when he first
produced it. He says: "After reading your article, I was struck,
almost startled, by the circumstance that the statements which had
purported to be made to me regarding conditions after death
coincided--I think almost to the smallest detail--with those you set
out as the result of your collation of material obtained from a great
number of sources. I cannot think there was anything in my antecedent
reading to account for this coincidence. I had certainly read nothing
you had published on the subject. I had purposely avoided Raymond and
books like it, in order not to vitiate my own results, and the
Proceedings of the S.P.R. which I had read at that time, do not touch,
as you know, upon after-death conditions. At any rate I obtained, at
various times, statements (as my contemporary notes show) to the effect
that, in this persisting state of existence, they have bodies which,
though imperceptible by our senses, are as solid to them as ours to us,
that these bodies are based on the general characteristics of our
present bodies but beautified; that they have no age, no pain, no rich
and poor; that they wear clothes and take nourishment; that they do not
sleep (though they spoke of passing occasionally into a semiconscious
state which they called 'lying asleep'--a condition, it just occurs to
me, which seems to correspond roughly with the 'Hypnoidal' state);
that, after a period which is usually shorter than the average
life-time here, they pass to some further state of existence; that
people of similar thoughts, tastes and feelings, gravitate together;
that married couples do not necessarily reunite, but that the love of
man and woman continues and is freed of elements which with us often
militate against its perfect realization; that immediately after death
people pass into a semi-conscious rest-state lasting various periods,
that they are unable to experience bodily pain, but are susceptible at
times to some mental anxiety; that a painful death is 'absolutely
unknown,' that religious beliefs make no difference whatever in the
after-state, and that their life altogether is intensely happy, and no
one having ever realised it could wish to return here. I got no
reference to 'work' by that word, but much to the various interests
that were said to occupy them. That is probably only another way of
saying the same thing. 'Work' with us has come usually to mean 'work
to live,' and that, I was emphatically inf