IX THE DOCTRINE OF IMMORTALITY 193 



the difficulty of understanding how a moving 

 extended material body was to affect a think- 

 ing thing which had no dimension, was as great 

 as that involved in solving the problem of how 

 to hit a nominative case with a stick. Hence, 

 the successors of Descartes either found them- 

 selves obliged, with the Occasionalists, to call in 

 the aid of the Deity, who was supposed to be 

 a sort of go-between betwixt matter and spirit ; 

 or they had recourse, with Leibnitz, to the doc- 

 trine of pre-established harmony, which denied 

 any influence of the body on the soul, or vice versd, 

 and compared matter and spirit to two clocks so 

 accurately regulated to keep time with one 

 another, that the one struck whenever the other 

 pointed to the hour; or, with Berkeley, they 

 abolished the "substance" of matter altogether, 

 as a superfluity, though they failed to see that the 

 same arguments equally justified the abolition of 

 soul as another superfluity, and the reduction of 

 the universe to a series of events or phenomena ; 

 or, finally, with Spinoza, to whom Berkeley makes 

 a perilously close approach, they asserted the 

 existence of only one substance, with two chief 

 attributes, the one, thought, and the other, exten- 

 sion. 



There remained only one possible position, which, 

 had it been taken up earlier, might have saved an 

 immensity of trouble ; and that was to affirm that 

 we do not, and cannot, know anything about the 



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