"Well, what about this recent misconduct of yours?" I ask, sternly.
Candidly he is puzzled, and I have to tell him that the world is shocked or elated, according to the length of its hair, at his recent pronouncement on the future life—I mean, on the absence of a future life. Henry Ford, his friend, had recently declared his belief, not only in incarnation, but in reincarnation. Henry always does things big, and, incidentally, it is always the people who know most about machines—Kelvin, Lodge, Faraday, Ford—who talk most about spirit. Psychologists and biologists, who ought to know, are very shy of spirits.
However, Burbank was asked what he thought about the matter, and he did not speak in parables. We no more survive, he said, to the representative of the San Francisco Bulletin, than does the automobile you fling on the scrap-heap. Those are his words. We survive only in "the good we have done in passing through." Souls? Why, said Burbank, "the universe is not big enough to contain perpetually all the human souls and the other living beings that have been here for their short span." Very comforting to some people, these religions, he said, but "as a scientist I cannot help feeling that all religions are on a tottering foundation." God? Well, there is "a great universal power," but whether it is "a conscious mind" or not, Luther Burbank did not know. What is worse, he did not care. "As a scientist I should like to know, but as a man I am
