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. 



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 1 

 remember, 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/ 7 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 c "< 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 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 

 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 



