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have highly condemned in others, I should wonder to find your lordship to argue, that because "it is a difficulty to understand what should keep together the minute parts of a material soul, when life is gone; and because it is not an easy matter to give an account how the soul should be capable of immortality, unless it be an immaterial substance:" therefore it is not so credible, as if it were easy to give an account, by natural reason, how it could be. For to this it is, that all this your discourse tends, as is evident by what is already set down out of page 55, and will be more fully made out by what your lordship says in other places, though there need no such proofs, since it would all be nothing against me in any other sense.

I thought your lordship had in other places asserted, and insisted on this truth, that no part of divine revelation was the less to be believed, because the thing itself created great difficulties in the understanding, and the manner of it was hard to be explained, and it was no easy matter to give an account how it was. This, as I take it, your lordship condemned in others, as a very unreasonable principle, and such as would subvert all the articles of the Christian religion that were mere matters of faith, as I think it will: and is it possible, that you should make use of it here yourself, against the article of life and immortality, that Christ hath brought to light through the Gospel; and neither was, nor could be made out by natural reason without revelation? But you will say, you speak only of the soul; and your words are, that "it is no easy matter to give an account, how the soul should be capable of immortality, unless it be an immaterial substance." I grant it; but crave leave to say, that there is not any one of those difficulties that are, or can be raised, about the manner how a material soul can be immortal, which do not as well reach the immortality of the body.

But if it were not so, I am sure this principle of your lordship's would reach other articles of faith, wherein our natural reason finds it not easy to give an account how those mysteries are; and which therefore, according to your principles, must be less credible than other articles,

that create less difficulty to the understanding. For your lordship says, that you appeal to any man of sense whether to a man who thought by his principles he could from natural grounds demonstrate the immortality of the soul, the finding the uncertainty of those principles he went upon in point of reason, i. e. the finding he could not certainly prove it by natural reason, doth not weaken the credibility of that fundamental article, when it is considered purely as a matter of faith. Which in effect, I humbly conceive, amounts to this, that a proposition divinely revealed, that cannot be proved by natural reason, is less credible than one that can which seems to me to come very little short of this, with due reverence be it spoken, that God is less to be believed when he affirms a proposition that cannot be proved by natural reason, than when he proposes what can be proved by it. The direct contrary to which is my opinion; though you endeavour to make it good by these following words: " if the evidence of faith falls so much short of that of reason, it must needs have less effect upon men's minds, when the subserviency of reason is taken away; as it must be, when the grounds of certainty by reason are vanished. Is it at all probable, that he who finds his reason deceive him in such fundamental points, should have his faith stand firm and unmoveable on the account of revelation?" Than which, I think, there are hardly plainer words to be found out, to declare, that the credibility of God's testimony depends on the natural evidence or probability of the things we receive from revelation, and rises and falls with it; and that the truths of God, or the articles of mere faith, lose so much of their credibility, as they want proof from reason: which if true, revelation may come to have no credibility at all. For if in this present case, the credibility of this proposition, the souls of men shall live for ever, revealed in the Scripture, be lessened by confessing it cannot be demonstratively proved from reason, though it be asserted to be most highly probable; must not, by the same rule, its credibility dwindle away to nothing, if natural reason should not be able to make it out to be

VOL. IV.

I I

so much as probable, or should place the probability from natural principles on the other side? For if mere want of demonstration lessens the credibility of any proposition divinely revealed, must not want of probability, or contrary probability from natural reason, quite take away its credibility? Here at last it must end, if in any one case the veracity of God, and the credibility of the truths we receive from him by revelation, be subjected to the verdicts of human reason, and be allowed to receive any accession or diminution from other proofs, or want of other proofs of its certainty or probability.

If this be your lordship's way to promote religion, or defend its articles, I know not what argument the greatest enemies of it could use, more effectual for the subversion of those you have undertaken to defend; this being to resolve all revelation perfectly and purely into natural reason, to bound its credibility by that, and leave no room for faith in other things, than what can be accounted for by natural reason without revelation.

