceptible universe. ”

“ The energy and enthusiasm of these writers, and the good work they may be doing in their own science, render them more or less immune from attack; but every now and then it is necessary to say clearly that such extravagant generalisations profane the modesty of science: whose heritage it is to recognise the limitations of partial knowledge, and to be always ready to gain fresh experience and learn about the unknown. The new and unfamiliar is the vantage ground, not of scientific dogmatism, but of scientific inquiry. ”

“ But why should anyone suppose a body of some kind always necessary? Why should they assume a perpetual sort of dualism about existence? The reason is that we have no knowledge of any other form of animate existence; and it may be claimed as legitimate to assume that the association between life and matter here on the planet has a real and vital significance, that without such an episode of earth life we should be less than we are, and that the relation is typical of something real and permanent. ”

“ The time draws nigh apace when the sublime truths of Spiritualism, rational and noble as they are when viewed by man's standard, shall wipe away from the face of God's earth the sectarian jealousy and theological bitterness, the anger and ill-will, the folly and stupidity, which have disgraced the name of religion and the worship of God; and man shall see in a clearer light the Supreme Creator and the spirit's eternal destiny. ”

“ The soil of a garden is a veritable charnel-house of vegetable and animal matter, and from one point of view represents death and decay, but the coltsfoot covering an abandoned heap of refuse, or the briar growing amid ruin, shows that Nature only needs time to make it all beautiful again. Let us think of the body as transmuted, not as stored. ”

“ Oh, it is interesting, he says—much more than on the old earth plane. I didn't want to leave you and mother and all of them, but it is interesting. I wish you could come over for one day, and be with me here. There are times you do go there, but you won't remember. They have all been over with him at night-time, and so have you, but he thought it very hard you couldn't remember. If you did, he is told (he doesn't know it himself, but he is told this) , the brain would scarcely bear the burden of the double existence, and would be unfitted for its daily duties; so the memory is shut out. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That the earth is a speck invisible from any one of the stars, that we are on a world which is but one among an innumerable multitude of others, ought to make us realise the utter triviality of any view of existence based upon familiarity with street and train and office, ought to give us some sense of proportion between everyday experience and ultimate reality. ”

“ But if they proceeded further, and entered on negations, if they surmised that that immanent aspect of the universe in which they lived and moved and had their being was the sole and only aspect, if they surmised that there was no personality, no feeling, no locomotion, no mind, no purpose, apart from them and their kind, they would greatly err. What conception could they ever form of the manifold interests and activities of man? Still less of the universe known to man, of which he himself forms so trivial a portion. ”

“ But does dominance of that kind give to that splendid science—the glory of Britain and of Cambridge—the right to make a gigantic extrapolation and sprawl over all the rest of the Universe, throwing out tentacles even into regions which it has definitely abstracted from its attention or excluded from its ken? There is not a physicist who thinks so. The only people who try to think so are a few enthusiasts of a more speculative habit of thought, who are annoyed with the physicists, from Lord Kelvin downwards, for not agreeing with them. ”

“ Under those conditions—so barely escaped from—how wretchedly meagre and limited would have been our conception of the Universe! Aye, and, unless we foolishly imagine that our circumstances are such as to have already given us a clue to every kind of possible existence, I venture to say that "wretchedly meagre and limited" must be a true description of our conception of the Universe, even now,—even of the conception of those who have permitted themselves, with least hesitation, to follow whithersoever facts lead. ”

“ The effort is like the effort to use a muscle not often or ever used—say the outer ear—one does not know which string to pull, so to speak, or, more accurately, which nerve to stimulate, and the result is a peculiarly helpless feeling, akin to stammering. In the case of a medium, I suppose the name is often in the mind of the communicator, but it will not come through the control. The control sometimes describes it as being spoken or shown but not clearly caught. The communicator often does not know whether a medium has successfully conveyed it or not. ”

“ Why not assume, what is manifestly the truth, that free-will exists and has to be reckoned with, that the universe is not a machine subject to outside forces, but a living organism with initiations of its own; and that the laws which govern it, though they include mechanical and physical and chemical laws, are not limited to those, but involve other and higher abstractions, which may perhaps some day be formulated, for life and mind and spirit? ”

“ In individual souls Christianity has flourished and borne fruit, but for the ills of the world itself it is an almost untried panacea. It will be strange if this ghastly war fosters and simplifies and improves a knowledge of Christ, and aids a perception of the ineffable beauty of his life and teaching: yet stranger things have happened; and, whatever the Churches may do, I believe that the call of Christ himself will be heard and attended to, by a large part of humanity in the near future, as never yet it has been heard or attended to on earth. ”

“ For the honest, pure, and truthful soul there is no Devil nor Prince of Evil such as theology has feigned.... The clouds of sorrow and anguish of soul may gather round [such a man] and his spirit may be saddened with the burden of sin—weighed down with consciousness of surrounding misery and guilt, but no fabled Devil can gain dominion over him, or prevail to drag down his soul to hell. All the sadness of spirit, the acquaintance with grief, the intermingling with guilt, is part of the experience, in virtue of which his soul shall rise hereafter. ”

“ There were people once who would not look at the satellites of Jupiter, lest their cherished convictions should be disturbed. There was a mathematician not long ago who would not see an experimental demonstration of conical refraction, lest if it failed his confidence in refined optical theory should be upset. And so, strange to say, there are people to-day who deny the fact, and condemn the investigation, of any manner of communication outside the realm of ordinary commonplace experience: having no ground at all for their denial save prejudice. ”

“ The old and tattered colours of a regiment, for which men have laid down their lives—though replaced perhaps by something newer and more durable—cannot be relegated to obscurity without a pang. And any sensitive or sympathetic person, contemplating such relics hereafter, may feel some echo of the feeling with which they were regarded, and may become acquainted with their history and the scenes through which they have passed. ”

“ But I take it that the real meaning of the term 'body' is a means of manifestation,—perhaps a physical mode of manifestation adopted by something which without such instrument or organ would be in a different and elusive category. Why should we say that bodies must be made of matter? Surely only because we know of nothing else of which they could be made; but that lack of knowledge is not very efficient as an argument. True, if they were made of anything else they would not be apparent to us now, with our particular evolutionally-derived sense organs ”

“ Writing as a hard-shell Darwinian evolutionist, a lover of the scalpel and microscope, and of patient, empirical observation, as one who dislikes all forms of supernaturalism, and who does not shrink from the implications even of the phrase that thought is a secretion of the brain as bile is a secretion of the liver, I assert as a biological fact that the moral law is as real and as external to man as the starry vault. It has no secure seat in any single man or in any single nation. ”

“ They do this in the interest of what they feel instinctively to be the ultimate achievement, a Monism in which mind and matter can be recognised as aspects of some one fundamental Reality. We can sympathise with the aim, and still feel how far from accomplishment we are. Nothing is gained by undue haste, and by unfounded negation much may be lost. We must not deny any part of the Universe for the sake of a premature unification. Simplification by exclusion or denial is a poverty-stricken device. ”

“ He says, I've got a kind of theory, in a crude sort of way, that man has made the earth plane into such a hotbed of materialism and selfishness, that man again has to atone by sacrifices of mankind in the prime of their physical life. So that by that prime self-effacement, they will bring more spiritual conditions on to the earth, which will crush the spirit of materialism. ”