These considerations of the Deity, as manifestly willing the intellectual and moral progress of his creatures, which death suspends, and, as a just estimator of the actions of mankind, whose awards may be considered as proportioned to the excellence which he loves,-these two views of the relation of man and his Creator, might lead us to some presumptive expectation of future existence, even though we had no positive proof of any spiritual substance within us, that might remain entire, in the mere change of place of the bodily elements,-a change which is the only bodily change in that death, which we are accustomed to regard as if it were a cessation of existence, but in which every thing that existed before, continues to exist with as perfect physical integrity as it before existed.

Even in this view of man, his future existence, as a living being, though not so obvious and easy of conception, might still seem a reasonable inference from the character of the Divinity in its relation to the earthly progress and earthly sufferings of a creature, whom it would be impossible for us to regard as an object of indifference to the Power that marked him out for our own admiration. But, in this view, the argument for immortality would be comparatively feeble. We are not to forget, as I have already repeated, that mind is itself a substance distinct from the bodily elements,-that when death itself is only a change of the mutual relations of atoms, all of which exist as before, with all their qualities, there is no reason of analogy that can lead us to suppose the mind, as a substance, to be the only thing which perishes, -that, in such a case, therefore, positive evidence is necessary, not to make us believe the continued existence of the mind, when nothing else is perishing, but to make us believe, that the Deity, who destroys nothing else in death, destroys those very minds, without relation to which the whole material frame of the universe, though it were to subsist for ever, would be absolutely void of value. It would not be a little, then, to find merely that there is no positive evidence, which can lead us to suppose such exclusive annihilation of spiritual existence. But how much more is it, to find, instead of such positive evidence of destruction, presumptions of the strongest kind, which the character of the Deity, as made known to us in his works, and especially in our hearts, can afford, that the life, which depended on his goodness on earth, will be a subject of the moral dispensations of his goodness. and justice, after all that is truly mortal about us, has not perished indeed, but entered into new forms of elementary combination. "Cum venerit dies ille qui mixtum hoc divini humanique secernat corpus, hoc, ubi inveni relinquam, ipse me diis reddam. Nec nunc sine illis sum; sed gravi terrenoque detineor. Per has mortalis ævi moras, illi meliori vitæ longiorique proluditur. Quemadmodum novem mensibus nos tenet maternus uterus, et præparat non sibi sed illi loco in quem videmur emitti, jam idonei spiritum trahere, et in aperto durare; sic per hoc spatium, quod ab infantia patet in senectutem, in alium maturescimus partum. Alia origo nos expectat, alius rerum status. Nondum cœlum nisi ex intervallo pati possumus. Quicquid circa te jacet rerum, tanquam, hospitalis loci sarcinas specta: transeundum est. Excutit redeuntem natura, sicut intrantem. Dies iste quem tanquam extremum reformidas, æterni natalis est."*

The day which we falsely dread as our last, is indeed the day of our better nativity. We are maturing on earth for heaven; and even on earth,

in those noble studies which seem so little proportioned to the wants of this petty scene, and suited rather to that state of freedom in which we may conceive our spirit to exist, when delivered from those bodily fetters, which confine it to so small a part of this narrow globe, there are presages of the diviner delights that await us,-marks of that noble origin from which the spirit was derived. These indications of its celestial origin are beautifully compared by Heinsius, in his very pleasing poem De Contemptu Mortis, to the gleams of the spirit of other years, with which a gallant courser condemned to the drudgery of the plough, seems still to show that it was formed for a nobler office.

Ut cum fortis equus Pisææ victor olivæ,

Aut quem sanguineus, sæva ad certamina, Mavors
Deposcit, fremitusque virum lituosque tubasque
Nunc misero datus agricolæ, pede creber inertem
Pulsat humum, patriamque domum testatur, et ignem
Naribus, et curvum collo aversatur, aratrum.*

The continuance of our existence, in the ages that follow the few years of our earthly life, is not to be regarded only in relation to those ages. Even in these few years which we spend on earth, comparatively insignificant as they may seem when we think at the same time of immortality, it is to him who truly looks forward to the immortality, as that for which human life is only a preparation, the chief source of delight, or of comfort, in occasional afflictions. If this life were indeed all, the sight of a single victim of oppression would be to us the most painful of all objects, except the sight of the oppressor himself; and though we might see sufficient proofs of goodness, to love him by whom we were made, the goodness would, at the same time, appear to us too capricious in many instances, to allow us to rest on it with the confidence which it is now so delightful to us to feel, when we think of hir in whom we confide. In the sure prospect of futurity, we see that unalterable relation, with which God and virtue are for ever connected,-the victim of oppression, who is the sufferer, and scarcely the sufferer of a few moments here, is the rejoicer of endless ages, and all those little evils which otherwise would be so great to us, seem scarcely worthy even of our regret. We feel, that it would be almost as absurd, or even more absurd, to lament over them and repine, as it would be to lament, if we were admitted to the most magnificent spectacle which human eyes had ever beheld, that some few of the crowd through which we passed, had slightly pressed against

us, on our entrance.

