A MODERN "SYMPOSIUM." 



21 



soul and body. Each man is conscious of using 

 his own body as an instrument, in the same sense 

 in which" he would use any other machine. He 

 passes a different moral judgment on the me- 

 chanical and involuntary actions of his body, 

 from that which he feels to be due to its actions 

 resulting from his own free-will. The unity and 

 identity of the " ego," from the beginning to the 

 end of life, is of the essence of his consciousness. 



In accordance with this testimony are such 

 facts as the following : that the body has no 

 proper unity, identity, or continuity, through the 

 whole of life — all its constituent parts being in a 

 constant state of flux and change ; that many 

 parts and organs of the body may be removed 

 with no greater effect upon the " ego " than when 

 we take off any article of clothing ; and that 

 those organs which cannot be removed or stopped 

 in their action without death are distributed over 

 different parts of the body, and are homogeneous 

 in their material and structure with others which 

 we can lose without the sense that any change 

 has passed over our proper selves. If, on the 

 one hand, a diseased state of some bodily organs 

 interrupts the reasonable manifestations of the 

 soul through the body, the cases are, on the oth- 

 er, not rare in which the whole body decays and 

 falls into extreme age, weakness, and even de- 

 crepitude, while vigor, freshness, and youtliful- 

 ness, are still characteristics of the mind. 



The attempt, in Butler's work, to reason from 

 the indivisibility and indestructibility of the soul 

 as ascertained facts, is less satisfactory than most 

 of that great writer's arguments, which are gen- 

 erally rather intended to be destructive of objec- 

 tions than demonstrative of positive truths. But 

 the modern scientific doctrine, that all matter 

 and all force are indestructible, is not without 

 interest in relation to that argument. There 

 must at least be a natural presumption from that 

 doctrine that, if the soul during life has a real 

 existence distinct from the body, it is not anni- 

 hilated by death. If, indeed, it were a mere 

 " force " (such as heat, light, etc., are supposed 

 by modern philosophers to be — though men who 

 are not philosophers may be excused if they find 

 some difficulty in understanding exactly what is 

 meant by the term when so used), it would be 

 consistent with that doctrine that the soul might 

 be transmuted after death into some other form 

 of force. But the idea of " force" in this sense 

 (whatever may be its exact meaning) seems 

 wholly inapplicable to the conscious being which 

 a man calls " himself." 



The resemblances in the nature and organiza- 



tion of animal and vegetable bodies seem to me 

 to confirm, instead of weakening, the impression 

 that the body of man is a machine under the 

 government of the soul, and quite distinct from 

 it. Plants manifest no consciousness ; all our 

 knowledge of them tends irresistibly to the con- 

 clusion that there is in them no intelligent, much 

 less any reasonable, principle of life. Yet they are 

 machines very like the human body ; not, indeed, 

 in their formal development or their exact chemi- 

 cal processes, but in the general scheme and func- 

 tions of their organism — in their laws of nutrition, 

 digestion, assimilation, respiration, and especially 

 reproduction. They are bodies without souls, liv- 

 ing a physical life, and subject to a physical death. 

 The inferior animals have bodies still more like our 

 own; indeed, in their higher orders, resembling 

 them very closely indeed ; and they have also a 

 principle of life quite different from that of plants, 

 with various degrees of consciousness, intelli- 

 gence, and volition. Even in their principle of 

 life, arguments founded on observation and com- 

 parison (though not on individual consciousness), 

 more or less similar to those which apply to man, 

 tend to show that there is something distinct 

 from, and more than, the body. But, of all these 

 inferior animals, the intelligence differs from that 

 of man, not in degree only, but in kind. Nature 

 is their simple, uniform, and sufficient law ; their 

 very arts (which are often wonderful) come to 

 them by Nature, except when they are trained by 

 man ; there is in them no sign of discourse of 

 reason, of morality, or of the knowledge of good 

 and evil. The very similarity of their bodily 

 structure to that of man tends, when these dif- 

 ferences are noted, to add weight to the other 

 natural evidence of the distinctness of man's soul 

 from his body. 



The immortality of the soul seems to me to 

 be one of those truths for the belief in which, 

 when authoritatively declared, man is prepared 

 by the very constitution of his nature. 



Canon BARRY. — Any one who from the an- 

 cient positions of Christianity looks on the con- 

 troversy between Mr. Harrison and Prof. Huxley 

 on " The Soul and Future Life " (to which I pro- 

 pose mainly to confine myself) will be tempted 

 with Faulconbridge to observe, not without a 

 touch of grim satisfaction, how, "from north to 

 south, Austria and France shoot in each other's 

 mouth." The fight is fierce enough to make him 

 ask, Tantcene animis sapienlibus irce? But he 

 will see that cacli is far more effective in batter- 

 ing the lines of the enemy than in strengthening 

 his own. Nor will he be greatly concerned if 



