AND IMMATERIALISJVI. 



369 



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

 (those that shall survive the body) be material or immaterial but, as a 

 faculty of intelligence is discernible in brutes as well as in man, bethought 

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

 ing 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 immortahty of the brute 

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

 inquiry as " invidious and weak. "J: 



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 pos- 

 session 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 principle 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 contended for such an hypothesis : and 

 the Abbe Polignac, who intrepidly follows him, gravely devotes almost a 

 whole book of his anti-Lucretius to an elucidation of this doctrine : main- 

 taining 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 harpsi- 

 chord 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 hy= 

 pothesis itself is unfounded. 



Yet tlie objections that apply to the conjecture of materialism, as com- 

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

 intermediate state of being between the death and the resurrection of the 

 body, it opposes not only what appears to be the general tenour, but what 

 is, in various places, the direct declaration of the Christian Scriptures ; 

 and by conceiving the entire dissolution and dispersion of the percipient 

 as well as impercipient parts of the animal machine, of which all the atoms 

 may become afterwards constituent portions of other intelligent beings, it 

 renders a resumed individuality almost, if not altogether, impossible. § 



The id^a, that the essence or texture of the soul consists either wholly 

 or in part of spiritualized, ethereal, gaseous, or radiant matter, capable of 

 combining with the grosser matter of the body, and of becoming an 

 object of sense, seems to avoid the difficulties inherent to both systems. 

 It says to the materialist, matter is not necessarily corruptible ; as a 

 believer in the Bible, you admit that it is not so upon your own principle, 

 which maintains the body was incorruptible when it first issued from thB 



* Analysis of Religion, Natural and Revealed, Part i. ch. i. 



t Id. Part i. ch. i. p. 30. Edit. 1802. | Id. p. 29. 



§ See the author's Life of Ltiicretius, prefixed to his translation of the ]6oem De Reruns, 

 Natnra, Vol. I, p. 



47 



