Explore "The New Revelation" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The subject of psychical research is one upon which I have thought more / and about which I have been slower to form my opinion, than upon any / other subject whatever. Every now and then as one jogs along through / life some small incident happens which very forcibly brings home the / fact that time passes and that first youth and then middle age are / slipping away. Such a one occurred the other day. There is a column / in that excellent little paper, Light, which is devoted to what was / recorded on the corresponding date a generation -- that is thirty / years -- ago. As I read over this column recently I had quite a start as / I saw my own name, and read the reprint of a letter which I had written / in 1887, detailing some interesting spiritual experience which had / occurred in a seance. Thus it is manifest that my interest in the / subject is of some standing, and also, since it is only within the last / year or two that I have finally declared myself to be satisfied with / the evidence, that I have not been hasty in forming my opinion. If I / set down some of my experiences and difficulties my readers will not, I / hope, think it egotistical upon my part, but will realise that it is / the most graphic way in which to sketch out the points which are likely / to occur to any other inquirer. When I have passed over this ground, / it will be possible to get on to something more general and impersonal / in its nature.
When I had finished my medical education in 1882, I found myself, like / many young medical men, a convinced materialist as regards our personal / destiny. I had never ceased to be an earnest theist, because it seemed / to me that Napoleon's question to the atheistic professors on the / starry night as he voyaged to Egypt: "Who was it, gentlemen, who made / these stars? " has never been answered. To say that the Universe was / made by immutable laws only put the question one degree further back as / to who made the laws. I did not, of course, believe in an / anthropomorphic God, but I believed then, as I believe now, in an / intelligent Force behind all the operations of Nature -- a force so / infinitely complex and great that my finite brain could get no further / than its existence. Right and wrong I saw also as great obvious facts / which needed no divine revelation. But when it came to a question of / our little personalities surviving death, it seemed to me that the / whole analogy of Nature was against it. When the candle burns out the / light disappears. When the electric cell is shattered the current / stops. When the body dissolves there is an end of the matter. Each / man in his egotism may feel that he ought to survive, but let him look, / we will say, at the average loafer -- of high or low degree -- would anyone / contend that there was any obvious reason why THAT personality should / carry on? It seemed to be a delusion, and I was convinced that death / did indeed end all, though I saw no reason why that should affect our / duty towards humanity during our transitory existence.