ke to a new life. "I could not
distinguish anything at first.[63] Darkest hours just before dawn, you
know that, Jim. I was puzzled, confused." This is probable enough. If
things are thus, death must be a sort of birth into another world, and
it is easy to understand that the soul which has been just born into
that new world cannot see or comprehend much in it till some time after
such birth.

James Howard remarked to George Pelham that he must have been surprised
to find himself still living, to which George Pelham replied, "Perfectly
so. Greatly surprised. I did not believe in a future life. It was beyond
my reasoning powers. Now it is as clear to me as daylight." Elsewhere he
says that when he found that he actually lived again he jumped for joy.
This joy is comprehensible enough; those of us who are resigned to the
prospect of annihilation are few. The thought that death is annihilation
makes us, against all principles of logic, shiver to the very marrow.
Such a feeling perhaps points to a revolt of the soul within that knows
itself immortal and cannot without a shiver of fear face the idea of
non-existence, an idea in opposition to its very nature.

With the impressions of George Pelham may be compared those of another
communicator called Frederick Atkin Morton, who had passed into the next
world in quite a different way. This Morton had lately started a
newspaper; anxiety, overwork, and perhaps other causes made him lose his
reason. His insanity lasted but a short time; in one of its attacks he
shot himself in the head and was killed on the spot. The first time that
he tried to communicate, his remarks showed great incoherence;--no
matter for surprise if Dr Hodgson's observations on this subject are
recalled. But his thoughts soon became clear, and at the second sitting
his communications were definite enough. This is how he relates to his
brother Dick his impressions about his own death. He does not speak of
suicide, an action which he probably committed without full
consciousness of what he was doing, but at the end of the sitting Mrs
Piper's hand wrote the word "Pistol." Death had been due to a pistol
shot.[64] "When on Sunday," he says, "I began to lose my mental
equilibrium, then suddenly I realised nothing and nobody." In answer to
the question as to what his next experience was he goes on: "I found I
was in this world. I did not know for the moment where I was only I
felt strange and freer; my head was lig