83. Proofs of the Immortality of the Soul

However, the experiments made in this direction clearly show how little understanding there still is today for developing the scientific way of thinking in such a way that it can seriously be considered for the spiritual realm. The natural scientist is accustomed to his field of research unfolding outside of his own soul. He must endeavor to accept as knowledge only what this field of research reveals, while keeping out of his own soul everything that comes from its own experience. He can only recognize as natural laws what is justified by facts independent of himself and his thoughts, and what exists independently of human ideas. Therefore, he also only wants the results of revelations in the spiritual realm that do not come from ordinary human consciousness. He believes, for example, that he can only learn something about the soul that may exist after death if it manifests itself within the world of facts in the same way that a physical force manifests itself. This leads him to his experiments with so-called mediums. These are persons in whom ordinary human consciousness is eliminated through certain events. The physical body of such persons behaves like that of a sleeping person, except that they develop an activity in response to questions or other stimuli, in which their own conscious soul life is uninvolved. It is then as if a foreign spirit were speaking through such persons, or, as in automatic writing, were using their hand to make itself known. If one could recognize in such manifestations that they must come from the soul of a deceased person, then this would be a kind of proof of the continuation of the soul that the scientifically minded person would want to accept as objective. Efforts are indeed being made to obtain evidence of the continuation of the soul in this way.