Of the existence of the soul there is now little doubt. For the discovery of this we are indebted to Professor Gerard Fuchs at Stanford. His research is well documented, as are the circumstances surrounding his discovery. How, whilst researching animal perceptions of colours across the light spectrum, he detected evidence of an aura that attached itself to living matter and yet was invisible to the naked human eye. This aura was present in all animals to a lesser or greater degree but was strongest of all in humans. Inanimate objects exhibited no such aura.
The publication of his findings produced a storm of controversy as the world's religious leaders came forward to claim that he had discovered the soul. This assertion produced, within them, no small degree of satisfaction since ironically it had been the advance of science which contributed to the decline in religious faith in the past. For the enemy of religion to now reaffirm one of faith's basic tenets, that man was composed of more than a body, seemed itself to be a gift from God.
For Professor Fuchs the discovery became something of a personal nightmare because of the hostility he endured from his own scientific community. His methodology was unsound, some said. Two scientists tried to duplicate his research but found no evidence of an aura. The situation was, if anything, made worse when it was demonstrated that his methodology was sound and that of his detractors that was faulty. Professor Fuchs' approach, when followed, produced the same results time after time. It made no difference. Many branded him a charlatan and a traitor to his profession. This viewpoint was in a large measure due to the divide between science and religion that had widened over the centuries. Many scientists believed that the goal of science was to improve the lot of man on earth.
"Leave religion to priests," they argued. "Scientists should be concerned with loftier horizons."
But what could be loftier than the concept of a soul?
And if the science community by turns tormented and scorned him then the attentions of the world's religions proved to be worse, each one feeling the need to establish that it was more right than the others. Thus Fuchs, himself a Lutheran with Baptist leanings, was interrogated by representatives of all of the major faiths and quite a few minor ones. The questioning was intense and Fuchs soon realised that a wrong answer could provoke a jihad of biblical proportions. Later he wrote that he now knew what Galileo had felt as he stood before the inquisition and defended his knowledge that the Earth revolved around the sun.
The questioning often took a somewhat medieval tone. Strangely most of these questions were very similar, as if a committee of the world's faiths had determined them beforehand. Each was concerned about the brightness of the soul's aura. Did it vary among the different faiths? Was a Jewish soul, for example, brighter than a Catholic's or a Buddhist's than that of a Muslim or a Hindu? And what about sin? Did a soul burn brighter if it was purer? Did the soul feed? Was it, as the church maintained, nourished by good deeds or, as the ancient philosophers asserted, by correct actions? Or did it simply feed on the body like some celestial vampire so that we were, as stated by Epictetus, a soul carrying a corpse? To these Fuchs had no answer.
Then there was the thorny question of animal souls which the Catholic Church maintained did not exist whereas the Buddhists and Animists felt that his findings bolstered their faiths. But if Fuchs was blamed for discovering the spirit within all animals he was surprised to discover that he was also condemned by Fruitarians for failing to recognise the sacredness of all living things - animals and plants. Strangely the chief beneficiary of this religious divide were the scientists themselves since churches were willing to fund research that might favour their own position. Paradoxically the one scientist who was not church funded was Gerard Fuchs.
His reaction to this was to fund his own research. He noted that his previous observations had been confined to living matter or inanimate objects. None of them were concerned with the point of transition from life to death. At first he considered that these experiments should be confined solely to animals but decided against this because the auras of mice and rabbits were already weak and might produce false readings. Instead he wanted to work with signals that were as strong as possible. We now know that there were many animals that would have suited his needs but controversially Fuchs chose to study a human aura. Many have speculated as to why he decided on this course of action but it seems likely that he intended to stifle some of the religious argument raging at the time. In this he was doomed to failure.
Having decided that the best and proper subject for experiment was man he began to make discrete enquiries to various hospices for a volunteer. In most of these he was met with a flat refusal. It was understandable. The duty of a hospice is to help a person to die as comfortably and with as little pain and distress as possible. What Fuchs proposed threatened the pursuance of this duty. Eventually, however, he found a hospice where the authorities consented to allow him to put the question to their patients in order that they decide. Off all of these patients one man agreed. Fuchs met him and was impressed both by the calm with which he faced his own death and the interest he showed in Fuchs' own research - research that would only be published and analysed after his death. The man's name was William Franklin and the two of them had several conversations before Franklin signed the consent forms. Franklin was by all accounts an interesting and amusing subject.
"Why do you want to conduct this experiment?" he once asked the professor.
"To find out what happens to the soul after death," he replied.
"Well professor, I think that I shall find out faster than you. Why don't you come along with me and then we shall find out together."
Fuchs declined, saying that someone needed to stay behind to publish the results of their findings.
Franklin gave his assent to the experiment but made two stipulations. The first was that he be accorded the same treatment that he was receiving within the hospice. The second was that he be given unlimited access to relatives and friends and that they be allowed as observers should they so wish. Fuchs agreed but pointed out that the experiments could not be conducted within the hospice but in a specially constructed glass walled room. This room, which Franklin likened to the kind of display case you kept lab specimens in, was designed to allow him space for treatment and visitors but also allow maximum access to Fuchs' measuring instruments. What it did not allow was privacy. Franklin bore this with good grace. In fact when Fuchs began to have serious ethical doubts about continuing with the project it was Franklin who persuaded him to carry on.
