380 



ON THE NATURE AND 



exists alone in a material system ; is nourished by material food ; grows 

 with the growth of the body; becomes matured with its maturity ; de- 

 clines with its decay ; and hence, whether belonging to man or brutes, 

 must die with its death. 



But this is to suppose that every combination of matter, and every prin- 

 ciple and quality connected with matter, are equally submitted to our 

 senses, and equally comprehended by them. It has already appeared that 

 we cannot determme for certain whether one or two of the principles which 

 enters into the composition of the soul, upon this philosopher's own system, 

 are matter, or something superior to matter, and, consequently, a distinct 

 essence blended with it, out of the animal fabric as well as in it. Yet if 

 they be matter, and the soul thus consists of matter, of a matter far lighter, 

 more subtilized and active than that of the body, it does not follow that it 

 must necessarily perish with the body. The very minute heartlet, or cor- 

 de, 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 tlie heavens as the grosser materials that surround the 

 corcle are decaying. In like manner, the decomposition of limestone, in- 

 stead of destroying, sets at liberty the light gas that was imprisoned in its 

 texture ; and the gay and gaudy butterfly 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 them- 

 selves, as well as the best schools of modern philosophy, believed it to be 

 solid and unchangeable in its elementary particles. Crystallized into 

 granitic mountains, we have innumerable instances of its appearing to 

 have resisted the united assaults of time and tempests ever since the crea- 

 tion of the world. And in the light and gaseous texture in which we are 

 at present contemplating it, it is still more inseparable and difficfilt of 

 decomposition. W hether 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 modification, or elaboration, \vhich this philosophy admits produces the 

 different degrees of its perfection, may also be sufficient to produce a dif- 

 ference 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 immaterial 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 dura- 

 tion 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 

 appears to have been common to most nations ; but the more men at- 

 tempted to reason upon it, at least with a single exception or two, the 

 inore they doubted and became involved in difficulties. They believed 

 find they disbelieved, they hoped and they feared, and life passed away in 



