RESEARCH INTO THE EVIDENCE OF MANʼS SURVIVAL AFTER DEATH

Abstract

Scientific research on the question of whether human personality survives physical death has been conducted for almost a century. The present article offers a summary of this research and accounts of some new developments in the field that have occurred within the past 15 years. The historical review is divided into three periods which, although not sharply separated, were characterized by different understandings and approaches both to the theoretical issues and to related empirical investigations. In the first period, extending from the 1880s to the 1930s, the investigators mainly engaged in collecting, classifying, and analyzing spontaneous experiences of persons who saw apparitions of deceased persons or had other experiences that suggested to them some communication from a discarnate personality. This period also saw the beginning of the scientific investigation of persons (usually called mediums) who claim they can bring messages from deceased persons. Considerable experimentation during this period, including studies of extrasensory communication between living persons, gradually led some investigators to conclude that all, or nearly all, of the evidence seeming to arise from a discarnate personality could be explained more easily on the basis of telepathy between living persons or some far ranging power of clairvoyance on the part of a person who seemed to receive a communication from a deceased person. In the second period, extending from the 1930s to about 1960, most parapsy-chologists neglected the question of the possibility of man's survival after physical death. They judged it wiser to defer a direct attack on the problem until after a more complete understanding had been achieved of the power and range of extrasensory perception on the part of living persons. During these years, nevertheless, some advances were made in the form of new types of empirical investigation and further efforts to clarify theoretical issues. In the third period of investigation, dating from approximately 1960, proportionately more parapsychologists have entered this field of research; and they have tried to devise experiments that would exclude extrasensory perception between living persons (or on the part of a single living person) as a counterexplanation for communications apparently coming from deceased persons. In addition, some of them have exploited the distinction between cognitive information and skills. They have argued that, although there may be no limits to the transmission by extrasensory perception of cognitive information, skills cannot be transmitted either normally or by extrasensory perception. Thus, persons exhibiting a skill not learned normally may provide evidence of having acquired this skill either in a previous incarnation or through the influence of a discarnate person who, during his terrestrial life, had demonstrated the skill.