RELIGION AND THE LIFE HEREAFTER

life Hereafter as a matter of fact. C. J. Ducasse (d. 1969), Professor of Philosophy at the Brown University, has made a philosophical and psychological scrutiny of this concept. He did not believe it in the sense in which it is presented by religion, yet he held that apart from the dogmas of religion, such evidence does exist that compels us to accept the survival of life after death. After making a general survey of various investigations in the field of research, he observed: Some of the keenest-minded and best-informed persons, who studied the evidence over many years in a highly critical spirit, eventually came to the conclusion that, in some cases at least, only the survival hypothesis remained plausible. Among such persons may be mentioned Alfred Russel Wallace, Sir William Crookes, F.W.H. Myers, Cesare Lombroso, Camille Flammarion, Sir Oliver Lodge, Dr. Richard Hodgson, Mrs. Henry Sidwick and Professor Hyslop, to name only a few of the most eminent. This suggests that the belief in a life after death, which so many persons have found no particular difficulty in accepting as an article of religious faith, not only may be true but is perhaps capable of empirical proof; and if so, that, instead of the inventions of theologians concerning the nature of the postmortem life, factual information regarding it may eventually be obtained. That, in such a case, the content of this information will turn out to be useful rather than not, for the two tasks which it is the function of religion to perform, does not, of course, automatically follow. Ducasse, while accepting life after death as a reality, has refused to accept the religious nature of this same phenomenon. This is only a matter of his own personal predilections. The truth is that if life survives after death, there can be no interpretation other than a religious one. o The truth is that if life survives after death, there can be no interpretation other than a religious one.