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COSMOLOGY OLD AND NEW
To ask Science to give its verdict with regard to the existence of soul is to ask an engineer to perform an operation on the injured part of your body. Don't think that the engineer is silly if he refuses to attend to you. It is not his province. But even the scientists, as logical thinkers, have felt that over the body and the intellect there rules a heaven-sent soul and regarding it as some form of energy they have made attempts from time to time to investigate its nature.
An account of a recent investigation carried out by a prominent South African doctor and an engineer in London was published under the caption "Scientist Seeks the Soul." We reproduce below certain portions of that article:
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"The doctor and the engineer both thought that the secret of life lay in some kind of energy, probably electrical... Intricate apparatus was designed and built by the engineer and the experiments started. Animals were used at first. Their apparatus proved that every animal was born with a difinite electric charge. They were able to record and tabulate this energy. They found that the more intelligent animals had a higher charge than the lower forms. At the moment of death the charge disappeared. In the animal experiments the records showed that the charge remained more or less the same throughout life except when the animal was breeding."
In the case of human beings they found the same laws holding and we read: "The babies were born with a definite charge. After death the charge vanished. An average human charge, they found, was 500 volts. As the subject grew older the charge increased not with age, but according to the type of character the subject was developing. The two men began to think that they were on the track not only of life but of the soul, so long sneered at by scientists. In coarse animal natures the charge remains. low and in cases of mental disease and lunacy the charge dropped. They found that male babies had a higher charge at birth than female babies, but that the female could catch up and pass the male according to the various characteristics shown."
Now they are trying to find out where does the electrical charge go at death. They think that as energy it cannot dis
130. This article was published in the Jayaji Pratap' of Gwalior in the issue dated 17th June 1937.