Science Quote by Oliver Joseph Lodge

A physicist insisting on an afterlife is already a provocation; Lodge sharpens it by dressing belief in the lab coat of proof. The phrase "basing my conclusions on experience" is doing heavy rhetorical lifting. He is not appealing to faith, tradition, or consolation. He is claiming a kind of empirical entitlement: I have observed enough to be "absolutely convinced". In a discipline built on doubt and reproducibility, that adverb is almost a dare.

Lodge pushes further with "not only of survival but of demonstrated survival", as if anticipating the eye-roll from colleagues who might tolerate private metaphysics but not public certainty. He frames survival as a technical claim, not a poetic one, then reaches for the most persuasive currency science has: matter. "Occasional interaction with matter" is a careful hedge (occasional, not reliable), but it also smuggles in the vocabulary of mechanics and measurement. The promised payoff, "physical results", is aimed straight at the skeptical heart: if something leaves a trace in the material world, it can in principle be investigated.

Context matters. Lodge was a major figure in early wireless and electromagnetism, writing in an era when spiritualism and psychical research were entwined with modernity rather than opposed to it. New invisible forces were being discovered, and the boundary between "unseen" and "unknowable" felt newly negotiable. The subtext is a bid to annex the supernatural into the expanding empire of science: if radio waves can carry a voice through empty space, why couldn't consciousness persist and occasionally knock on the furniture?