5570 Reason and Instinct. 



slight a presumption that animals can lose their living powers — much 

 less that they lose them by death. Death merely removes them from 

 our view, and destroys the sensible proof which we had before their 

 death of their being possessed of living powers. Moreover, the fact 

 that they possessed these powers up to the very period to which we 

 have faculties capable of tracing them, is itself a probability of their 

 retaining them beyond it, especially when we take into consideration 

 the very great and astonishing changes all living creatures actually 

 pass through while yet living. 



Further, there is no proof that our organized bodies, the portions of 

 us actually subject to death, are really ourselves, or a part of our- 

 selves, as living agents or beings ; and there are presumptions to the 

 contrary, deduced from (1) metaphysical considerations and (2) ex- 

 perimental observations. 



1. The living agent cannot be pronounced or believed to be 

 destructible by death, except it can be proved to be compounded and 

 therefore discerptible ; which it cannot be, as the perceptive power, or 

 power of consciousness, must be indivisible, and therefore also the 

 conscious being in which it resides, or living agents ; whence our bodies 

 are no more the living beings ourselves than any other matter. 



2. Living agents may lose limbs, organs of sense, even the greatest 

 part of their bodies, and yet remain the same living agents : even had 

 the loss happened in their infancy, when their bodies were so small, 

 still would they have been the same living agents. They may and do 

 undergo a ceaseless change and loss of, or in, their bodies, from 

 natural wear and tear, but their identity as living agents is not 

 affected : and hence we are compelled to distinguish between the 

 living beings ourselves and our material bodies, since these may be 

 alienated and actually are in a daily course of succession and changing 

 their owners ; whilst we are assured each living agent remains one and 

 the same permanent being. 



Whence it may be observed, I. That we have no reason to think 

 death will be the dissolution of the living being, because we cannot 

 by experience determine that it is larger in bulk than the solid ele- 

 mentary particles of matter, indissoluble by any natural power, into 

 which our bodies are resolved after death. 



II. That from our being unaffected by loss and change in those 

 systems of matter, our bodies, which proves they are not ourselves, we 

 have no ground for thinking any other systems of matter, internal 

 e.g., to be ourselves; and therefore have no reason to think that what 

 befals them at death will be the destruction of the living agents. We 



