40 MIND. 



no more than in the case of life, and equally increasing the 

 number of its difficulties l ; as though we were not created beings, 



Bacon complained (1. c.) that the first attempts to explain thunder and tem- 

 pests were accused of impiety by religious persons, who thought that religion 

 demanded these phenomena to be referred to the immediate operation of the Deity. 

 The lovers of subtle fluids and spirits, conversely and as strangely, think religion 

 served by interposing a subtle fluid between common matter and the Deity. Van 

 Helmont was remarkably fortunate, for, after severe meditation, he fell into an 

 intellectual vision, and saw his own soul : " Magna mox quies me invasit, et incidi 

 in somnium intellectuale satisque memorabile." It was very small, and had no 

 organs of generation : " Vidi enim animam meam satis exiguam, specie humana, 

 sexus tamen discrimine liberam." Ortus Medicince, Coufessio auctoris, p. 13. 

 He gave the soul, however, a close and dirty dwelling, for he placed it, not in the 

 pineal gland, but in the stomach. 



1 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 (f. e. from its inherent 

 immortality), who did not likewise assert its pre-existence." If we necessarily 

 shall exist to all eternity, we then must have existed from all eternity ; yet we are 

 not aware of having been alive before our brains. Sterne's fine ridicule of the 

 absurdities introduced by this hypothesis of a soul, and that independent of the 

 brain, into the Romish church, is well known. A great French man-midwife 

 acquaints us that he baptised a little abortion of the magnitude of a skinned 

 mouse ; and on another occasion, when a woman was miscarrying in her fourth 

 month, and the child's posteriors presented, that he sprinkled water upon them 

 and baptized them, in case the little thing should turn out alive. (De la Motte, 

 Traite complet des Accouchemens, p. 243. 246.) Dr. Foder in his noted Me- 

 decine Legale, 1813, (vol. ii. p. 62.) gravely suggests that baptism may always be 

 administered by a squirt, after the membranes are pierced, " Quant au bap- 

 teme, il me semble qu'il sera toujours facile de 1'administrer, apres avoir perc6 

 les membranes, par le moyen d'un seringue a injection." A good idea of what 

 follows in its train may be collected from Dante's tiresome account of the intro- 

 duction of the soul into the body, beginning, " Sangue perfetto che mai non si 

 beve," &c. Purgatorio, canto xxv. It is one parent of necromancy, of the belief 

 in ghosts, and of all the popish " trumpery " respecting purgatory and the worship 

 of dead people called saints, of the opinions held by many respecting our oc- 

 cupations between death and doomsday, as if a future state began before; and 

 old writers sicken one with their notions about the period at which the soul enters 

 the body, when it first existed, how it was engaged before it united with the bod)', 

 and how it employs itself after its separation till the day of judgment, &c. 

 " Hierom, Austin, and other fathers of the church, hold that the soul is immortal, 

 created of nothing, and so infused into the child or embryo in his mother's womb 

 six months after the conception ; some say at three days, some six weeks, others 

 otherwise." Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy > p. 1. s. 1. m. 2 subs. 9. Where 



