Posted on 21 October 2024, 8:30

Thanks to Professor James Hyslop for being a guest columnist this fortnight.  This is an abridgement of the concluding chapter of his 1905 book, “Science and a Future Life.” Hyslop was professor of logic and ethics at Columbia University before becoming a full-time psychical researcher in 1902. Key verbiage has been underscored.—MET

OVERCOMING THE FOLLIES OF A FUTURE LIFE

by James H. Hyslop, Ph.D., LL.D.

Secularism is the rationalist’s protest against an absurd “other worldliness,” and it seems forced by the very law of human progress to gain its own end by a neglect of the spiritual, similar to that which characterized the religious mind’s attitude toward the earthly. But there is no reason, save the lack of intelligence and high moral development, why both tendencies should not act together. There is no reason why a belief in a future life should be a necessary evil and there is no reason why a reference to present duties alone should be the world’s only virtue. Both ought to be articulated in the highest character, if there is any reason to accept a future life at all.

Of course, a reference to a future life in our daily conduct will get its rationality from the conviction that it is a fact, while ignorance of such a destiny is certainly an excuse for the neglect of it. No duties can have any force or motive power if they are based upon a mere possibility of another life when they are confronted with an equal possibility that it is not a fact. Morality, to be effective, must have some certainties in the causal series of events or it will be largely inoperative. Hence, if we are to use a future life as a motive power in conduct at all, we must assure ourselves that it is a fact and that it represents some degree of progress as the result of effort in the present life.

The ideals of a democracy will live or die with the belief in immortality. Christianity boasted of its freight of hope to the poor and of its placing men on an equality before the world. It taught us that man shall not live by bread alone, and that riches were not the pathway into the kingdom of God

It is all very well for the rich and cultured to tell us we should have no personal interest in a future life and thus appear to be very disinterested in their views of that life, when the fact is that this is only a subterfuge to escape the duty to share with labor and suffering the fruits of a selfish exploration of them. The truth is that men never became stoical and pretentiously virtuous about immortality until they came convinced that it was not to be had; and then to placate the poor they begin teaching them the duty of sacrifice in this respect while they make none themselves in the field of wealth until they have satisfied all their Epicurean desires. But they will learn in the dangers of a social revolution that the poor will not sacrifice both wealth and immortality. They will insist on sharing one or the other.

I am well aware of the follies which might easily be aroused by the reinstatement of a belief in a future life, as if that belief should become as badly abused as it has been in the past. But the dangers of abuse are no reason for trying to suppress facts. We cannot shy at the truth because some unwise people lose their heads about it. On the contrary our supreme duty is to appropriate that truth and to prevent its abuse. We only double our task when we ridicule facts until they get beyond our control. Our business is not to follow in the wake of movements we cannot control, but to give their truths sobriety and sanity. If a future life is a fact, we cannot disprove it by laughing at phenomena that we do not like. Our esthetics have no more to do with the fact than they have with the eclipse of the sun or with the existence of disease. Emotional contempt of the facts is no more legitimate than the condemned emotional interest in a future life, and if it be a fact we shall not escape it by cultivating indifference to its truth. It is the business of the intelligent and scientific man to command the subject, not to despise it because it is not respectable.

If nature has thrown in our way indubitable evidence of a future life, no matter what its character, if there is no escape from the admission of the significance of the facts for some large theory of the world, it is not only the scandal of science that the facts are not incorporated in its work, but it is also a reproach to our morals that we do not appropriate the facts in some rational and useful way. If we cannot deny them we must articulate them with our rational life and see that they get sober instead of insane appreciation.

If we can infect life with the belief that consciousness survives and that we cannot form an intelligent idea of that survival without many centuries of scientific study we may get the combined advantages of the Greco-Roman devotion to science and art while we sustain Christian hopes and ideals. The mediation between the material and spiritual life may be effected in this union. We do not need assurance of anything but the fact of a future life if we can accept and trust the lesson of evolution, namely, that progress is the law of the cosmos.

Michael Tymn is the author of The Afterlife Revealed: What Happens After We Die, Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife, and Dead Men Talking: Afterlife Communication from World War I.
His latest book, No One Really Dies: 25 Reasons to Believe in an Afterlife is published by White Crow books.

