The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [170]
“No, all this talk of an existence for us, as individuals, beyond the grave is wrong. It is born of our tenacity of life—our desire to go on living—our dread of coming to an end as individuals. I do not dread it though. Personally I cannot see any use of a future life.”
But then, Edison thought the newspaper was asking a dated question, relating to a past time when people believed in a personal God, burned their candles, and kept their faith for an Almighty who spoke to them of morality and decency and a better life beyond this one. Edison saw no evidence of such a supreme being, or such moral behaviors, in this life any more than the next one.
“Mercy? Kindness? Love? I don’t see ’em. Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of the religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me—the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love—He also made fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in?”
If a determined reader continued to the end of that long interview, there was a hint that Edison didn’t see the world as quite such a finished machine as he had indicated at first. Running like a small rough thread of doubt through his polished confidence was the faintest glint of humility.
“Now I am going to ask you a question,” Edison said to the reporter. “Why are you here for—here on earth, I mean?
As the journalist confessed in the newspaper article, he had no good answer to that question.
“Well, there you are. We do not understand. We cannot understand. We are too finite to understand. The really big things we cannot grasp as yet.
It was exactly the kind of point that William James would have agreed with, the kind of discussion he would have enjoyed. But the newspaper put Edison’s admissions of uncertainty at the end of the story. They didn’t fit neatly into an account of the ways the twentieth century had left dusty notions of faith and spirit behind.
IT HAD BEEN barely a year since Oliver Lodge had announced, also in the Times, that he and his colleagues had found evidence to link the dead and the living. In the forgotten hopefulness of Lodge’s predictions, in the clear confidence of Edison’s commentary, one could read between the newspaper lines and see, far better than in any light-shot crystal ball, the look of the future.
Oliver Lodge would continue to argue the case for life after death, through the coming decade and beyond. His argument would turn more personal after one of his sons, Raymond, died in battle during World War I. Nora Sidgwick would maintain her insistence on objectivity, but concede in 1913 that the cross-correspondence studies offered real evidence of “cooperation by friends and fellow-workers no longer in the body.” Charles Richet would continue dividing his time between traditional physiology and unorthodox investigations of the occult, insisting that the best hope in resolving difficult questions was for good scientists to tackle them: “Our duty is plain. Let us be sober in speculation; let us study and analyze facts; let us be as bold in hypothesis as we are rigorous in experimentation. Metaphysics will then emerge from Occultism, as Chemistry emerged from Alchemy; and none can foresee its amazing career.”
Carrington, Baggally, and Feilding would continue their work as psychic investigators for many years—debunking a number of well-known psychics along the way. Of the three, Carrington would achieve international fame as a psychic detective; the American magician Harry Houdini once called Carrington’s writings on the subject the best ever produced. Carrington and his colleagues, though, would always regret the collapse of their work with Eusapia Palladino, who died in 1918 due to complications of diabetes. They all agreed, though, with Feilding’s assessment, in a letter to Carrington, that her reputation