DEATH AND RESURRECTION.
GUSTAF JOHAN BJÖRKLUND
Death and Resurrection
FROM THE POINT OF VIEW
OF THE CELL-THEORY
BY
GUSTAF BJÖRKLUND
Translated from the Swedish by
J. E. FRIES
Chicago
THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING COMPANY
LONDON AGENTS
Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd.
1910
Copyright by
THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING CO.
1910
PUBLISHERS’ PREFACE.
Never in the history of humanthought has the interest in thesoul and its immortality been greaterand keener than now. The leading investigatorsof the Society of PsychicalResearch have taken up the problem ofenquiring into the facts of spiritual experiences,telepathy, forebodings andkindred phenomena. The result hasbeen rather negative, for, while we havereceived innumerable single facts, theyall suffer from the common fault thatthey are too subjective in their natureto furnish a proof that could be objectivelyvalid. Moreover, many reportscome from witnesses whose mental constitutionis under the suspicion of beingpathological, and so their value is practicallynull.
Of much greater importance wouldbe an investigation as to the possibilityof immortality on the basis of scientificdata, but, strange to say, this methodhas been almost entirely lost sight ofby leaders of the S. P. R. If we couldform a definite theory as to the natureof the soul based on exact observation,we would be enabled, first, to explainman’s instinctive yearning for immortality;and, secondly, to form a definiteidea of the condition of the soul afterdeath. Thus we could exclude all themany mistakes which are now made,and which originate through an erroneousand partly superstitious notion ofthe relation of the dead to the living.The result is shown in the reports ofthe S. P. R., abounding in statementsof ghost stories, which can be regardedonly as a continuation of folk-lore. Asa matter of fact, the work of the S. P.R. has so far provided very little helptoward a better comprehension of immortality.
Among the men who have done the[ix]work of a sympathetic reconstruction ofthe idea of immortality on the basis ofscience, there is to be mentioned, nextto Fechner, Gustave Björklund, a Swedishscientist who is well known in hisown country, but who has been almostentirely ignored in other lands. The obviousreason of this is the inaccessibilityof his writings, which have not yetbeen translated into English.
We do not believe Björklund’s solutionis the right one, but we do believethat he has made a contributionto the philosophy of religion whichought not to be ignored. His case issimilar to Fechner’s. We have publishedFechner’s book On Life AfterDeath