“I have been thinking a good deal on this subject and my reflections have resulted in this conclusion.”

His voice had now resumed its usual melody and power, and we sat down while he turned the pages of Prof.  Bain’s little work entitled “Mind and Body.”  He read (I marked at the time the passage):  “The memory rises and falls with the bodily condition; being vigorous in our fresh moments and feeble when we are fatigued or exhausted.  It is related by Sir Henry Holland that on one occasion he descended, on the same day, two mines in the Hartz Mountains, remaining some hours in each.  In the second mine he was so exhausted with inanition and fatigue, that his memory utterly failed him; he could not recollect a single word of German.  The power came back after taking food and wine.  Old age notoriously impairs the memory in ninety-nine men out of a hundred.”

My father then continued:  “It seems to me quite clear that our memory, at any rate, however little of our other mental attributes is engaged in matter, is quite constructed in a series of molecular arrangements of our nervous tissues.  No doubt there is memory also in that subtle fluid that survives death, but, inasmuch as memory is so closely expressed in physical or material units or elements, does it not seem plain that as spirits we shall probably lose memory?

“The material structure in which it existed, which in a sense was memory itself, is dissipated by death.  Memory disappears with it.  But perhaps not wholly.  Some shadow of itself remains.  What will most likely be treasured then?  The strongest, deepest memories only.  Those which are so subjectively strong as to leave even in the spirit flesh an impression.  In this same little book of Bain’s this sentence occurs:  ’Retention, Acquisition, or Memory, then, being the power of continuing in the mind, impressions that are no longer stimulated by the original agent, and of recalling them at after-times by purely mental forces, I shall remark first on the cerebral seat of those renewed impressions.  It must be considered as almost beyond a doubt that the renewed feeling occupies the very same parts, and in the same manner as the original feeling, and no other parts, nor in any other manner that can be assigned.’

“It seems to me, my son, in view of all this, that, as the fondest hope of my life is to send back to you from wherever I may be, a message, and as we both believe the means must be something like this wireless telegraphy, I must imbed in my mind the whole system we have developed, and especially make myself almost intuitively familiar with the Morse alphabet.  Beating, beating, beating upon my brain substance this ceaselessly reiterated mechanical language, it will become so incorporated, that even in the surviving mind I shall find its traces and be able to use it.