340 



ON THE NATURE AND 



perish with the body. The very rninute heartlet, or corcle, which every one 

 must have noticed in the heart of a walnut, does not perish with the solid 

 mass of the shell and kernel that encircle it : on the contrary, it survives this, 

 and gives birth to the future plant which springs from this substance, draws 

 hence its nourishment, and shoots higher and higher towards the heavens as 

 the grosser materials that surround the corcle are decaying. In like man- 

 ner, the decomposition of limestone, instead of destroying, sets at liberty the 

 light gas that was imprisoned in its texture ; and the gay and gaudy but- 

 terfly mounts into the skies from the dead and mouldering cerement by which 

 it was lately surrounded. Matter is not necessarily corruptible under any 

 form. The Epicureans themselves, as well as the best schools of modern 

 philosophy, believed it to be solid and unchangeable in its elementary parti- 

 cles. Crystallized into granitic mountains, we have innumerable instances 

 of its appearing to have resisted the united assaults of time and tempests ever 

 since the creation of the world. And in the light and gaseous texture in 

 which we are at present contemplating it, it is still more inseparable and dif- 

 ficult of decomposition. Whether material or immaterial, therefore, it does 

 not necessarily follow, even upon the principles of this philosophy itself, that 

 the soul must be necessarily corruptible ; nor does it, moreover, necessarily 

 follow that, admitting it to be incorruptible or immortal in man, it must be 

 so in brutes. Allowing the essence to be the same, the difference of its modi- 

 fication, or elaboration, which, this philosophy admits, produces the difi'erent 

 degrees of its perfection, may also be sufficient to produce a difference in its 

 power of duration. And for any thing we know to the contrary, while some 

 material bodies may be exempt from corruption, there may be some imma- 

 terial bodies that are subject to it. 



The philosophers of Rome present us with nothing new ; for they merely 

 followed the dogmas of those of Greece. Cicero, though he has given us 

 much of the opinions of other writers upon the nature and duration of the 

 soul, has left us almost as little of his own as Aristotle has done. Upon the 

 whole, he seems chiefly to have favoured the system of Plato. Seneca and 

 Epictetus were avowed and zealous adherents to the principles of the Stoics ; 

 and Lucretius to those of Epicurus. 



Upon the whole, philosophy seems to have made but an awkward handle 

 of the important question before us. A loose and glimmering twilight ap- 

 pears to have been common to most nations: but the more men attempted to 

 reason upon it, at least with a single exception or two, the more they doubted 

 and became involved in difficulties. They believed and they disbelieved, 

 they hoped and they feared, and life passed away in a state of perpetual 

 anxiety and agitation. But this was not all : perplexed, even where they 

 admitted the doctrine, about the will of the Deity, and the mode of securing 

 his favour after death, with their own abstruse speculations they intermixed 

 the religion of the multitude. They acknowledged the existence of the po- 

 » pular divinities ; clothed them with the attributes of the Eternal ; and, anxious 



to obtain their benediction, were punctilious in attending at their temples, 

 and united in the sacrifices that were presented. Even Socrates, amid the 

 last words he uttered, desired Crito not to forget to offer for him the cock 

 which he had vowed to Esculapius.* 



In effect, the whole of the actual knowledge possessed at any time appears 

 to have been traditionary : for we may well doubt whether, without such a 

 basis to have built upon, philosophy would ever have started any well- 

 grounded opinion in favour of a future state. And this traditionary know- 

 ledge seems to have been of two kinds, and both kinds to have been delivered 

 at a very early age of the world — the immortality of the soul, and the final 

 resurrection of the body. From the preceding sketch it seems reasonable to 

 suppose that both these doctrines (unquestionably beyond the reach of mere 

 human discovery) were divinely communicated to the patriarchs ; and amid 

 the growing wickedness of succeeding times, gradually forgotten and. lost 



* Xenoph, Meio. 1. iv. Plat. Apol. Laert. iL 