Your lordship insists much upon it, as if I had contradicted what I had said in my Essay, by saying, that upon my principles it cannot be demonstratively proved that it is an immaterial substance in us that thinks, however probable it be. He that will be at the pains to read that chapter of mine, and consider it, will find, that my business there was to show, that it was no harder to conceive an immaterial than a material substance; and that from the ideas of thought, and a power of moving of matter, which we experienced in ourselves (ideas originally not belonging to matter as matter) there was no more difficulty to conclude there was an immaterial substance in us, than that we had material parts. These ideas of thinking, and power of moving of matter, I in another place showed, did demonstratively lead us to the certain knowledge of the existence of an immaterial thinking being, in whom we have the idea of spirit in the strictest sense; in which sense I also applied it to the soul, in that 23d chapter of my Essay: the easily conceivable possibility, nay, great probability, that that thinking substance in us is immaterial, giving me sufficient ground for it. In which sense I shall

think I may safely attribute it to the thinking substance in us, till your lordship shall have better proved from my words, that it is impossible it should be immaterial. For I only say, that it is possible, i. e. involves no contradiction, that God, the omnipotent immaterial spirit, should, if he pleases, give to some parcels of matter, disposed as he thinks fit, a power of thinking and moving; which parcels of matter, so endued with a power of thinking and motion, might properly be called spirits, in contradistinction to unthinking matter. In all which, I presume, there is no manner of contradiction.

I justified my use of the word spirit in that sense, from the authorities of Cicero and Virgil, applying the Latin word spiritus, from whence spirit is derived, to a soul as a thinking thing, without excluding materiality out of it. To which your lordship replies, "that Cicero, in his Tusculan Questions, supposes the soul not to be a finer sort of body, but of a different nature from the body.-That he calls the body the prison of the soul. And says that a wise man's business is to draw off his soul from his body." And then your lordship concludes, as is usual, with a question, "is it possible now to think so great a man looked on the soul but as a modification of the body, which must be at an end with life?" Answ. No; it is impossible that a man of so good sense as Tully, when he uses the word corpus or body, for the gross and visible parts of a man, which he acknowledges to be mortal; should look on the soul to be a modification of that body, in a discourse wherein he was endeavouring to persuade another, that it was immortal. It is to be acknowledged that truly great men, such as he was, are not wont so manifestly to contradict themselves. He had therefore no thought concerning the modification of the body of man in the case; he was not such a trifler as to examine, whether the modification of the body of a man was immortal, when that body itself was mortal: and therefore that which he reports as Dicæarchus's opinion, he dismisses in the beginning without any more ado, c. 11. But Cicero's was a direct, plain, and sensible inquiry, viz. What the

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soul was; to see whether from thence he could discover its immortality. But in all that discourse in his first book of Tusculan Questions, where he lays out so much of his reading and reason, there is not one syllable showing the least thought, that the soul was an immaterial substance; but many things directly to the contrary.

Indeed (1.) he shuts out the body, taken in the sense he uses corpus all along*, for the sensible organical parts of a man, and is positive that is not the soul: and body in this sense, taken for the human body, he calls the prison of the soult; and says a wise man, instancing Socrates and Cato, is glad of a fair opportunity to get out of it. But he nowhere says any such thing of matter: he calls not matter in general the prison of the soul, nor talks a word of being separate from it.

(2.) He concludes, that the soul is not like other things here below, made up of a composition of the elements,

c. 27.

(3.) He excludes the two gross elements, earth and water, from being the soul, c. 26.

So far he is clear and positive; but beyond this he is uncertain; beyond this he could not get. For in some places he speaks doubtfully, whether the soul be not air or fire: " anima sit animus ignisve nescio," c. 25. And therefore he agrees with Panatius, that, if it be at all elementary, it is, as he calls it, " inflammata anima, inflamed air;" and for this he gives several reasons, c. 18, 19. And though he thinks it to be of a peculiar nature of its own, yet he is so far from thinking it immaterial, that he says, c. 19, that the admitting it to be of an aerial or igneous nature would not be inconsistent with any thing he had said.

That which he seems most to incline to is, that the soul was not at all elementary, but was of the same substance with the heavens; which Aristotle, to distinguish from the four elements and the changeable bodies here below, which he supposed made up of them, called " quinta essentia." That this was Tully's opinion, is *Chap 19, 22, 30, 31, &c.

+ So speaks Ennius: "Terra corpus est, at mens ignis est."

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