OCR Text |
Show Rulings on Queer Wills. The courts, writes Robert E. Hein-selman Hein-selman in Case and Comment, have been asked to pass upon many strange and mysterious beliefs as affecting testamentary capacity; for instance, belief in degrees of happiness in a future fu-ture state of existence, depending upon up-on the amount of property possessed here and the charitable purposes to which it is devoted: belief in the doctrine doc-trine of metempsychosis, or the passing pass-ing of the souls of men after death Into animals, belief that a departed person to whose picture the testator talked held the "keys of the kingdom" and could hear and understand what was said to him, and belief on the part of an Englishman who had embraced em-braced the Hindu and Mohammedan faiths that he and God were one, that he was next to God and was a second prophet all of these and many more, as to some of which the words of Po-lonius Po-lonius to Hamlet are true, that "though this be madness, yet there is method in't," have solemnly been adjudged by the secular tribunals of justice as not such delusions as necessarily to render ren-der their possessors incompetent to make a will. |