OP HEALTH AND HUMAN NATURE. 53 



thing immortal, subtle, immaterial, diffused through and con- 

 nected with the brain. A physical enquirer has to do with only 

 what he observes. He finds this power, but attempts not td 

 explain it, — he simply says the living brain has this power, and 

 leaves others at liberty to fancy an hypothesis of this power 

 being a subtle, immaterial, immortal substance, exactly as they 

 fancy life to be a subtle fluid, or perhaps, though very extra- 

 ordinarily, the same subtle fluid (if subtlety is immateriality and 

 immortality), elucidating the subject no more than in the case of 

 life, and equally increasing the number of its difficulties,* as 

 though we were not created beings, or not altogether ignorant 

 what matter is, or of what it is capable and incapable ; as though 

 matter exhibited nothing but extension, attraction, and inertness $ 

 and as though the Almighty could not, if it seemed good to him, 

 endow it with the superaddition of life, and even of feeling and 

 will.f 



* Locke, {Second Reply to the Bishop of Worcester, p. 477. 8vo. edition.) 

 in disparaging philosophical reasons for the immortality of the soul, says, 



" Dr. Cudworth affirms that there was never any of the ancients before Chris- 

 tianity that held the soul's future permanency after death, who did not like- 

 wise assert its prc-existence." Sterne's fine ridicule of the absurdities introduced 

 by the hypothesis into the Romish church need not be quoted. A French mid- 

 wife acquaints us that he baptised a little abortion of the magnitude of a beetle, 

 and another of the same breadth but longer. (De la Mottc, Traiti des accouche- 

 mens. p. 201. p. 244.) A good idea of what follows in its train may be collected 

 from Dante's tiresome account of the introduction of the soul into the body, 

 l>eginning, ' Sanguc perfetto che mai non si beve, &c.' — Purgatorio. Cantojcxv. 

 It is one parent of necromancy, of the belief in ghosts, and of all the popish 

 trumpery respecting purgatory. 



t " All the difficulties that arc raised against the thinking of matter, from 

 our ignorance or narrow conceptions, stand not at all in the way of the power 

 of God, if he pleases to ordain it so." The faculties of brutes prove " either 

 that God can and doth give to some parcels of matter a power of perception 

 and thinking, or that all animals have immaterial and consequently immortal 

 souls as well as men ; and to say that fleas and mites, &c. have immortal souls 

 as well as men, will possibly be looked on as going a great way to serve an 

 hypothesis." Locke, Second Reply to the Bishop of Worcester, p. 466. 8vo. ediW 



