'So we presently come back out of our tunnel into the light of day, and relate our experience to a busy an incredulous, or in some cases too easily credulous, world ... our business is to pierce the mountain at some moderate elevation, and construct a permanent road or railway for the service of humanity ... The first thing we learn, perhaps the only thing, we clearly learn in the first instance is continuity ... Meanwhile it would appear that knowledge is not suddenly advanced-it would be unnatural if it were...'<blockquote>'So we presently come back out of our tunnel into the light of day, and relate our experience to a busy an incredulous, or in some cases too easily credulous, world. We expect to be received with incredulity; though doubtless we shall be told in some quarters that it is stale news, that there has been access to the other side of the mountain range from time immemorial, and that our laboriously constructed tunnel was quite unnecessary. Agile climbers may have been to the top and eeped over. Flying messages from the other side may have arrived; pioneers must have surveyed the route. But we, like the navvies, are unprovided with wings, we dig and work on the common earth, our business is to pierce the mountain at some moderate elevation, and construct a permanent road or railway for the service of humanity.
What we have to announce, then, is no striking novelty, no new method of communication, but only the reception, by old but developing methods, of carefully constructed evidence of identity more exact and more nearly complete than perhaps ever before. Carefully constructed evidence, I say. The constructive ingenuity exists quite as much on the other side of the partition as on our side: there has been distinct co-operation between those on the material and those on the immaterial side; and we are at liberty, not indeed to announce any definite conclusion, but to adopt as a working, hypothesis the ancient doctrine of a possible intercourse of intelligence between tile material and some other, perhaps etherial, order of existence.
...
But let us not jump to tile conclusion that the idea of "space" no longer means anything to persons removed from the Planet. They are no longer in touch with matter truly, and therefore can no longer appeal to our organs of sense, as they did when they had bodies for that express purpose; but, for all we know, they may exist in the ether and be as aware of space and of the truths of geometry, though not of geography, as we are. Let us not be too sure that their condition and surroundings are altogether and utterly different from those of mankind. That is one of the things we way gradually find out not to be true.
Meanwhile is there anything that provisionally and tentatively we can say is earnestly taught to those who are willing to make the hypothesis that the communications are genuine?
The first thing we learn, perhaps the only thing, we clearly learn in the first instance is
continuity. There is no such sudden break in the conditions of existence as may have been anticipated; and no break at all in the continuous and conscious identity of genuine character and personality. Essential belongs such as memory, culture, education, habits, character, and affection, - all these, and to a certain extent tastes and interests, - for better for worse, are retained. Terrestrial accretions, such as worldly possessions, bodily pain and disabilities, these for the most part naturally drop away.
Meanwhile it would appear that knowledge is not suddenly advanced-it would be unnatural if it were, we are not suddenly flooded with new information, nor do we at all change our identity; but powers and faculties are enlarged, and the scope of our outlook on the universe may be widened and deepened, if effort here has rendered the acquisition of such extra insight legitimate and possible.'
- Sir
Oliver Lodge,
Tentative Conclusion</blockquote>