With respect to Hyslop’s comments regarding morality and immortality, one of the secular points of resistance with regard to the traditional religious notions of Heaven and Hell (what Michael would call ‘humdrum Heaven and Horrific hell’) is that of Divine Judgment, of the weighing up and consequent separation of the sheep from the goats, the wheat from the tares. The secular response is to reject this understanding and declare that there is no Judgment, no immortality and - whether explicitly or implicitly - no ultimate consequences for morality or immorality. Dead is dead and that is that. One of the most remarkable - and potentially decisive - consistent themes of testimony from the discarnate literature is to present a ‘third way’ between these two understandings, that the judgment, such as it is, and the sorting that is its consequence flow from the nature of things rather than from the ruling of some external Judge.  What Robert Crookall referred to as the ‘sorting’ of the discarnate individual is based upon the the ‘affinity’, the ‘affiliation’ or the ‘resonance’ of one’s character or quality of being with the character and quality of a given discarnate ‘state’, ‘level’, ‘plane’, ‘realm’ or ‘vibration’.  Thus does one sow as one reaps, out of one’s own nature and in consequence of the nature of things.  Such an understanding restores the urgent need for one to ‘set one’s house in order’ while living precisely so that one’s ‘sorting’ may be discarnately felicitous, both in the sense of avoiding suffering but also in the sense of shaping one’s soul in a manner that is in keeping and in harmony with the nature of things, which tend and ultimately lead to the Good, the True and the Beautiful - as Hyslop concludes, “progress is the law of the cosmos.”

Amos, I agree.  It is difficult to reconcile Hyslop’s convictions relative to survival with his comments about Patience/Pearl.  I gather that he never observed Pearl. It may be that his arrogance has held him back in his spiritual evolution and that he is at a realm low enough for me to contact him after I transition.  If so, I will attempt to question him on this matter

Thanks to everyone for your patience on the problems with the comments section.  Jon Beecher tells me that the new system should be operational around Christmas.  It is an expensive and time-consuming project, including moving the archives to the new system.

Mike,

I greatly enjoyed this. It’s the kind of article I can send to a materialist with some hope they will read it. His denunciation of Christianity’s view of the future life gives credibility to his thesis.

Stafford

Michael,
Thanks for letting Professor Hyslop speak on your blog.  He was an esteemed academician among his peers. I have several books by Hyslop but I found them difficult to get through due to his language usage, and his academic writing style probably representative of his time at the end of the Victorian era and the beginning of the 20th century.  He was a deep thinker and wrote many papers and books. His academic presentation and his personal style however were very different.
I have spent some time considering Hyslop’s involvement in the Pearl Curran /Emily Hutchings case in which both women wrote novels using a Ouija board.  Pearl Curran was a poorly-educated reluctant medium transmitting dictation from an entity called “Patience Worth” while Emily Hutchings enthusiastically transmitted dictation from the spirit of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) also using the Ouija board and through medium Lola V. Hays.

Hyslop, based on gossip from Hutchings and Hays, denigrated the first book about Patience Worth written by newspaper man and editor, Casper S. Yost as having absolutely no interest to the “intelligent” “scientific” man. And based on gossip provided by Emily Hutchings he severely criticized Mr. Yost and John Curran, Pearl Curran’s husband and their publisher as having mercenary interests in promoting Patience Worth, saying that Yost did not investigate Pearl Curran’s background related to her knowledge of history, literature and her previous writing ability and therefore Yost’s book, “Patience Worth: A Psychic Mystery” was a “fools’ venture.” And that a Ouija board was “worthy of children and savages.”

On the other hand, he praised Emily Hutchings’s book “Jap Herron”, dictated by the spirit of Samuel Clemens also using a Ouija board saying it was an authentic spirit communication from Mark Twain. (Emily said that Mark wanted to give 25% of the proceeds from “Jap Herron” to the scientific study of parapsychology, taken to mean to James Hyslop.)  Hyslop failed to acknowledge that both Emily and Lola (especially Emily) had extensive writing careers.  Emily wrote at least three novels and contributed to many, primarily women’s magazines, and was an editor for the St. Louis Globe Democrat newspaper. She grew up in Hannibal, Missouri the same town that Clemens grew up in and obviously as a writer, editor and a reader, she had read most of his books, learning his style of writing and had met him and written to him on a couple of occasions.  She was the reporter for the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis being the first on the scene sending reports in several languages all over the world, she was the last reporter to leave. Emily spent months writing “Jap Herron,” re-writing it, moving sentences and paragraphs around until it pleased her something Pearl Curran never did with the Patience Worth writing.

Hyslop praised Emily’s book as an authentic communication from Samuel Clemens, ignoring the history of Emily’s College Education, previous extensive writing abilities and use of the Ouija Board—- “worthy of children and savages.”  Clemens daughter, Clara, did not agree that the book, “Jap Herron” was dictated by her father and sued to have it taken off of the market. Clara Clemens is quoted as characterizing Professor Hyslop’s assertations as “silly, foolish, stupid and crazy.”

I can’t help but think that due to his vituperous and false declarations about Pearl Curran and her husband, John Curran, Casper Yost and The Henry Holt publishing company, based solely on rumor and gossip, I cannot regard him, at times, other than an arrogant shrew of a man.

Here is an oft-quoted comment by Hyslop giving some insight into his personality:

“I regard the existence of discarnate spirits as scientifically proved, and I no longer refer to the skeptic as having any right to speak on the subject. Any man who does not accept the existence of discarnate spirits and the proof of it is either ignorant or a moral coward.  I give him short shrift, and do not propose any longer to argue with him on the supposition that he knows anything about the subject.”
                            – AOD