330 



ON MATERIALISM 



nence above a beast ;"* whence his hope of future existence, apparently like 

 that of Solomon, who was without the light of the Christian Scriptures, 

 depends exclusively upon a resurrection of the body. 



The immaterialist, on the contrary, who conceives that mere matter is 

 incapable, under any modification, of producing sensation and thought, is 

 under the necessity of supplying to every rank of being possessing these 

 powers, the existence of another and of a very different substance combined 

 with it ; a substance not subject to the changes and infirmities of matter, and 

 altogether impalpable and incorruptible. For if sensation and ideas can only 

 result from such a substance in man, they can only result from such a sub- 

 stance in brutes ; and hence the level between the two is equally maintained 

 by both parties ; the common materialist lowering the man to the brute, and 

 the immaterialist exalting the brute to the man. The immaterialist, however, 

 on the approach of dissolution, finds one difficulty peculiar to himself, for he 

 knows 'not, at that period, how to dispose of the brutal soul : he cannot de- 

 stroy an incorruptible substance, and yet he cannot bring himself to a belief 

 that it is immortal. This difficulty seems to have been peculiarly felt by the 

 very excellent Bishop Butler. He was too cautious a reasoner, indeed, to 

 enlist the term immaterial into any part of his argument; not pretending to 

 determine, as being a point of no importance whatever, " whether our living 

 substances (those that shall survive the body) be material or immaterial :"f but, 

 as a faculty of intelligence is discernible in brutes as well as in man, he 

 thought himself compelled to ascribe it in both to a common principle ; and 

 believing this principle to be immortal in the latter, he supposed it also to be 

 immortal in the former ; and hence speaks of the "natural immortality of 

 brutes."! But as to what becomes of this natural immortality of the brute 

 creation after death, he says nothing whatever, and even regards the inquiry 

 as " invidious and weak."<^ 



By some immaterialists, and particularly by Vitringa and Grotius, it has 

 been conceived that, as something distinct from matter must be granted to 

 brutes, to account for their powers of perception, mankind are in possession 

 of a principle superadded to this, and which alone constitutes their immortal 

 spirit. But such an idea, while it absurdly supposes every man to be created 

 with two immaterial spirits, leaves us as much as ever in the dark as to 

 the one immaterial, and consequently incorruptible, soul or principle possessed 

 by brutes. The insufficiency of the solution has not only been felt but 

 acknowledged by other immaterialists ; and nothing can silence the objection, 

 but to advance boldly, and deny that brutes have a soul or percipient princi- 

 ple of any kind ; that they have either thought, perception, or sensation ; and 

 to maintain, in consequence, that they are mere mechanical machines, acted 

 upon by external impulsions alone. Des Cartes was sensible that this is the 

 only alternative : he, therefore, cut the Gordian knot, and strenuously con- 

 tended for such an hypothesis : and the Abbe Polignac, who intrepidly follows 

 him, gravely devotes almost a whole book of his anti-Lucretius to an eluci- 

 dation of this doctrine ; maintaining that the hound has no more will of his 

 own in chasing the fox than the wires of a harpsichord have in exciting 

 tones ; and that, as the harpsichord is mechanically thrown into action by a 

 pressure of the fingers upon its keys, so the hound is mechanically urged 

 onwards by a pressure of the stimulating odour that exhales from the body 

 of the fox upon his nostrils. Such are the fancies which have been invented 

 to explain what appears to elude all explanation whatever; and consequently 

 to prove that the hypothesis itself is unfounded. 



Yet the objections that apply to the conjecture of materialism, as commonly 

 understood and professed, are still stronger. By the denial of an interme- 

 diate state of being between the death and the resurrection of the body, it 

 opposes not only what appears to be the general tenor, but what is, in va- 

 rious places, the direct declaration, of the Christian Scriptures ; and by con- 



• Eccles. iii. 19. 



t lb. part i. ch. i. p. 30, edit. 1802. 



t Analysis of Religion, Natural and Revealed, part i. ch. L 

 ^ lb. p. 29. 