All now is vanish'd. Virtue sole survives
Immortal, never failing friend to man,

His guide to happiness on high. And see,

"Tis come,-the glorious morn,-the second birth

Of heaven and earth. Awakening Nature hears

The new-creating word, and starts to life

In every heighten'd form, from pain and death
For ever free The great eternal scheme,
Involving all, and in a perfect whole
Uniting, as the prospect wider spreads,
To Reason's eye refin'd clears up apace.
Ye vainly wise, ye blind presumptuous, now
Confounded in the dust, adore that Power

* Lib. II.

And Wisdom oft arraign'd;-see now the cause,
Why unassuming Worth in secret liv'd,
And died neglected;-why the good man's share
In life was gall and bitterness of soul;-
Why the lone widow and her orphans pin'd
In starving solitude, while luxury

In palaces lay straining her low thought
To form unreal wants. Why heaven-born truth
And moderation fair wore the red marks
Of Superstition's scourge. Ye good distress'd,
Ye noble few, who here, unbending, stand
Beneath life's pressure, yet bear up awhile,-
And what your bounded view, which only saw
A little part, deem'd evil, is no more.
The storms of wintry time will quickly pass,
And one unbounded Spring encircle all."

LECTURE XCVIII.

RETROSPECT OF THE ARGUMENT FOR THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL; ON OUR DUTY TO OURSELVES

My last two Lectures, gentlemen, have been devoted to the very interesting inquiry, into the grounds which reason, without the aid of Revelation, affords for our belief of the immortality of the sentient and thinking principle, of that principle which is the life of our mortal frame, but which survives the dissolution of the frame which it animated. The importance of the subject will justify, or rather demand, a short retrospect of the general argument.

It is from the dissolution of the body, that the presumption as to the complete mortality of our nature is derived; and it was therefore necessary, in the first place, to consider the force of this presumption, as founded on the organic decay. If thought be only a state of those seemingly contiguous particles, which we term organs, the separation of these particles may be the destruction of the thought; but if our sensations, thoughts, emotions, be states of a substance which itself exists independently of the particles, that by their juxtaposition obtain the name of organs, the separation of these particles to a greater distance from each other, (which is all the bodily change that truly takes place in death,) or even the destruction of these particles, if what we term decay, instead of being a mere form of continued existence, were absolute destruction, would not involve, though it might, or might not, be accompanied by the annihilation of the separate principle of thought.

The result of this primary and most important examination was, that far from being a state of any number of particles arranged together in any form -thought cannot even be conceived by us, to be a quality of number or extension that it is of its very essence, not to be divisible,-and that the top or bottom of a sentiment, or the half or quarter of a truth or falsehood, or of a joy or sorrow, is at least as absurd to our conception, as the loudness of the smell of a rose, or the scarlet colour of the sound of a trumpet.

* Thomson's Seasons-conclusion of Winter.

An organ is not one substance because we term it one. It is truly a multitude of bodies, the existence and qualities of each of which are independent of the existence and qualities of all the others,-as truly independent, as if instead of being near to each other, they were removed to distances, relatively as great, as those of the planets, or to any other conceivable distances in the whole immensity of space. If any one were to say, the Sun has no thought, Mercury, Venus, the Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and all their secondaries, have no thought: but the Solar System has thought,-we should then scarcely hesitate a single moment in rejecting such a doctrine; because, we should feel instantly that there could be no charm in the two words, solar system, which are of our own invention, to confer on the separate masses of the heavenly bodies, what under a different form of mere verbal expression, they had been declared previously not to possess. What the sun and planets have not, the solar system, which is nothing more than that sun and planets, has not; or, if so much power be ascribed to the mere invention of a term, as to suppose that we can confer by it new qualities on things, there is a realism in philosophy, far more monstrous than any which prevailed in the Logic of the Schools.