Come the fateful day, Franklin's condition worsened. Doctors pronounced that it was only a matter of time before he died. Fuchs was more distressed at this news than he had imagined several weeks before because a bond had grown between the two men but he masked his grief by checking the calibration of his instruments. In keeping with Franklin's wishes his last moments were spent in the company of close family members and friends, his only interruption being the medical attention he received to alleviate his suffering.
Eventually Franklin lapsed into a coma and his doctors pronounced that the end would be soon. One by one the relatives departed save for his wife who maintained a silent vigil by her husband's side. Occasionally she would cast a glance towards Fuchs. He sensed that she resented his presence as if , for her husband, this was his final indignity after so many months of illness. But if she had any objections she chose to remain silent, respecting Franklin's last wishes. For his part Fuchs said nothing to her but instead maintained his scrutiny of his instruments, pausing only to observe the rapid decline of his subject. The end came an hour or so later. His wife requested to be left alone with her husband and Fuchs and his assistants left the room, not without a certain reluctance as he was afraid that the soul would leave Franklin's body whilst he was away. The instruments would of course record this but he wanted to be present when it happened.
That events did not occur as Fuchs expected is obvious from the notes he made of his observations. They record his initial surprise on finding that two hours after Franklin had slipped into that irreversible unconsciousness that is termed somatic death the aura was still present around the body, its light apparently or immeasurably undiminished. The notes continue...
"Subject pronounced dead three hours ago.onset of cell decay assumed, beginning of course with the brain between three and seven minutes. Body core temperature decreasing.. no change in aura.. Rigor mortis established after four hours. Subject is now in a state of initial decay. Body appears fresh externally but is decomposing internally due to the activities of bacteria, protozoa and nematodes present..
Day one.slight but notable dimming of aura. Body temperature still falling. Rigor mortis ceased.
Day two...body temperature increasing.putrefaction obvious..growing odour...aura continues to diminish.at present it is difficult to establish a gradient for the rate of light shift..body visibly swollen by internal gases."
It was at this point that the first of Fuchs' assistants quit. Like all of them he had expected the research to be over within a matter of hours. Now it seemed that they were to be forced to witness, from behind a glass screen, the steady and slow decay of the body of a human being. Over the next few months there were to be many such desertions as the horror of what they saw and indeed smelled whittled away at their scientific enthusiasm. Those that remained were to confess to ongoing and recurring nightmares that dogged them for years. Many undertook counselling and at least one may have had a breakdown as a result of what she saw. But throughout it all Fuchs continued to record his findings with a Linnaean diligence.
"..black putrefaction now established.. body samples taken indicate flesh has a creamy consistency. External exposed parts are now black. .overall appearance of body shows it to be in a state of collapse due to escaping gases..Odour of decay now very marked..light shift of aura appears to be inversely proportionate to cell decay.Light decay now shows hourly changes which when analysed on a daily basis indicate profound dissipation..."
"It is difficult to describe what Fuchs and his band of ever diminishing assistants were forced to observe in the name of scientific enquiry," noted James Everidge one of Fuchs' later biographers. Each day they toiled like renaissance anatomists as the corpse mouldered and decayed in front of them, doing their best to ignore the terrible smell. New assistants came and went and the health problems of the team increased. Added to disturbed sleep patterns, insomnia and nightmares were loss of appetite, palpitations, night sweats and sexual dysfunction. Strangely the only one who did not complain of any of these was Fuchs himself. Perhaps the criticism he had faced on making his original discovery had hardened him. Certainly he was the most determined and drive on the project.
Days moved into weeks and weeks into months. Fuchs' diary noted how Franklin's body moved effortlessly into the stage of butyric fermentation. It was now drying out and although there was some flesh on the body the smell of decay was not so bad, being more like ripe cheese. What was left of the abdomen was now covered in a mould. The aura had continued to decline until now there was little of it remaining. The rate of light decay began to tail off at this point. Inexorably the corpse began to dry out. This drying slowed down the rate of both bodily and light decay but after several weeks the aura was so dissipated as to be invisible to Fuchs' measuring instruments, though Fuchs assumed that the process was still ongoing and would only cease when all the light had diminished. He believed that this would be achieved some time after the corpse was in a state of dry decay when there was little or no flesh on the body.
This theory was advanced in Fuchs' second paper on the subject of the aura which was, if anything, greeted with greater opprobrium than the first. Briefly, as Everidge summed it up, one was faced with two possible conclusions from the evidence. The first was the simplest, that the aura observed was not in fact the soul but a part of the body that slowly faded as the body decayed. This had the advantage of returning everything back to the status quo, leaving the mystery of the soul to theologians but at the same time posed a few awkward questions for scientists. If the aura was a necessary part of the body what did it do? If it was unnecessary why was it there? If it was part of the life force of the body then surely it was to all intents and purposes some form of soul.
