DURATION OF THE SOUL. 



333 



supported respectively by men of the deepest learning and research, that 

 have been offered in relation to the essence of the mind or soul ; and showed 

 by a scale of analysis conducted through all the most striking modifications 

 of that plastic and fugitive substance which composes the whole of the visi- 

 ble world, that all such discussions must be necessarily uncertain, and con- 

 siderably less likely to be productive of truth than of error. But there is a 

 question of far more consequence to us than the nature of the soul's essence, 

 and that is, the nature of its duration. Is the soul immortal 1 Is it capable of 

 a separate existence 1 Does it perish with the body as a part of it ? Or, if a 

 distinct principle, does it vanish into nothinp-ness as soon as the separation 

 takes place? What does philosophy offer us upon this subject? This, too, 

 has been studied from age to age; the wisest of mankind have tried it in 

 every possible direction : new opinions have been started, and old opinions 

 revived ; — and what, after all, is the upshot ? The reply is as humiliating as 

 in the former case : vanity of vanities, and nothing more ; utter doubt and 

 indecision, — hope perpetually neutralized by fear. 



If we turn to the oldest hypotheses of the East, — to the Vedas of the Brah- 

 mins and the Zendavesta of the Parsees, — to those venerable bu-t fanciful 

 stores of learning, from which many of the earliest Greek schools drew their 

 first draughts of metaphysical science, we shall find, indeed, a full acknowledg- 

 ment of the immortality of the soul, but only upon the sublime and mystical 

 doctrine of emanation and immanation, as a part of the great soul of the uni- 

 verse; issuing from it at birth, and resorbed into it upon the death of the 

 body ; and hence altogether incapable of individual being, or a separate state 

 of existence. If we turn from Persia, Egypt, and Hindostan to Arabia, to 

 the fragrant groves and learned shades of Dedan and Teman, from which it 

 is certain that Persia, and highly probable that Hindostan, derived its first 

 polite literature, we shall find the entire subject left in as blank and barren a 

 silence, as the deserts by which they are surrounded; or, if touched upon, 

 only touched upon to betray doubt, and sometimes disbelief. The tradition, 

 indeed, of a future state of retributive justice seems to have reached the 

 schools of this part of the world, and to have been generally, though perhaps 

 not universally, accredited ; but the future existence it alludes to is that of a 

 resurrection of the body, and not of a survival of the soul after the body's 

 dissolution. The oldest work that has descended to us from this qjiarter (and 

 there is little doubt that it is the oldest, or one of the oldest works in exist- 

 ence,*) is that astonishing and transcendent composition, the book of Job : — 

 a work that ought assuredly to raise the genius of Idumea above that of 

 Greece, and that of itself is demonstrative^of the indefatigable spirit with 

 which the deepest as well as the most polished sciences were pursued in this 

 region, during what may be comparatively called the youth and dayspring of 

 the world. Yet in this sublime and magnificent poem, replete with all the 

 learning and wisdom of the age, the doctrine upon the subject before us is 

 merely as I have just stated it, a patriarchal or traditionary belief of a future 

 state of retributive justice, not by the natural immortality of the soul, but by 

 a resurrection of the body. And the same general idea has for the most part 

 descended in the same country to the present day; for the Alcoran, which is 

 perpetually appealing to the latter fact, leaves the former almost untouched, 

 and altogether in a state of indecision, whence the expounders of the Islam 

 scriptures, both Sonnites and Motazzalites, or orthodox and heterodox, are 

 divided upon the subject, some embracing and others rejecting it. And it is 

 hence curious to observe the different grounds appealed to in favour of a 

 future existence, in the most learned regions of the East : the Hindoo philoso- 

 phers totally and universally denying a resurrection of the body, and support- 

 ing the doctrine alone upon the natural immortality of the soul, and the Ara- 

 bian philosophers passing over the immortality of the soul, and resting it 

 alone upon a resurrection of the body. 



The schools of Greece, as I have already observed, derived their earliest 



* Ser. II. Lect. x. 



