526 LECTURE XCVIII. RETROSPECT OF THE ARGUMENT FOR THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL; ON OUR DUTY TO OURSELVES. My last two Lectures, Gentlemen, have been devoted to the very interesting inquiry, into the grounds which reason, without the aid of Revelation, affords, for our belief of the immortality of the sentient and thinking principle,-of that principle which is the life of our mortal frame, but which survives the dissolution of the frame which it animated. The importance of the subject will justify, or rather demand, a short retrospect of the general argument. It is from the dissolution of the body, that the presumption as to the complete mortality of our nature is derived; and it was therefore necessary, in the first place, to consider the force of this presumption, as founded on the organic decay. If thought be only a state of those seemingly contiguous particles, which we term organs, the separation of these particles may be the destruction of the thought; but if our sensations, thoughts, emotions, be states of a substance which itself exists independently of the particles, that by their juxtaposition obtain the name of organs, the separation of these particles to a greater distance from each other, (which is all the bodily change that truly takes place in death,) or even the destruction of these particles, if what we term decay, instead of being a mere form of continued existence, were absolute destruction, would not involve, though it might, or might not, be accompanied by the annihilation of the separate principle of thought. The result of this primary and most important examination was, that far from being a state of any number of particles ar ranged together in any form-thought cannot even be conceived by us, to be a quality of number or extension—that it is of its very essence, not to be divisible,—and that the top or bottom of a sentiment, or the half or quarter of a truth or falsehood, or of a joy or sorrow, is at least as absurd to our conception, as the loudness of the smell of a rose, or the scarlet colour of the sound of a trumpet. -- An organ is not one substance, because we term it one. It is truly a multitude of bodies, the existence and qualities of each of which, are independent of the existence and qualities of all the others, as truly independent, as if instead of being near to each other, they were removed to distances, relatively as great, as those of the planets, or to any other conceivable distances in the whole immensity of space. If any one were to say, the Sun has no thought, Mercury, Venus, the Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and all their secondaries, have no thought: but the Solar System has thought, we should then scarcely hesitate a single moment, in rejecting such a doctrine; because, we should feel instantly that there could be no charm in the two words, solar system, which are of our own invention, to confer on the separate masses of the heavenly bodies, what under a different form of mere verbal expression, they had been declared previously not to posWhat the sun and planets have not, the solar system, which is nothing more than that sun and planets, has not; or, if so much power be ascribed to the mere invention of a term, as to suppose that we can confer by it new qualities on things, there is a realism in philosophy, far more monstrous than any which prevailed in the Logic of the Schools. sess. If, then, the solar system cannot have properties, which the sun and planets have not, and if this be equally true, at whatever distance, near or remote, they may exist in space, it is surely equally evident, that an organ, which is only a name for a number of separate corpuscles, as the solar system is only a number of larger masses of corpuscles, cannot have any properties which are not possessed by the corpuscles themselves, at the very moment at which the organ as a whole, is said to possess them, nor any affections as a whole, additional to the affections of the separate parts. An organ is nothing; the corpuscles, to which we give that single name, are all,-and if a sensation be an organic state, it is a state of many corpuscles, which have no more unity than the greater number of particles in the multitudes of brains, which form the sensations of all mankind. Any one of the particles in any brain, has an existence as complete in itself, and as independent of the existence of the other particles of the same brain, which are a little nearer it, as of the particles of other brains, which are at a greater distance. Even though it were admitted, however, in opposition to one of the clearest truths in science, that an organ is something more than a mere name for the separate and independent bodies which it denotes, and that our various feelings are states of the sensorial or gan, it must still be allowed, that, if two hundred particles exist. ing in a particular state, form a doubt, the division of these into two equal aggregates of the particles, as they exist in this state at the moment of that particular feeling, would form halves of a doubt; that all the truths of arithmetic would be predicable of each separate thought, if it were a state of a number of particles; and the truths of geometry be, in like manner, predicable of it, if it depended on extension and form. In short, if joy or sorrow, simple and indivisible as they are felt by us to be, be not one, but a number of corpuscles separate, and divisible into an infinite number of little joys and sorrows, that may be variously arranged into spheres and parallelopipeds, any thing may, with equal certainty, be said to be any thing, however apparently opposite and contradictory. When sensation is said to be the result of organization, the vagueness of the term result, throws a sort