150 THE CREED OF SCIENCE, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL. 



that the cunning arrangements of the atoms was the 

 beginning, and their mysterious marshallings and com- 

 binations the underlying essence and cause, of the whole 

 life-drama of man. 



2. Such is the conclusion of science; but before 

 exhibiting in detail the arguments on which it depends, 

 it is desirable to revert to, and briefly to consider, the 

 theological and metaphysical theories of the soul, together 

 with the auguments for a future existence founded upon 

 them. We shall then be in a better position to estimate 

 the comparative weight of these on the one side, and 

 those advanced by science on the other. 



The metaphysicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth 

 centuries Descartes, Leibnitz, Wolf, Clarke with minor 

 and unimportant differences, had agreed and laid down 

 that the soul was an independent entity, separate from 

 the body, and of wholly dissimilar nature. It was a 

 thinking substance, of its own nature, and of necessity, an 

 immaterial and an immortal thing. But as a further 

 security and protection in the great shock of death, in 

 order to shield it from all harm at that great transition, 

 so suggestive to the imagination of fateful possibilities, 

 they had made it one and indivisible. In short, it was a 

 thinking substance, simple, indivisible, immaterial, and im- 

 mortal. It could not be broken up or dissolved by death, 

 for death could find no avenue of assault, no vulnerable 

 point in a thing so carefully guarded. It could not be 

 touched by any power short of Omnipotence, and not 

 even by Him after an irrevocable existence had once 

 been granted. True, the metaphysicians did not really 

 prove that the soul possessed the alleged attributes, 

 including immortality ; they had only covertly assumed 

 them in their definitions of the soul, and afterwards, 

 according to the fashion of skilful conjurors, merely shook 



