say, reason alone speaks thus, reason and Scripture thus, whatever may be the language of reason, Scripture, and tradition.

And secondly tradition has not been appealed to, because it is not to be believed that the various and vague notions of the Christian writers of the third and fourth centuries, to whom those who differ from the author would refer, were founded upon any apostolic tradition whatever. What is called church-tradition variously contradicts Scripture, but neither interprets it, nor pronounces any unanimous and definite sentence of its own, concerning the state of the dead. And there are good grounds for supposing that, according to the general belief of Christians of the first two centuries at least, the dead remained out of the reach of joy or pain, until the day of resurrection."*

* See Appendix.

BOOK I.

PHYSICAL EVIDENCES OF A FUTURE LIFE.

CHAPTER I.

ON THE DEPENDENCE OF THE HUMAN MIND

TH

ON THE BODY; AND ON SLEEP.

'HE opinion that the soul will continue to exist, and will experience no diminution, at least, of its powers, after the dissolution of the body which ensues on death, has been maintained, without any aid from Scripture, or from any moral considerations, chiefly upon the two following grounds. Its independence of the body; as being an immaterial thing, which cannot possibly owe its existence to any arrangement or structure of material senseless particles ;-and its essentially indestructible nature; as being one and indivisible, and therefore incapable of dissolution or decay, or indeed of any change whatever.

The object of this first, and of several following chapters is, to show that granting the immateriality of the soul, a connection with the body, such as we know to exist during life, however incompre

* Lord Brougham has founded an argument, upon which he places great reliance, and which will be stated and considered in a future chapter, upon the fact of a "chronic dissolution" of the body during life.

DEPENDENCE OF THE MIND ON THE BODY. 23

hensible the nature of the connection may be, as apparently essential to the exercise of any of the mental functions; and in the latter part of the book it is argued, that even if consciousness, and the subject in which it resides, be indivisible, and be indestructible, consciousness is nevertheless capable of complete suspension, and probably will be completely suspended by, and after, death.

In reference to the first point Bishop Butler, the most successful of all vindicators of the reasonableness of the Gospel dispensation, has argued, and justly enough, that if death and the dissolution of the body do not of themselves destroy our capacity for thought and action, we may reasonably expect to retain it through and after death. That death does not destroy them would certainly be a "sufficient reason" for supposing them to survive. And many facts have been brought forward, by Butler, and by other writers, with a view to show that death does not in any way destroy this capacity. Matter, it is observed, is universally, under every form and in every modification, inert and insensate; no commixture of elements, however subtle, no organization, however complicated, can impart to it motion or life. These are derived from the soul, the body being merely the means by which we per

These are not the same thing; but one the cause of the other; as will be hereafter further considered. This has been generally overlooked: and has led to much and serious misrepresentation.

ceive and act upon external things. How then, it is argued, can the dissolution of these elements, or the breaking up of this structure, destroy or impair the soul? Now not to call in question, in this place, the justice of the assumption, that man, mind and body,-is nothing beyond an aggregation of passive particles, and an indivisible soul; it can only be replied that our inability to explain how the body can influence the soul at the time of death must not be permitted to create any doubt that such an influence is possible, unless we are also entitled to doubt that the mind and body reciprocally influence one another during life, because we are unable to give any account of the mode by which that influence is maintained. The language of some writers is such, indeed, as to go far towards denying this connexion and influence, at least that of body on mind, altogether. Dr. Butler calls consciousness one and indivisible, and argues that it is therefore indissoluble, imperishable, unchangeable and further says that the subject in which consciousness resides, the mind, must be so to. Is then the mind, the whole mind, unchangeable? This it seems would naturally follow.

And Lord Brougham speaks of the mind, as continuing the same, from youth to old age, amidst all the changes of the body, "without shadow of turning." Now there may be some inmost essence of soul, some consciousness of consciousness, which remains the same during all the waking hours at least, of a man's life. And

there may be, beyond this, some faculty of consciousness, which remains the same during the profoundest sleep, the most utter insensibility, and which even death will not destroy. But however this be, it is certain that the mind does possess and exert powers at one time, which it does not possess, or (which is practically just the same thing) cannot exert, at another; and is, in a perfectly intelligible sense, the most changeable thing we know. And are we to reject all that is changeable; and having thus reduced the mind as it were to the skeleton of its former self, call man an immortal being? Such an existence would be of no value; it would be a virtual death. Unless not merely the faculty of consciousness, but all or a considerable portion of the active and ever varying energies of the mind, remain entire and unimpaired after the dissolution of the body, nothing remains worth contending for. And the question now to be considered is, whether there is, or is not, so close a connexion between mind and body, as that the latter is essential, if not to the bare existence of mind in the abstract, at least to the exercise of the mental functions. The practically The practically important question is, not whether any capacity for thought, but whether any thoughts, will survive the death of the body; or whether they will not "all perish, when man returns to his earth."

There are many facts, familiarly known, and indeed matters of universal experience, which very strongly show, that the mind, however dis