164 FKAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



sagacity, a similar idea. The Bishop still influences 

 many superior minds ; and it will repay us to dwell for 

 a moment on his views. He draws the sharpest dis- 

 tinction between our real selves and our bodily instru- 

 ments. He does not, as far as I remember, use the 

 word soul, possibly because the term was so hackneyed 

 in his day, as it had been for many generations pre- 

 viously. But he speaks of ' living powers,' ' perceiving 

 or percipient powers,' ' moving agents,' ' ourselves,' in 

 the same sense as we should employ the term soul. He 

 dwells upon the fact that limbs may be removed, and 

 mortal diseases assail the body, the mind, almost up to 

 the moment of death, remaining clear. He refers to 

 sleep and to swoon, where the ' living powers ' are sus- 

 pended but not destroyed. He considers it quite as 

 easy to conceive of existence out of our bodies as in 

 them ; that we may animate a succession of bodies, the 

 dissolution of all of them having no more tendency to 

 dissolve our real selves, or ' deprive us of living faculties 

 the faculties of perception and action than the 

 dissolution of any foreign matter which we are capable 

 of receiving impressions from, or making use of for 

 the common occasions of life.' This is the key of the 

 Bishop's position : ' our organised bodies are no more a 

 part of ourselves than any other matter around us.' In 

 proof of this he calls attention to the use of glasses, 

 which ' prepare objects ' for the ' percipient power ' ex- 

 actly as the eye does. The eye itself is no more 

 percipient than the glass ; is quite as much the instru- 

 ment of the true self, and also as foreign to the true self, 

 as the glass is. ' And if we see with our eyes only in 

 the same manner as we do with glasses, the like may 

 justly be concluded from analogy of all our senses.' 



Lucretius, as you are aware, reached a precisely 

 opposite conclusion : and it certainly would be interest- 



