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Page 49
"I begin to comprehend," said I.
"Yes," replied Bainbridge, "the more you think of it, the more convinced
will you become that Peters made the leap as he states. Of course he
could not have sprung fifty feet, or even forty feet, on a level; for,
in a leap of only forty feet, one would have to raise himself more than
twelve feet into the air, and (except for a possible small advantage of
position in leaping) it requires the same amount of force to raise a
body ten feet on an incline, as it does to raise the same body ten feet
perpendicularly into space--an impossible feat, even to Peters at
twenty-eight or thirty years of age."
"I quite believe that he did it," I said, "and when we consider that he
claims to have measured the distance only mentally, and that he might
therefore honestly have mistaken it to the extent of a few feet, I am
willing to say that my confidence in his intended veracity is
unshaken--even if he is an old sailor."
"Yes," said Bainbridge, "and we must not overlook the fact that a man's
mental state at the time of performing a physical feat is a very
important determining factor in the result of the performance. A
powerful but lackadaisical fellow might, with only a few dollars at
stake, make a very poor showing; yet to preserve his life he might make
a really wonderful leap. What effect, then, did mental condition exert
on a man like Peters under the circumstances attending this unparalleled
leap? Think of the enormous muscular power developed by the message
received through the nerves from a mind thus affected! His own life, and
that of another, if not of two others, depended upon the success of his
effort. Under such circumstances muscular power would either be
paralyzed, or else intensified beyond our common conception of such
force. Peters positively asserts, that when a boy of sixteen he
frequently leaped from the flat upper deck of a boat--that is, from a
height of twenty feet--into the surrounding water, habitually covering a
distance of from forty to forty-five feet; whilst other boys, under the
same conditions, rarely covered twenty-five feet, and never thirty."
A moment later Bainbridge arose to depart; but he lingered for a moment,
standing, and with his left hand resting on the centre table, began to
speak in a general way of the great antarctic crater and its surrounding
wonders. It was my habit to make full notes of the actual facts stated
by him in the more formal parts of these evening recitals, and sometimes
even of his comments; and I regret that I did not do so at the
particular moment to which I am now alluding. It was not until the
following morning that I made a few memoranda of the closing incident of
the evening. With the help of these notes and a fairly good memory, I
hope to be able at this late day to describe for the reader an episode
that I should dislike entirely to omit from this narrative.
He spoke for several minutes of the wonderful power of nature to
accomplish certain ends--the force that accomplishes which, he termed a
_purpose_ in nature; and he made some remarks along the line of a
contention, that the development of all matter into higher forms was
what he called an unconscious intention, explaining that there was no
paradox in the expression "unconscious intention"; for, he said, even
men, individual men, are constantly performing a thousand acts that have
an unconscious purpose or intention--as, for instance, the automatic
action of winding a watch without the slightest exercise of will, and
without remembering the action. This unconscious motive-force, he said,
is inherent in vegetables as well as in animals, and that in fact it
exists, though relatively of very slow and feeble action, in all matter,
the power being an attribute of all molecules, and even of elemental
atoms. He, however, claimed no originality for any of the views which he
expressed.
"To my consciousness," he said, "the conviction of individual
immortality is so clear that, if I were not perfectly aware of the cause
of their doubt or disbelief, I should wonder at intelligent persons
questioning the fact. Like everything else taught by Christ, that we are
immortal is a fact; and it is not in a billion years that we shall live
again under new conditions, but, as He intimated, 'to-morrow.' And I
surmise that we shall not do so in any absurdly physical way, nor yet in
a manner so deeply abstruse that it would require a logician and a
professional physicist, were it explained, to comprehend it. As with all
that God has given us, we shall find the conditions of the next life
very simple. Educated men--nearly all highly educated men, and
particularly educated theologians--when they touch this subject remind
me of the cuttle-fish. There is nothing around them that is not
perfectly transparent until, by their own act, everything is obscured to
themselves and to their neighbors. But whilst the cuttle-fish swims out
of the zone of opacity created by himself, the theologian remains in
his, fighting the obscurity with logic--for that purpose the poorest of
all devices. You cannot guide an emotional boat with an intellectual
rudder. Something to me much more convincing than reason, tells me that
our bodies will not be long in their graves before we shall again begin
to live; and my feeling is, that, though consciousness will at the death
of this body be obscured for a time, it will not be lost for a _long_
time. I feel that almost at once after death the mystery of conscious
individuality will again assert itself. Refined by this life, as the
molecular construction of inorganic matter is refined by passing through
organic life, so the consciousness lately within the molecules of your
discarded body, will not be as the consciousness within like molecules
of mineral or of vegetable matter; for it will be your consciousness
--_your_ consciousness, created by God and developed by His edict
--developed after slumbering for ages within the mineral; awakening
to quicker action in the vegetable world; touching the domain of
conscious memory in lower animals; aroused to keener moral and
intellectual existence in your late body, and at last made ready for a
new mystery--what, we know not--in another world, possibly in the
direction of what we might call a 'fourth dimension' of consciousness.
Oh, no; there should not be anything to prevent us from knowing now that
we shall continue to exist, and to go ever upward, upward, upward.
Nature permits us, in each sphere of being, to catch a glimpse of the
succeeding one, if only we will not ourselves obstruct the view."
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