our way before us; but shadows, clouds, and darkness rest on all beyond, while the gulf on which we sail is unfathomable to the plummet of mortals

It is something more than matter, observes one class of philosophers, for matter itself is essentially unintelligent, and is utterly incapable of thought. But this is to speak with more confidence than we are warranted; and unbecomingly to limit the power of the Creator. It has already appeared that we know nothing of the essential properties of matter.* If it be capable of gravitation, of elective attractions, of life, of instinct, of sensation, there does not seem to be any absurdity in supposing it may be capable of thought; and if all these powers or endowments result from something more than matter, then is the visible world as much an immaterial as a material system.

On the other hand, it is as strongly contended by an opposite class of philosophers, and the same train of arguments has been continued, almost without variation, from the days of Epicurus, that the principle of thought or the human mind must be material; for otherwise the frame of man, we are told, will be made to consist of two distinct and adverse essences, possessing no common property or harmony of action. But this is to speak with as unbecoming a confidence as in the former case. The great visible frame of the world seems to point out to us in every part of it a co-existence either of different essences

* If the author had read Mr. Ditton's very acute disquisition, entitled "Matter not a Cogitative Substance; or, the true State of the Case about Matter's thinking," he would, probably, have considerably modified the train of reasoning in this lecture.-ED.

or of different natures of matter and a something which is not matter; or of common matter and matter possessed of properties that it does not discover in its common form. Yet all these, so far from being adverse to each other, subsist in the strictest union, and evince the completest harmony of action. And hence the soul, or intelligent principle, though combined with matter, though directly operating from a material organ, may be a something distinct from matter, and more than matter, even in its most active, etherial, and spiritualized forms; though, whatever be its actual, essence, it undoubtedly makes the nearest approach to it under such a modification.

In reality, under some such kind of etherial or shadowy make, under some such refined or spiritualized and evanescent texture, it seems in almost all ages and nations to have been handed down by universal tradition, and contemplated by the great mass of the people, whatever may have been the opinion of the philosophers, as soon as it has become separated from the body, And the opinion derives some strength from the manner in which it is stated to have been first formed in the Mosaic records, which intimate it to be a kind of divine breath, vapour, or aura, or to have proceeded from such a substance; for "God," we are told, "breathed into man's nostrils THE BREATH OF Life (D” now), and he became a living soul."*

Opposed as the two hypotheses of materialism and of immaterialism are to each other, in the sense in which they are commonly understood, it is curi

*Gen. ii. 7.

ous to observe how directly and equally they tend to one common result, with respect to a point upon which they are conceived to differ diametrically; mean an assimilation of the human soul to that of brutes.

The materialist, who traces the origin of sensation and thought from a mere modification of common matter, refers the perception and reflection of brutes to the very principle which produces them in man; and believing that this modification is equally, in both instances, destroyed by death, maintains that " as the one dieth, so dieth the other; so that a man hath no pre-eminence 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 substance 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 pe*Eccles. iii. 19.

culiar to himself, for he knows not, at that period, how to dispose of the brutal soul: he cannot destroy 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*:" 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 enquiry 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

* Analysis of Religion, Natural and Revealed, part i. ch. i. † Id. part i. ch. i. p. 30. edit. 1802. + Id. p. 29.

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 Abbé Polignac, who intrepidly follows him, gravely devotes almost a whole book of his anti-Lucretius to an elucidation 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 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