Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/215

XV ] (While he has most enthusiastically greeted Mr. Carington's theories he prefers "interpersonal" to the term "associational" linkage, as of ideas.) The individual is "far indeed from the sharply defined and autonomous little capsule of energy which he is likely to imagine himself to be." He is a part of an "interpersonal psychic field," and "if, on independent grounds, there is reason to believe that the discarnate exist and are capable of contact with the living, there is no theoretical difficulty involved in their participating jointly with the living in an interpersonal psychical field."

Most modern psychical researchers believe that there is strong evidence for some form of survival but no actual proof. What would constitute proof? More complete evidence of the kind that suggests the people "on the other side" had thought up a test that could only have originated with them and not with anyone living here.

Professor Murphy's cautious verdict is: "There is some reason to believe that personality continues after death to be, as it is now, an aspect of an interpersonal reality, and to doubt whether it could survive as an encapsulated entity."

Previously he has called attention to the fact that from infancy to old age the "field properties" of personality change profoundly (the field theory being the treatment of a thing as a whole and not as the mere sum of its parts). Now, "with the change called death, there is every reason to believe that in so far as psychical operations continue, they [the personality characteristics] must, as aspects of larger fields, take on new qualities, new structural relationships," which yet would only be an extension of the interpersonal relationships in which they existed while in the flesh.34

There is no possible way of deciding now, Gardner Murphy says, how far such "surviving organized impressions" (or such discarnate psychon-systems) would resemble us.

There is no way of deciding this, and it is as yet hardly possible to speculate on such questions, without being put down as either fool or charlatan. It is as if so much fear still remained from the days when the church caused men of science to be burnt at the stake that license to speculate on conceivable other-wordly realms were only issued to poets. Many people of course are utterly unable to entertain hypotheses; they must either believe or not believe, but