powerful than the force of argument, and even breathing of divine inspiration, that, in his last moments, he triumphed in the persuasion of its truth, and had scarcely a doubt upon his mind. When the venerable sage, at this time in his seventieth year, took the poisoned cup, to which he had been condemned by an ungrateful country, he alone stood unmoved while his friends were weeping around him he upbraided their cowardice, and entreated them to exercise a manliness worthy of the patrons of virtue: "It would, indeed," said he, " be inexcusable in me to despise death if I were not persuaded that it will conduct me into the presence of the gods, the righteous governors of the universe, and into the society of just and good men: but I draw confidence from the hope that something of man remains after death, and that the state of the good will be much better than that of the bad." He drank the deadly cup, and shortly afterwards expired. Such was the end of the virtuous Socrates! "A story," says Cicero, " which I never read without tears."* The soul of the Platonic system is a much more scholastic compound than that of the Socratic; it is in truth a motley triad produced by an emanation from the Deity or Eternal Intelligence, uniting itself with some portion of the soul of the world, and some portion of matter. In his celebrated Phædo, Plato distinctly teaches, and endeavours to prove, that this compound structure had a pre-existent being, and is immortal in its own nature; and that * Mem. Xen. 1. i. Nat. Deor. iii. 33. qui Socratem transtulit è carcere in cœlum. Calix venenatus as it did exist in a separate state antecedently to its union with the body, it will probably continue to exist in the same manner after death. There are various other arguments in favour of its immortality introduced into the same dialogue, and, like the present, derived from the different tenets of his own fanciful theory; in no respect more cogent, and only calculated for the meridian of the schools. In the writings of Aristotle there is nothing which decisively determines whether he thought the human soul mortal or immortal; but the former is most probable from the notion he entertained concerning its nature and origin; conceiving it to be an intellectual power, externally transmitted into the human body from the eternal intelligence, the common source of rationality to human beings. Aristotle does not inform his readers what he conceived the principle, thus universally communicated, to consist of; but there is no proof that he supposed it would continue after the death of the body.* The grand opponent of the soul's immortality, He however, among the Greeks, was Epicurus. conceived it to be a fine, elastic, sublimated, spiritualized gas or aura, composed of the most subtle parts of the atmosphere, as caloric, pure air, and vapour+, introduced into the system in the act of respiration, peculiarly elaborated by peculiar organs, and united with a something still lighter, still rarer, De Gen. An. ii. 3. iii. 11. Cic. Tusc. Q. i. 10. Enfield's Brucker, i. 285. In the language of Lucretius, iii. 284. Et calor Ventus et aer and more active than all the rest; at that time destitute of name, and incapable of sensible detection, offering a wonderful resemblance to the electric or galvanic gas of modern times. In the words of Lucretius, who has so accurately and elegantly described the whole of the Epicurean system: Penitus prorsum latet hæc natura, subestque ; * Far from all vision this profoundly lurks, The soul thus produced, Epicurus affirmed, must be material, because we can trace it issuing from a material source; because it exists, and exists alone in a material system; is nourished by material food; grows with the growth of the body; becomes matured with its maturity; declines 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 principle and quality connected with matter, are equally submitted to our senses, and equally comprehended by them. It has already appeared that we cannot determine for certain whether one or two of the principles which enter into the composition of the soul, upon this philosopher's own system, are matter, or something superior to matter, and, consequently, a distinct * Lib. iii. 274. 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 corcle, 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 the heavens as the grosser materials that surround the corcle are decaying. In like manner the decomposition of lime-stone, instead 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 themselves, 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 creation of the world. And in the light and gaseous texture in which we are at present contemplating it, it is still more inseparable and difficult of decomposition. Whether 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, which this philosophy admits, produces the different degrees of its perfection, may also be sufficient to produce a difference 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 duration 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 research into the important question before us. A loose and glimmering twilight appears to have been common to most nations: but the more men attempted to reason upon it, at least with a single exception or two, the more they doubted and became involved in difficulties. They believed and they disbelieved, they hoped and they feared, and life passed away in a state of perpetual anxiety and agitation. But this was not all: perplexed, even where they admitted the doctrine, about the will of the Deity, and the mode of securing his favour after death, with their own abstruse speculations they intermixed the religion of the multitude. They |