Religion and Science
4. Religion and the Life Hereafter
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the inevitable inference that the soul by its very
nature is something separate from (though not
extraneous to) the body and that it exists
independently. The relation of the soul to the body
is not comparable to that of a machine and its
movement, nor to that of a musical instrument and
the music it produces. Had there been any basis for
this comparison, the same laws, which apply to the
body, would have affected the soul.
A branch of modern psychology which makes an
empirical study of man’s supernatural faculties—
psychical research—does establish the existence of
life after death at a purely observational level. What
is most interesting is that such research does not
establish mere survival; rather it establishes the
survival of exactly the same personality—the entity
that was known to us before death.
Man has possessed many other analyzable traits
right from the very beginning, but it is only
comparatively recently that they have been
analyzed scientifically. For instance, dreaming is
one of the oldest known activities of man. But
ancient man was unaware of the psychological
