MIND. 41 



or not altogether ignorant what matter is, or of what it is 

 capable and incapable ; as though matter exhibited nothing but 

 extension, impenetrability, attraction, and inertness ; and as 

 though an Almighty could not, if it seemed good to him, have 

 endowed it, as he most evidently has, with the superaddition of 

 life, and even of feeling and will. 



Nor does this assertion imply that the resurrection from the 

 dead is impossible, or even improbable. The physical enquirer, 

 finding the mind a power of the brain, and abstaining from 

 hypothesis, must conclude that, in the present order of things, 

 when the brain ceases to live the power necessarily ceases, that, 

 in the language of scripture, Dust we are, and unto dust we all 

 return, that our being is utterly extinguished, and we go back 

 to the insensibility of the earth whence we were taken. n Our 



the depot of souls is ; how they learn when a youth has impregnated an ovarian 

 vesicle, and how they fly to and get into it ; how it happens that the qualities of 

 the soul correspond with the brain, and are as hereditary as those of the body ; 

 whether this depends upon souls varying, and, if so, how a soul finds a body just 

 corresponding to itself; or upon the soul being obliged to conform to the cha- 

 racter of the brain, and thus suffering by the brain's defects, we are not satisfac- 

 torily informed. 



m All the difficulties that are 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 edit. 



" Si quelqu'un de'montreroit jamais que 1'ame est mate'rielle," says the pious 

 and benevolent Bonnet, " loin de s'en alarmer, il faudroit admirer la puissance 

 qui auroit donn6 a la matiere la capacite" de penser." 



" In the ordinary derivation of plants and animals," says Paley, " from 

 one another, a particle, in many cases minuter than all assignable, all conceivable 

 dimensions ; an aura, an effluvium, an infinitesimal ; determines the organis- 

 ation of a future body : does no less than fix, whether that which is about to be 

 produced shall be a vegetable, a merely sentient, or a RATIONAL being; an oak, 

 a frog, or a philosopher ; makes all these differences; gives to the future body its 

 qualities, and nature, and species. And this particle, from which springs, and by 

 which is determined, a whole future nature, itself proceeds from, and owes its con- 

 stitution to, a prior body," &c. Natural Theology, conclusion, p. 591. 



n Miscellaneous Tracts, $c. by Richard Watson, D. D. F. R. S. Lord Bishop of 

 LlandafF. Sermon iii. p.- 399. sq. 



