272 MIND MORTAL SOUL IMMORTAL, 



works, really and truly knows of the most familiar 

 features of the least of them ; and God, it is to be 

 hoped, will pardon as well as pity (for He made man 

 daring as well as imbecile) at once the rash flippancy 

 with which the firmest and best persuasions of natural 

 reason and the most sacred doctrines of Revelation 

 have been braved, because they have appeared to be 

 incompatible with philosophy, and the bigoted blind- 

 ness with which the most evident deductions of phi- 

 losophy have been spurned, because they appeared to 

 be opposed to natural reason and revelation. As often, 

 then, as it shall be said that mind, or the faculty of 

 thinking, is a property of living matter, as much as 

 irritability or sensibility are properties of it that it 

 is born with the body, is developed with the body, 

 decays with the body, and dies with the body it is 

 understood to be the mind only, not the soul. The 

 soul is certainly something not material indeed, but 

 substantial a divine gift to the highest alone of God's 

 creatures, responsible for all the actions of the mind, 

 but as totally distinct from it as one thing can be from 

 another or rather, as something is from nothing " 

 (iii. 93, 94). 



Further comment is superfluous on this point, but I 

 may add that Fletcher's opinions were in favour of the 

 physical rather than the teleological view' of the nature 

 of things. He did not reject altogether the appeal to 

 final causes, but held, that although all things were 

 created with fore-knowledge and purpose by the 

 Almighty, yet His will was carried out by the inter- 

 action of ordinary matter and force in blind obedience 

 to the properties originally impressed upon them, both 



