Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, 1912, Vol. 6

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Excerpt from Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, 1912, Vol. 6: Section "B" Of the American Institute for Scientific ResearchMaterialism holds that consciousness is a function of the brain or physical organism. This phenomenon is treated exactly as other functions of the body. Digestion, ciren lation, secretion, assimilation, etc., are all regarded as activi ties or functions of the body by physiology and psychology and these they undoubtedly are, and they as undoubtedly vanish with the dissolution of the organism. They are the resultants of composition just as all the properties of com pounds are which vanish with the breaking up of the com pound into its elementary constituents. If consciousness, therefore, be a similar function of the body it must meet the same fate as its allied manifestations. It must perish with the body and there would be no basis for the belief in its survival. But if we have evidence that supernormal informa tion can be obtained without the ordinary use of the channels of sense we raise the fundamental issue whether materialism is an adequate explanation of the facts. To prove the survival of individual consciousness in such cases we must not only prove intelligence independent of the normal experience of the subject in and through which it is manifested, but we must prove that it is a particular intelligence that we once20 Proceedings of American Society for Psychical Research.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.