42 MIND. 



consciousness of personality can afford no reason for imagining 

 ourselves immortal and distinct from earth, more than brutes; 

 for this the fly possesses equally with the philosopher about 

 whose head it buzzes. The moral government of the world, 

 the sublime reach of our acuteness, the great improveableness 

 of our characters, 



... this pleasing hope, this fond desire, 



This longing after immortality, 



this secret dread and inward horror 



Of falling into nought," P 



have been thought to completely harmonise with a life hereafter, 

 but certainly fall so short of proof as to have left the wisest of 

 antiquity, Solomon, Socrates, Cicero, &c. in uncertainty q , 

 when they saw how death reduces us to our pristine elements. 

 The hope of immortality inspired by such reflections, assisted by 

 the desire of explaining every thing in some way or other, first, 

 I apprehend, made men attempt to find, in the imagined ethereal 

 essence of the soul, a reason for our not totally perishing as our 

 senses would lead us to suppose. But, because we refuse to 

 listen to a mere hypothesis respecting spirit, we are not necessa- 

 rily to deny the resurrection. For if a divine revelation pronounce 

 that there shall be another order of things in which the mind shall 

 exist again, we ought firmly to believe it, because neither our 

 experience nor our reason can inform us what will be hereafter, 

 and we must be senseless to start objections on a point beyond 

 the penetration of our faculties. r The scripture so pronounces, 



e Heathens have, very consistently with this reason for immortality, given it to 

 the fancied souls of brutes : Ulysses is made by Homer to behold the shade of 

 Orion 



&f)pas 6{Ji.u fl\evvra, /car' acrQodeX'bi' Xet/tava 



Tovs avrbs KarfirfQvw Iv oloir6\ouriv optffffi. Odyss. A. 571. 



Dr. Thomas Brown believed, " that the metaphysical ARGUMENT which proves 

 the immortality of man, extends with equal force to the other orders of earthly 

 existence." Memoir of Thomas Brown, M.D., by the Rev. David Welsh. 1828, 

 p. xxii. 



And " Bonnet promised brutes immortality." 



P Addison, Cato. See a full enumeration in Mr. Dugald Stewart's Outlines, 

 &C. p. 235. sq. 



9 Bishop Watson, 1. c. Sermon vi. p. 504. sq. 



* " Nor can we be obliged, where we have the clear and evident sentence of 

 reason, to quit it for the contrary opinion, under a pretence that it is a matter of 

 faith, which can have no authority against the plain dictates of reason. But 