of illusive obscurity over the supposed process, and we more readily admit the asser tion, with the meaning which the materialist would give to it,because, however false it may be in his sense, it is true in another sense. Sensation is the result of organization, a result, however, not in the organs themselves, but in a substance of which the Deity has so arranged the susceptibilities, as to render the va riety of that class of feelings which we term sensations, the effects of particular states of the particles which compose the organ. The result, therefore, is one and simple, because the mind, that alone is susceptible of the state which we term sensation, is one and simple; though the bodily particles of the state of which the one sensation is the result, are many. A sound, for example, is one, because it is an affection of the mind, which has no parts, and must always be one in all its states, though the mental affection may have required before it could take place, innumerable motions of innumerable vibratory particles, which have no unity but in their joint relation to the mind, that considers them as one, and is affected by their concurring vibrations. In like manner, in the phenomena of chemical agency, to which the phenomena of thought and feeling, as simple results, are by the materialists most strongly asserted to be analogous, it surely requires no very subtile discernment, to perceive, that, though we may speak of the result of certain mixtures, as if the result were one of simple combustion, deflagration, solution, precipitation, and the various other terms which are used to denote chemical changes, it is in the single word alone, that all the unity of the complex phenomenon is to be found, that the solution of salt in water, or the combustion of charcoal in atmospheric air, expresses not one fact, but as many separate facts as there are separate particles dissolved or burnt ;--that the unity, in short, is not in the chemical phenomena as facts, but in the mind and only in the mind, which considers all these facts together; and that the mere words combustion and solution, either signify nothing, or signify states of innumerable particles, which are not the less innumerable, because they are comprehended in a single word. Sensation then, which is not more truly felt by us in any case, as a pleasure or a pain, than it is felt to be one and incapable of division, is not a state of many particles, which would be as many separate selves, without any connecting principle that could give them unity, but a single substance, which we term mind, when we speak of it generally, or self, when we speak of it with reference to its own peculiar series of feeling. There is mind then, as well as matter, or rather, if there be a difference of the degrees of evidence, there is mind, more surely than there is matter;-and if at death, not a single atom of the body perishes, but that which we term dissolution, decay, putrifaction, is only a change of the relative positions of those atoms, which in themselves continue to exist with all the qualities which they before possessed,-there is surely no reason, from this mere change of place of the atoms that formed the body, to infer, with respect to the independent mind, any other change, than that of its mere relation to those separated atoms. The continued subsistence of every thing corporeal, cannot, at least, be regarded, as indicative of the annihilation of the other substance; but must, on the contrary, as far as the mere analogy of the body is of any weight, be regarded as a presumption in favour of the continued subsistence of the mind, when there is nothing around it, which has perished, and nothing even which has perished, in the whole material universe, since the universe itself was called into being. The Deity, however, though he has not chosen to annihilate a single atom of matter, since he created the world, may, it will be admitted, have chosen to annihilate every spiritual substance. But with the strong analogy of matter, which is the only substance that is capable of being perceived by us, in favour of the continued existence of the mind, it would be necessary, for the proof of the supposed spiritual mortality, to show some reason which may be believed to have influenced the Supreme Being, to this exclusive annihilation. The assertor of the soul's immortality, if the existence of the soul, as a separate substance, be previously demonstrated, has not so much to assign reasons for the belief of its immortality, as to obviate objections which may be urged against that belief. At the moment of death, there exists the spirit; there exist also the corporeal atoms,-at that moment, the Deity allows every atom to subsist as before. The spirit, too, if he do not annihilate it, will subsist as before. If we suppose him to annihilate it, we must suppose him to have some reason for annihilating it. Is any such reason imaginable, either in the nature of the spirit itself, or in the character of the Deity? Instead of any such reason for annihilation, that might be sup posed to justify the assertion of it, we found, on the contrary, reasons, which might of themselves lead us to expect the continued existence, far more probably than the destruction of the soul. If the Deity will, as it is evident from the whole frame of our minds, that he most truly wills, the progress of mankind, he must will the progress of the individuals of mankind;--since mankind is but a name for the individuals who compose it ;—and, if he will the progress of individuals, there can be no reason, that he should love that progress less, when the individual is capable of making greater advances, and that, merely on account of that greater capacity, he should destroy, what he sustained with so much care |