But if the first conclusion posed many unanswered questions - a situation not new in science - the second conclusion came as a bombshell. This stated that the aura was the soul but that it remained trapped within the body until almost all organic decay had occurred. There was no abrupt "switching off" as had previously been surmised. The 'soul' simply appeared to gradually dissipate into nothingness.
As we now know, many favoured the convenience of the first conclusion but Fuchs himself did not accept that he had merely discovered a useless appendage to the body, a "celestial appendix" as he called it. He was well aware of the convenience of his first theory but later stated to Everidge that the chief reason for this was that it provided the answer to some of the unpalatable questions raised by the second theory.
Firstly, if the aura or soul had been observed to dissipate into nothingness how could it be an eternal entity? Would it reform itself somewhere in space? If it did then logically there would need to be a gathering point. Was this the true concept of heaven? Fuchs was unconvinced. He did not subscribe to the notion of a soul reconstituting itself like a packet of instant soup. A far more logical explanation was that once the aura had dissipated existence and identity for that human being had ceased - if it had not already done so at the point of death.
If this was the case then the phenomena that Fuchs had observed was more akin to a form of renewable energy that could be utilised in the creation of new life. This was similar to the first idea but removed the need for there to be a heaven that acted as a sort of Crewe Station redirecting stray light back to its original owner. What Fuchs was suggesting was a basic form of reincarnation. This should have at least made the theory attractive to Buddhists except that they too did not like the idea of the demolition of the self. Besides that aura stayed attached to the body in some form for many months. This conflicted with Buddhist theories about the proper time scale for reincarnation.
Above all the theory challenged notions of human consciousness. Why did the aura remain so long with the body? Was there, after death, still a trace of the self that gradually ebbed away. Perhaps after death we experienced a form of "dreaming" until we drifted into oblivion. Fuchs believed that the aura only finally disappeared once the corpse had become a near skeleton causing people to reach the obvious conclusion that the manner of disposal had a direct effect on the rate of dissipation. Based on this, in theory, an Egyptian mummy might still possess an aura although Fuchs was never able to obtain permission to test this hypothesis. Someone who was cremated, on the other hand, should dissipate immediately. And as for those who chose the grave - they faced months or even years of dissipation, dependant on the soil content, whilst their aura slowly leached away.
This final conclusion was what made Fuchs' ideas unacceptable at the time. What relative of the recently deceased would care to add to the pain of their loss by imagining that there loved one was in some way buried alive? What torments would they imagine that person suffered?
Fuchs' paper was, so to speak, 'buried'. It raised issues that no one, be they scientist or priest wanted raised - that one day we will cease to exist. So people forgot about his theory and got on with such lives as remained to them. Fuchs' observations concerning the aura were fated, like the prophesies of Nostradamus, to be misquoted from time to time by the tabloid newspapers whenever they were short of copy. Equally, though with less justification these ideas were forgotten the next day.
As for Fuchs, he continued his work and lived to see his theory vindicated thanks to the corroborating research carried out by Kelly and Schuster. Despite occasional requests for interviews he remained a largely anonymous figure for the rest of his life. In the last interview he gave he was asked, not for the first time, what he believed happened to humans after death. In reply he cited the Phaedo, Plato's account of the death of Socrates. Socrates had been sentenced to death by poisoning and the Phaedo is a fictional account of the conversation between Socrates and his friends whilst waiting for the poison to take effect.
This conversation ranged over several topics, of which Socrates was very knowledgeable but finally he too, like Fuchs, was asked what happened after death. Now this was a subject upon which Socrates would have had no empirical basis for a theory but he was undeterred. He believed, or perhaps more accurately Plato believed on his behalf, that when the body dies there is a period of decay but that on the point of death the soul flies to God. He also suggested that the soul was invisible. Fuchs had of course established that the soul is no more invisible than Democritus' atoms were. But despite the flaws in Socrates' argument, Fuchs suggested that it pointed to the eternal dilemma for all of us. In point of fact Socrates knew no more about what happened to a person after death than Fuchs did. All he had to go on was a belief system which is in essence what we all have - either a belief in life after death or a belief in nothing after death. Fuchs himself was Jungian in his approach. He believed that since he had been unable to observe the life force remaining as a separate energy then we were all part of an energy collective - that we were all part of the life force of the universe. However, he was prepared to accept an alternate theory should a convincing one come along.
"But if it were true," he said, "then it is interesting to speculate that each of us may have little of the life force that animated Socrates burning within us. The notion of this is humbling. At any rate, as a theory, it is no wilder than are many others. But the truth is. I suspect, that we among the living know nothing of what happens to the soul despite our discoveries. As I grow older I find myself remembering some of Franklin's last words that he said to me. Those who go before us - Franklin and indeed Socrates - are the ones who truly know the secrets of the soul. The rest of us are forced to stumble and speculate in our darkness though eventually the secret is made known to all of us."
Fuchs died a month later.