MIND. 45 



While those are wrong who think there can be any thing like an 

 argument against a future life in another order of things, if de- 

 clared by a revelation, it is strange that others should think it 

 necessary to attempt rendering the pronunciations of scripture 

 more probable, and that by an hypothesis which is at best but the 

 remains of unenlightened times y , and should require any as- 



y The more uninformed the age, the greater the disposition to explain every 

 thing. The savage personifies the winds and the heavenly bodies ; the ancients 

 fancied all matter endowed with a spirit spiritus intus alit. Philo and Origen 

 maintain that the stars are so many souls, incorruptible and immortal. In the 

 older writings of the moderns, even in those of the father of experiment and 

 observation Lord Bacon, the properties of matter are referred to spirits : 

 " from them and their motions principally proceed rarefaction, colliquation, con- 

 coction, maturation, putrefaction, vivification, and most of the effects of nature;" 

 " for tangible parts in bodies are stupid things, and the spirits do, in effect, all." 

 (Natural History, cent. i. 98.) In fact, some authors believe in three souls 

 the vegetable, sensible, and natural for vegetables, brutes, and man ; those which 

 have the second having also the first, and those who have the third having all 

 three. Paracelsus believed in four. These old writers, in providing a spirit for 

 every thing, were more consistent than the moderns, who require it for only life 

 and mind ; because a subtle fluid or spirit is quite as necessary to explain the <( 

 arrangement of saline particles into the regular form, of a beautiful crystal. 

 All these notions still exist among the vulgar ; and the last remaining among the 

 better informed, though it too is rapidly dying away, relates to mind. Those who 

 upbraid others for refusing their assent to this hypothesis, may recollect that 

 Anaxagoras and many more were accused of atheism and impiety, because they 

 denied that the heavenly bodies were animated and intelligent. Even in the last 

 reign but one, the Newtonian doctrines were thought irreligious by the Hutchin- 

 sonian sect, to which Bishop Home, the amiable writer on the Psalms, and 

 Mr. Jones, the learned and ingenious writer in defence of the Trinity, belonged : 

 and the Jesuits, in their edition of Newton, 1742, carefully disclaim all belief 

 in his demonstration of the earth's motion, as this is decreed false by the Pope. 



Materialist is as good a word as any other for branding those from whom we 

 differ; but materialism in its true acceptation signifies the doctrine of no first ' 

 cause, or that all has been produced ex fortuita atomorum collisione. The whole 

 tenor of scripture implies that we are bodies endowed with certain properties ; and 

 those passages from which our having a distinct immaterial substance is inferred, 

 may be easily explained by the figurative style of the Bible, by the necessary 

 adoption of the language of the times, and by the influence of the national 

 opinions and prejudices of the writers on their modes of expression. With- 

 out due allowance, we might deem it impious to deny that " the round world 

 cannot be moved;" that the sun " pursues its course" round the earth; 

 ( Galileo was imprisoned for doing so, and yet, said the sage to himself while 

 in prison, " the earth does move" epur si muove .) that Naaman's leprosy (a 

 condition of body) was a real substance, because we read that it left him and 



