Myers' way of attacking the question of immortality in
particular, the official way is certainly so far from the mark as to be
almost preposterous. It assumes that when our ordinary consciousness
goes out, the only alternative surviving kind of consciousness that could
be possible is abstract mentality, living on spiritual truth, and
communicating ideal wisdom--in short, the whole classic platonizing
Sunday-school conception. Failing to get that sort of thing when it
listens to reports about mediums, it denies that there can be anything.
Myers approaches the subject with no such _a priori_ requirement. If he
finds any positive indication of "spirits," he records it, whatever it
may be, and is willing to fit his conception to the facts, however
grotesque the latter may appear, rather than to blot out the facts to
suit his conception. But, as was long ago said by our collaborator, Mr.
Canning Schiller, in words more effective than any I can write, if any
conception should be blotted out by serious lovers of Nature, it surely
ought to be classic academic Sunday-school conception. If anything is
unlikely in a world like this, it is that the next adjacent thing to the
mere surface-show of our experience should be the realm of eternal
essences, of platonic ideas, of crystal battlements, of absolute
significance. But whether they be animists or associationists, a
supposition something like this is still the assumption of our usual
psychologists. It comes from their being for the most part philosophers,
in the technical sense, and from their showing the weakness of that
profession for logical abstractions. Myers was primarily a lover of life
and not of abstractions. He loved human life, human persons, and their
peculiarities. So he could easily admit the possibility of level beyond
level of perfectly concrete experience, all "queer and cactus-like"
though it might be, before we touch the absolute, or reach the eternal
essences.

Behind the minute anatomists and the physiologists, with their metallic
instruments, there have always stood the out-door naturalists with their
eyes and love of concrete nature. The former call the latter
superficial, but there is something wrong about your laboratory-biologist
who has no sympathy with living animals. In psychology there is a
similar distinction. Some psychologists are fascinated by the varieties
of mind in living action, others by the dissecting out, whether by
logical an