Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/211

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Swedenborg's Clairvoyance
195

well-known English medium Mrs. Leonard. Her son, killed in 1920, purportedly communicated to his mother that she must search a certain place of the box-room for an old purse with a tiny paper in it, a counterfoil. He stressed its importance without saying why. She found it; it was the counterfoil of a money order. This was in 1921. In 1924 she had a letter from "The Enemy Debt Clearing Office" which demanded payment of a sum of money said to be owing by her son to a Hamburg firm, a debt said to have been incurred in July, 1914, before the war.

Mrs. Dawson Smith knew that her boy had paid it, but the Hamburg people insisted they had not received the money. She then remembered her boy's "message," looked at the old counterfoil, "and found it the identical paper needed to prove the account had been paid." The Government acknowledged that she was right. The existence of the counterfoil, and the correspondence with the Enemy Debt Clearing Office were verified by two members of the Society for Psychical Research, Sir Oliver Lodge and Mrs. Henry Sidgwick.

Such cases, and there are a number of them, seem difficult to explain except in terms of survival of some sort. How do they look in terms of Mr. Carington's theories?

Telepathy has proved, Mr. Carington feels, that "psychons" (ideas, images, sensa) can act independently of the body. They are "real." That combination of them which we call a human mind is real. The question for him is chiefly this: if you believe that Jones survives death, "what part do you consider survives, and where?" 29

According to the association theory of telepathy and the psychon theory of mind, the answer is that Jones's mind survives, his mind being the psychons which have been organized in the course of his life, including those which have been brought to him by his sense organs, and those which he may have acquired by telepathic interaction with other minds. As to where Jones's mind survives, "that ceases to have any ordinary meaning, because psychons and psychon-systems are not spatially located in the physical sense; and there is no difficulty about continuity, because the psychons surviving immediately after death are identically the same as those which formed Jones's mind immediately before it."

A Swedish innkeeper in London who kept the inn King Charles