“In trying to answer the question, What is life?, we cannot stop with organized life as we know it, for there is abundant evidence that all space and all substance is filled with quivering, dancing, sparkling life. “Inanimate matter”, a phrase much used twenty-five years ago, has now given place to “the life of matter.” M. Bose, whose ingenious experiments we have before mentioned, has shown that matter reveals more and more the qualities which were formerly attributed to living beings only. Gustave Le Bon says:
“Physiologists measure, as is well known, the sensitiveness of a being by the degree of excitation necessary in order to obtain from it a reaction. The being is considered very sensitive, when it acts under slight stimuli. Applying similar tests to brute matter, we can show that the most rigid substance and the least sensitive in appearance, a bar of metal for example, is really incredibly sensitive.”
We know that when the body dies, something leaves it. The materialists say that the life dies, but whom shall we believe, the materialists, who are few in number compared with those who believe in spirit; or the great majority of mankind that believe in the existence of the soul after the dissolution of the body? “The very scientific materialism of our day”, writes Professor Hyslop, in The North American Review, “points definitely to the possibility, or at least the rationality of supposing the possibility, of a future life….”
“Physical science admits the existence of a supersensible world of reality which had not been suspected or proved until within recent years. We may instance Roentgen rays, the various forms of radio-active energy whose whole gamut is not yet known, and the speculations about ions and electrons that take us far beyond the world of Lucretian atoms, into the measureless ether, whose properties make it impossible to apply the term ‘matter’ to it, without removing the antagonism of matter to the spiritual. All these discoveries represent realities quite as supersensible as the Christian conception of the immaterial, and we escape calling them spiritual only because the development of human thought has come to confine the connotation of ‘spirit’, to implications of consciousness as its necessary and only function.
“It is this and this alone that prevents us from claiming that the outcome of physical science is the proof of a spiritual world. We have so defined the nature and problem of spirit as implicative of personal consciousness, that there can be no proof of its reality apart from the animal organism and its functions, until we show that consciousness and personal identity can survive death. All that the discovery of supersensible forms of energy proves is that the limitations of reality are not confined to the material world as we directly know it, but that there may be vast regions of energy which can be inferred or known only by its effects in the physical cosmos.”
I am satisfied that more than three-fourths of all men and women have had positive proof, if they would accept it, of the existence of spirit. I say positive proof if they would accept it, because skepticism has become so popular and universal that men have been taught to deny their own senses, but among those that are not ready to deny the evidence of their own senses are a great majority who in their hearts can say, “I know there is such a thing as spirit existence”, and even those who claim to be the strongest materialists have evidence within themselves, that they are wrong.”
Hiram Butler
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 