If, then, the solar system cannot have properties, which the sun and planets have not, and if this be equally true, at whatever distance, near or remote, they may exist in space, it is surely equally evident, that an organ, which is only a name for a number of separate corpuscles, as the solar system is only a name for a number of larger mases of corpuscles,-cannot have any properties which are not possessed by the corpuscles themselves, at the very moment at which the organ as a whole, is said to possess them,―nor any affections as a whole, additional to the affections of the separate parts. An organ is nothing; the corpuscles, to which we give that single name, are all,— and if a sensation be an organic state, it is a state of many corpuscles, which have no more unity than the greater number of particles in the multitudes of brains, which form the sensations of all mankind. Any one of the particles in any brain, has an existence as complete in itself, and as independent of the existence of the other particles of the same brain, which are a little nearer it, as of the particles of other brains, which are at a greater distance. Even though it were admitted, however, in opposition to one of the clearest truths in science, that an organ is something more than a mere name for the separate and independent bodies which it denotes, and that our various feelings are states of the sensorial organ, it must still be allowed, that, if two hundred particles existing in a certain state, form a doubt, the division of these into two equal aggregates of the particles, as they exist in this state at the moment of that particular feeling, would form halves of a doubt; that all the truths of arithmetic would be predicable of each separate thought, if it were a state of a number of particles; and the truths of geometry be, in like manner, predicable of it, if it depended on extension and form. In short, if joy or sorrow, simple and indivisible as they are felt by us to be, be not one, but a number of corpuscles separate, and divisible into an infinite number of little joys and sorrows, that may be variously arranged in spheres and parallelopipeds, any thing may, with equal probability, be said to be any thing, however apparently opposite and contradictory.

When sensation is said to be the result of organization, the vagueness of the term result, throws a sort of illusive obscurity over the supposed process, and we more readily admit the assertion, with the meaning which the mate

rialist would give to it,-because, however false it may be in his sense, it is true in another sense. Sensation is the result of organization, a result, however, not in the organs themselves, but in a substance of which the Deity has so arranged the susceptibilities, as to render the variety of that class of feelings which we term sensations, the effects of certain states of the particles which compose the organ. The result, therefore, is one and simple, because the mind, that alone is susceptible of the state which we term sensation, is one and simple; though the bodily particles of the state of which the one sensation is the result, are many. A sound, for example, is one, because it is an affection of the mind, which has no parts, and must always be one in all its states, though the mental affection may have required, before it could take place, innumerable motions of innumerable vibratory particles, which have no unity but in their joint relation to the mind, that considers them as one, and is affected by their concurring vibrations. In like manner, in the phenomena of chemical agency, to which the phenomena of thought and feeling, as simple results, are by the materialists most strangely asserted to be analogous, it surely requires no very subtile discernment, to perceive, that, though we may speak of the result of certain mixtures, as if the result were one of simple combustion, deflagration, solution, precipitation, and the various other terms which are used to denote chemical changes, it is in the single word alone, that all the unity of the complex phenomenon is to be found, that the solution of salt in water, or the combustion of charcoal in atmospheric air, expresses not one fact, but as many separate facts as there are separate particles dissolved or burnt ;—that the unity, in short, is not in the chemical phenomena as facts, but in the mind and only in the mind, which considers all these facts together; and that the mere words combustion and solution, either signify nothing, or signify states of innumerable particles, which are not the less innumerable, because they are comprehended in a single word.

Sensation then, which is not more truly felt by us in any case, as a pleasure or a pain, than it is felt to be one and incapable of division, is not a state of many particles, which would be as many separate selves, without any connecting principle that could give them unity, but a state of a single substance, which we term mind, when we speak of it generally, or self, when we speak of it with reference to its own peculiar series of feeling.

There is mind then, as well as matter, or rather, if there be a difference of the degrees of evidence, there is mind, more surely than there is matter; -and if at death, not a single atom of the body perishes, but that which we term dissolution, decay, putrefaction, is only a change of the relative positions of those atoms, which in themselves continue to exist with all the qualities which they before possessed,-there is surely no reason, from this mere change of place of the atoms that formed the body, to infer, with respect to the independent mind, any other change, than that of its mere relation to those separated atoms. The continued subsistence of every thing corporeal cannot, at least, be regarded as indicative of the annihilation of the other substance; but must, on the contrary, as far as the mere analogy of the body is of any weight, be regarded as a presumption in favour of the continued subsistence of the mind, when there is nothing around it, which has perished, and nothing even which has perished, in the whole material universe, since the universe itself was called into being.

The Deity, however, though he has not chosen to annihilate a single atom