13 SEPTEMBER 1913, Page 3

Coming to the question of personal continuity, Sir Oliver Lodge

observed that either we were immortal beings or we were not. Those who made denials were just as likely to be wrong as those who made assertions. Personally, he believed that the methods of science could be extended in their scope, and that the psychic region could be studied and brought under law as well. Anyhow, he pleaded for a fai,r field wherein to make the attempt. Let those who preferred the materialistic hypothesis develop their thesis as far as they could ; for himself, speaking as one of the representatives of orthodox science, he did not shrink from summarizing the results of thirty years' psychical research by recording his conviction "that memory and affection are not limited to that association with matter by which alone they can manifest themselves here and now, and that personality persists beyond bodily death." The evidence went to prove that discarnate intelligence under certain conditions might interact with us on the material side, and that gradually we might hope to attain some understand- ing of a larger,perhaps aetherial, existence and of the conditions regulating intercourse across the chasm.