Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/527

 VI. CEITICAL NOTICES. Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. By FEEDEBIO W. H. MYERS. 2 vols. Longmans, Green & Co., 1903. THESE two large volumes, containing 1,360 closely printed pages, present in final form the results of the life-long research of the late F. W. H. Myers. This research, to which Myers devoted his great capacities with an admirable and steadily glowing enthusiasm, was concerned with the problems at once the most obscure and the most momentous that the human mind can legitimately hope to solve, the problems of the nature of man, of his survival of the death of the body, and of the existence of a world of purely spiritual beings. Books dealing with these subjects are of course common enough, and the peculiar interest attaching to Myers' researches arises, not from the nature of the problems discussed, but from the nature of the methods by which he attempted a solution of them. He was the first, though assuredly not the last, to apply to these problems persistently and consistently the inductive methods of modern science ; and this fact alone, even if the final outcome of the inquiry should prove entirely negative, must entitle him to a permanent place in the history of man's intellectual development. Hitherto the belief in a future life has been a matter of faith : Myers sought to make it a matter of knowledge. And he rightly believed that this inquiry is one of supreme interest to that small part of the human race which wishes to know and to understand. " Could a proof of our survival be obtained," he wrote, "it would carry us deeper into the true nature of the universe than we should be carried by an even perfect knowledge of the material scheme of things. It would carry us deeper both by achievement and by promise. The discovery that there was a life ia man independent of blood and brain would be a cardinal, a dominating fact in all science and in all philosophy. And the prospect thus opened to human knowledge, in this or other worlds, would be limitless indeed." With this estimate of the importance of the discovery contemplated we must all agree, whether, as Myers did, we ardently long for its achievement, or rather feel that proof of the survival of our personality after death would snatch away from us the sure hope of ultimate extinction, the certainty of a final and 33