DeDanaan

Filed by Aine MacDermot

497:1 Cf. Communication adressée ou Dr J. Dupré, p. 382 of an essay on La Métempsycose basée sur les Principes de La Biologie et du Magnétisme physiologique, in Le Hasard (Paris, 1909), by P. C. Revel. Cases of regeneration among the aged are known, and these show how the subliminal life-forces try to renew the physical body when it is worn out (of. Revel, ib., p. 372).

499:1 Cf. Revel, op. cit., p. 295 ff.

499:2 If scientists discover, as they probably will in time, what they call the secret of life, they will not have discovered the secret of life at all. What they will have discovered will be the physical conditions under which life manifests itself. In other words, science will most likely soon be able to set up artificially in a laboratory such physical conditions as exist in nature naturally, and by means of which life is able to manifest itself through matter. Life will still be as great a mystery as it is today; though short-sighted materialists are certain to announce to an eager world that the final problem of the universe has been solved and that life is merely the resultant of a subtle chemical compound.

502:1 Professor Freud, after long and careful study, arrived at the following conclusion : — ‘The child has his sexual impulse and activities from the beginning, he brings them with him into the world, and from these the so-called normal sexuality of adults emerges by a significant development through manifold stages.’ And Dr. Sanford Bell, in an earlier writing entitled A Preliminary Study of the Emotions of Love between the Sexes (see Amer. Journ. Psych., 1902), came to a similar conclusion (of. Freud, op. cit., pp. 207-8).

502:2 Cf. Hans Driesch, The Science and Philosophy of the Organism (London, 1908); and Henri Bergson, L’Évolution créatrice (Paris, 1908).

503:1 This Celtic view of non-personal immortality completely fits in with all the voluminous data of psychical research: after forty years of scientific research into psychics there are no proofs yet adduced that the human personality as a self-sufficient unit of consciousness survives indefinitely the death of its body. Granted that it does survive as a ghost for an undetermined period, generally to be counted in years, during which time it seems to be gradually fading out or disintegrating, there is no reliable evidence anywhere to show that a personality as such has manifested through a ‘medium’ or otherwise after an interval of one thousand years, or even of five hundred years. We have, in fact, no knowledge of the Survival of a human personality one hundred years after, and probably there are no good examples of such a survival twenty-five years after the death of the body. Such an eminent psychical researcher as William James recognized this drift of the data of psychics, and when he died he held the conviction that there is no personal immortality (see p. 505 n. following).

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