RELIGION AND THE LIFE HEREAFTER

existent (as compared to the body), keeping its existence in changeless form amidst continuous changes. Further proof of the truth of this concept is provided by the discovery in the field of psychology of the ‘unconscious’ or the ‘subconscious’—a major part of the human brain. It has been established that the thoughts stored in the unconscious remain in exactly the same condition until death. Freud writes in his thirty-first lecture: The laws of logic—above all, the law of contradiction, do not hold for processes in the Id (inner nature). Contradictory impulses exist side by side without neutralizing each other or drawing apart; at most they combine in compromise. There is nothing in the Id, which can be compared to negation, and we are astonished to find in it an exception to the philosophers’ assertion that space and time are necessary forms of our mental acts. In the Id there is nothing corresponding to the idea of time, no recognition of the passage of time, and (a thing which is very remarkable and awaits adequate attention in philosophic thought) no alteration of mental processes by the passage of time. Cognitive impulses which have never got beyond the Id, and even impressions which have been pushed down into the Id by repression, are virtually immortal and are preserved for whole decades as though they had only recently occurred. The processes of the Id being independent of time shows that the unconscious has its own independent existence; it has been established that the body is subject to the laws of time and space and that it is in space and time that all its actions take place. Now if the soul is simply an extension of the body, then, like the body, it too should be subject to the laws of time and space. Since observation has shown that this is not so, there is the inevitable inference that the soul by its very nature is something separate from (though not extraneous to) the body and that it exists independently. The relation of the soul to the body is not comparable to that of a machine and its movement, nor to that of a musical instrument and the music it produces. Had there been any basis for this comparison, the same laws, which apply to the body, would have affected the soul. By means of various experiments and demonstrations, it was shown that even after bodily death, the human personality survives in some mysterious form.