464 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 
hold of the doctrine upon the foremost scientific minds. 
In fact, it may be doubted whether, wanting this funda- 
mental conception, a theory of the material universe is 
capable of scientific statement. 
. t.tie. -XX. * -. 
SECTION 5. Ninety years subsequent to Gassendi the 
doctrine of bodily instruments, as it may be called, assumed 
immense importance in the hands of Bishop Butler, who, 
in his famous " Analogy of Religion/* developed, from his 
own point of "View, and with consummate 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 distinction between our real 
selves and our bodily instruments. He does not, as far as I 
rein ember^use the word soul, possibly because the term was 
so hackneyed in his day, as it had been for many genera- 
tions previously. But he speaks of "living powers," 
" perceiving or percipient powers/' " moving agents," " our- 
selves," 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 
7 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, 
~"N>r making use of for the common occasions of life." This 
is the key of the bishop's position: " our organized 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 "percip- 
ient power" exactly as the eye does. The eye itself 
is no more percipient than the glass; is quite as much 
the instrument of the true self, and also as foreign 
Va to the true self, as the glass is. "And if we see witli 
1 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 
. < 
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