The New York Times, October 15, 1926. PAGE NUMBER 11
If There Is Any Evidence at All It Is in Favor of a Life Beyond, He Declares.
WAVERS IN HIS SKEPTICISM
He Urges Religious Teachers to Try to Build Up Proof That Won’t Be Laughed At.
Thomas A. Edison has again experienced a change of conviction on the subject of the immortality of the soul. In an interview with Edward Marshall in the November Forum the inventor says that if there is any evidence bearing one way or another on the question that evidence is in favor of life after death.
The aged inventor speaks vaguely in the interview and never commits himself, but admits that he no longer sees anything incredible in the possibility of the soul’s being immortal. Though he does not admit that evidence of any weight in one direction or the other now exists, he thinks that the indications are favorable to the existence of a soul rather than against it. He urges religious teachers to seek genuine evidence and endeavor to build up proof which the skeptical cannot laugh at.
Worked on Spirit Mechanism.
In earlier interviews Mr. Edison has denied that there is any reason to suppose that the soul is immortal. For years he and the late Luther Burbank were the great luminaries of the Freethinkers’ Society. Some years ago, however, the inventor reconsidered and admitted that the soul might persist. In 1920 he announced in an interview that he was revolving in his mind the plans for a mechanism with which to communicate with the souls of the departed.
In an interview with B. C. Forbes in The American Magazine in 1920 Mr. Edison said that he was working on an apparatus which would intercept and “magnify many times” anything in the nature of a spirit message.
“If this apparatus fails to reveal anything of exceptional interest,” he added, “I am afraid that I shall have lost all faith in the survival of personality as we know it in this existence.”
This engine of communication never developed. For several years Edison parried questions on it. One friend of the inventor said that the whole thing was a hoax. He quoted Edison as saying:
“That man came to see me on one of the coldest days in the year. His nose was blue and his teeth were chattering. I really had nothing to tell him, but I hated to disappoint him, so I thought up this story about communicating with spirits, but it was all a joke.”
Sees Sun as Life’s Source.
In 1924, in an interview with Allan Belson in Hearst’s International Magazine, Mr. Edison said:
“My brain is incapable of conceiving of such a thing as a soul. I may be in error, and man may have a soul, but I simply do not believe in it. What a soul may be is beyond my understanding. I believe that the force of energy we call life came from some other planet, or, at any rate, from somewhere in the great spaces beyond us. We know that life could not have been here when the earth was a molten mass. Later, life was here. Was it created here or did it come here? I believe it came here, just as electricity comes to the earth from the sun.”
Last year Edison was one of the leaders in founding the Thomas Paine Memorial Museum at New Rochelle and gave a long interview in defense of the teachings of Paine. In an interview with Edward Marshall printed in The New York Times in 1910 Mr. Edison said:
“Soul? Soul? What do you mean by soul? The brain? There is no more reason to believe that any human brain will be immortal than there is to think one of my phonographic cylinders will be immortal.”
In that interview Mr. Edison described the brain as a “meat mechanism.”