Professor Sir G. Stokes, the President of the Royal Society,
delivered an interesting lecture last Sunday at the Finsbury Polytechnic on " I." We have given a careful account of the principal drift of the lecture,—so far as the Times' report would enable us to do so,—in another column, but may add here that the Professor expressed his doubt as to what is called the intrinsic immortality of the soul, which he held to be rather a philosophic than a religious doctrine, and not one supported by Revelation. That Christ taught the doctrine of a future life, he admitted, and, indeed, eagerly main- tained; but the divine promise of a future life, he said, is one thing, and the necessary immortality of what is called the soul, quite another. For himself, he did not hold the theory of the separability of the soul from the body; indeed, be held that the future life promised, would be a future life of the whole individual,—every individual possessing both the powers of thought which are usually attributed to the soul, and also a bodily organisation (of some sort) which is really involved in individuality. Sir G. Stokes held to the view of a probably long interval of unconsciousness between death and resurrection, and said that from his own experience he knew how time appeared to be annihilated when he was in a faint. Perhaps. But looking to the fact that we so often completely forget very elaborate dreams on awaking,—though, if interrogated at once on the subject, we can remember them,—is it not very likely that what Professor Stokes calls the annihilation of time, was nothing but a complete oblivion of a very rapid and perhaps complicated dream, dreamt in a state of mind so different from that of our waking hours, that there are no links of association between the dreaming state and the waking state sufficiently strong to recall the dream to the waking thought ?
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