is extremely slim, with much more likely explanations at band for all known phenom-
ena. And yet, the realities of the distant future will be at least as strange as this
Without filling in the details or soft spots, maybe we can picture something like this.
The mind is different from the brain-material, but extremely subtle, even harder to
detect by ordinary methods than the neutrino. This mind, essentially, is the person.
It is symbiotic with the brain, in a sense; or perhaps we should say that only the mind
is “alive,” the brain being merely an appendage of the mind, as the leg is an append-
age of the person. Both-brain and mind-are essential, and both develop together,
the reproductive cells carrying both the seed of a brain and the seed of a mind. With
present techniques, the mind cannot exist without the brain, but future developments
may make it possible for the mind to divorce itself from its gross partner and be self-
supporting. Thus we may imagine our transfigured selves as beings of “Pure mind,”
gliding swift and ethereal through the reaches of the cosmos
We do know that very sensitive linkages exist in nature, pivot-points where extreme-
ly subtle influences can exert profound effects: for example, some years back a few
pounds of copper threads were put in orbit around the earth for certain tests, and
some scientists thought there was danger of the earth’s entire climate being disturbed!
Professor J. C. Eccles, a prominent neurophysiologist, has written that the brain is
indeed the sort of machine a ghost could operate; i.e., the mind might be a very in-
substantial kind of director, needing only to nudge the brain very slightly at crucial
spots to make it carry on their mutual business in the desired way. While this kind of
dualism seems most farfetched to me, so far neither necessary nor fruitful, one can-
not make a final judgment. Neutrinos certainly have almost a ghostly quality, and so
do tachyons, if they exist; it may conceivably turn out, after all, that the spiritualists
have erred chiefly in language and attitude.
e evidence for psychic phenomena, in the sense of extrasensory perception, seems
extremely weak. Nevertheless, some investigators are convinced of their reality, and
of their dramatic divergence from the ordinary phenomena of physics; for example,
Professor Joseph Rhine believes that certain effects are unaffected by distance or time.
(141) Likewise, the seance-spiritualists have not convincingly demonstrated their
“ectoplasm,” yet it is at least conceivable that some quasi-material “soul” somehow
inhabits and directs the body.
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