Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 40, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 December 1907 — The Scientific Immortality. [ARTICLE]

The Scientific Immortality.

Sir Oliver Lodge, the noted British scientist, has delivered another pronouncement on the subject of the immortality of the aeul. lie says first that the simple important truth to be kept in sight is the commonplace fact that there is nothing immortal or persistent about the body except the material atoms of which it is composed. He dismisses utterly the notion, still taught by part of the Christian church, that these atoms will some day be gathered and reunited so as to constitute a complete man as he appeared on the earth, and who thereafter will last forever. This he regards as merely a clumsy expedient to make pleasing the idea of the homeless, wandering spirit or ghost of the departed individual. Sir Oliver says that nobody knows what the soul is, but that common sense rebels against its being nothing, and that no genuine science had assumed to-declare it a purely imaginary nonentity. He holds it must be acknowledged by science that no really existing thing perishes, it only changes form. As this has been shown clearly in the case of matter and energy,, it must also be true of mind, consciousness, will, memory, love and other activities which interact with matter and appeal to the bodily senses. These facts of the individual human consciousness, he says, cannot be regarded as nothing, and they will never vanish into nothingness. They did arise with us. They never sprang suddenly into being from previous non-exist-ence. They are as eternal as the Godhead itself, and will in eternal being endure forever.