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...

Never in the history of human thought has the interest in the soul and its immortality been greater and keener than now. The leading investigators of the Society of Psychical Research have taken up the problem of enquiring into the facts of spiritual experiences, telepathy, forebodings and kindred phenomena. The result has been rather negative, for, while we have received innumerable single facts, they all suffer from the common fault that they are too subjective in their nature to furnish a pro

Johan Gustaf Björklund was born the tenth of November, in the year 1846. His parents were farmers in very small circumstances. His father seems to have been endowed with a good business head and, ultimately, became a real estate owner on a small scale, first in one city and then in Upsala, the principal university town of Sweden. Poverty was familiar to Björklund throughout his life. Doubtless one reason for this was that his consuming interest in sociology and philosophy prevented him from taki

A consciousness of immortality, sometimes dim and vague, sometimes vivid and clear, seems to be characteristic of the human race. However low man may stand he cannot consider death to be the end of his existence. The conviction that he is immortal is innate to him. Annihilation is contrary to the nature and demands of his spirit. It is true that uncertainty and doubt might arise, but man will never be able wholly to uproot either hope or fear as to the possibility of a future life. Experiencing

If we survey the stages of evolution through which humanity hitherto has passed, we find that all peoples, from prehistoric times up to our own days, have believed in a spiritual body which is essential to the soul in a future life. Is humanity then mistaken in this universal manifestation of religious intuition? On this question we need no longer remain uncertain, no longer believe; we know that man possesses such a spiritual body. For many years, even centuries, this has been a fully demonstra

The critically thinking public today might be said to have long ago relinquished the hope of obtaining a sure and decisive answer to the question, whether there is an existence beyond the grave. Some people confine themselves to a faith founded on a smaller or greater probability for either conception. We want palpable evidence. To many it even appears necessary to have a look behind the veil of visible matter in order to satisfy themselves as to whether anything exists within the void. “Nobody

The manner in which this problem, from a materialistic point of view, can and must be treated, is not so complicated as we might imagine. The central thought in all materialistic discussions and investigations may be briefly expressed as follows: Life is a material force and nothing else. If this be true, then of course materialism is the only true religion. Whether God or some other higher being exists, must then become a question of little or no consequence. Man knows in any case his own origi

This whole method is consequently unsatisfactory. With Harvey’s law proved in the empirical way, the only way hitherto tried, we are still unable to decide how the first organism came into existence, and this is probably after all the most important question. Because, as Büchner rightly points out: “If life has a supernatural beginning, it has also a supernatural subsequent existence.” Even if we were observing with our own eyes the creation of the first organism we would not be able to say whet

The essential in matter is force. Strictly speaking, we comprehend nothing but forces. Every body manifests itself as resistance necessary to overcome if we wish to remove it from its place. What remains of the body if we think of it as deprived of this counter force? At least nothing remains that we can touch or by which we may obtain palpable evidence of its existence. Neither does there remain anything that we can see, as seeing depends upon resistance to light, reflection of the ether-waves.

From the previous chapter we now draw the extremely important conclusion that all organic matter is a product of art , that is, a product which the forces of nature cannot produce. Spontaneously these forces only create natural products. Products of art belong to an entirely different category; they owe their existence to a foreign interference in the natural order of the world and have a cause that does not fall within the limits of a mere mechanical causality. But before we discuss this subjec

Living beings are alive because the very substance in them is living. Life belongs to this substance exactly as materiality belongs to matter. As living substance can exist only in the form of living individuals, all living beings fall outside the limitations of time and possess individual immortality without exception. The cell, therefore, is as immortal as man. But if this is the case, the fact that the duration of the earthly life of man is different from that of the cell must now at last app

In order to illustrate the fundamental characteristics of an organic structure in general, we will begin with comparing it with what it most resembles, namely, a complicated mechanism. The likeness is so striking that the very dissimilarities become instructive. First of all we notice the parts of which the machine is composed. What these parts are to the machine the members and organs are to the organism. Every part, like every organ, has a certain duty to perform which it incessantly repeats.

Hitherto only little study has been given to the spiritual qualities of the cells, and such investigations must always meet with certain insurmountable difficulties. The reason is that we only judge others by ourselves and we are therefore unable to understand the spiritual life of any being that is not one of our kin. If a being stands higher or lower than ourselves its spiritual experiences, if not entirely different from ours, are at least limited and modified by the being’s own power of comp

From the relationship existing between the soul and the cells it appears that the former cannot live a life independent of the latter. The soul receives its entire individuality, all its qualities, forces, and faculties, through the organism built by the cells, which therefore must exist before the soul can exist as the real unity in the organism. This does not mean that the soul is an empty form void of independent substance. Even before the cells have combined into an organic unit the soul is

It is the perennial honor of Sweden’s greatest philosopher, Christofer Jacob Boström, to have satisfactorily explained the extremely difficult and complicated question with which our last chapter concluded. He has shown that man, exactly on the supposition that he is an eternal part of God’s being, requires and must go through an evolution in time. According to Boström, religious intuition has found the truth that man is an eternal idea in God, a living member in His organism. But Boström has al

The theory we have here advanced may naturally seem startling; for what could be more foreign to common conceptions than the assertion that science today gives us full evidence of a death and a resurrection that commence during our life in time? Considering this, it may be appropriate to recapitulate the salient points in our line of thought. From prehistoric times up to our own days all people at all stages of evolution have to a man been convinced that the body in some way and in some form con