"The hypothesis of surviving intelligence and personality - not only surviving but anxious and able with difficulty to communicate - is the simplest and most straightforward and the only one that fits all the facts"
About this Quote
A physicist calling spirit survival "the simplest" explanation is the kind of rhetorical judo that tells you exactly how hard the early 20th century was tugging at the borders of science. Oliver Lodge wasn’t a fringe crank; he was a respected figure in electromagnetic theory who also became a public champion of psychical research. That split identity animates the sentence. It borrows the prestige language of the laboratory - "hypothesis", "facts", "fits" - then smuggles in a metaphysical conclusion: not just that the mind survives death, but that it’s "anxious" and straining to get a signal through.
The intent is less to persuade through wonder than to reframe the burden of proof. By insisting survival is "straightforward", Lodge flips the default skepticism of his peers: if the data look messy (seances, mediums, cross-correspondences), the mess must be in the channel, not the source. That’s why the dead aren’t serenely omniscient; they’re "able with difficulty to communicate", a convenient clause that pre-explains ambiguity, error, and fraud without surrendering the core claim.
Context matters: this is post-Victorian Britain, where spiritualism and new physics rose together, and where mass death (especially World War I, including Lodge’s own bereavement) made consolation socially urgent. Lodge’s subtext is an engineer’s afterlife: consciousness as a transmitter, the beyond as weak reception. The sentence works because it treats grief and uncertainty as engineering problems - and offers a scientifically dressed permission to believe.
The intent is less to persuade through wonder than to reframe the burden of proof. By insisting survival is "straightforward", Lodge flips the default skepticism of his peers: if the data look messy (seances, mediums, cross-correspondences), the mess must be in the channel, not the source. That’s why the dead aren’t serenely omniscient; they’re "able with difficulty to communicate", a convenient clause that pre-explains ambiguity, error, and fraud without surrendering the core claim.
Context matters: this is post-Victorian Britain, where spiritualism and new physics rose together, and where mass death (especially World War I, including Lodge’s own bereavement) made consolation socially urgent. Lodge’s subtext is an engineer’s afterlife: consciousness as a transmitter, the beyond as weak reception. The sentence works because it treats grief and uncertainty as engineering problems - and offers a scientifically dressed permission to believe.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
|---|
More Quotes by Oliver
Add to List
