"Death is not extinction. Neither the soul nor the body is extinguished or put out of existence"
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Death, in Lodge's framing, is a category error: we treat it like a switch flipping to "off" because our senses lose the signal. A physicist choosing the language of "extinction" and "put out of existence" isn’t accidental. It borrows the vocabulary of conservation and continuity, smuggling metaphysics through the side door of science. The intent is reassurance, but it’s also a quiet argument about what counts as evidence. If energy isn’t destroyed, why should the self be?
The subtext is a rebellion against the late Victorian story that modern physics had permanently dethroned the soul. Lodge lived in an era when telegraphs and radio made invisible transmission feel newly plausible; "presence" could be disembodied and still real. Spiritualism fed on that cultural electricity, and Lodge, famously invested in psychical research and later shaped by personal grief, tried to build a bridge between laboratory authority and the ache for continuity. The line’s neat parallelism - neither soul nor body - does strategic work: it grants dignity to matter while refusing materialism’s finality. Even the body, he implies, doesn’t vanish; it transforms. That’s scientifically safe ground, then he extends the same logic to consciousness.
Why it works is the rhetorical sleight. Lodge speaks like a man correcting a misconception, not preaching a belief. The confidence of scientific diction gives an ontological claim the costume of a physical law, offering comfort with the cool tone of a theorem.
The subtext is a rebellion against the late Victorian story that modern physics had permanently dethroned the soul. Lodge lived in an era when telegraphs and radio made invisible transmission feel newly plausible; "presence" could be disembodied and still real. Spiritualism fed on that cultural electricity, and Lodge, famously invested in psychical research and later shaped by personal grief, tried to build a bridge between laboratory authority and the ache for continuity. The line’s neat parallelism - neither soul nor body - does strategic work: it grants dignity to matter while refusing materialism’s finality. Even the body, he implies, doesn’t vanish; it transforms. That’s scientifically safe ground, then he extends the same logic to consciousness.
Why it works is the rhetorical sleight. Lodge speaks like a man correcting a misconception, not preaching a belief. The confidence of scientific diction gives an ontological claim the costume of a physical law, offering comfort with the cool tone of a theorem.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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