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 sens

ation 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 peculiar 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 argu

* Eccles. iii. 19.

ment; 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 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

* Analysis of Religion, Natural and Revealed, part i. ch. i.

† Id. part i. ch. i. p. 30. Edit. 1802. ‡ Id. p. 29.

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 and dispersion of the percipient as well as impercipient parts of the animal machine, of which all the atoms may become afterwards constituent portions of other intelligent beings, it renders a resumed individuality almost, if not altogether, impossible.

The idea that the essence or texture of the soul consists either wholly or in part of spiritualised, etherial, gaseous, or radiant matter, capable of combining with the grosser matter of the body, and of becoming an object of sense, seems to avoid the difficulties inherent to both systems. It says to the materialist, matter is not necessarily corruptible; as a believer in the Bible, you admit that it is not so upon your own principle, which maintains that the body was incorruptible when it first issued from the hands of its Maker, and that it will be incorruptible upon its resurrection. It says to the immaterialist, the term immaterial conveys no determinate idea; it has been forcibly enlisted into service, and at the same time by no means answers the purpose that was intended. It tells him that it is a term not to be found in the Scriptures, which, so far from opposing the belief that the soul, spirit, or immortal part of man, is either wholly or in combination, a system of radiant or etherial matter, seem rather, on the contrary, to countenance it, not only, as I have already observed, by expressly

See the author's Life of Lucretius, prefixed to his translation of the poem De Rerum Natura, vol. i. p. 92.

asserting that it was originally formed out of a divine breath, aura, or vapour, but by presenting it to us under some such condition in every instance in which departed spirits are stated to have re-appeared.

That a principle of the same kind, though under a less active and elaborate modification, appertains to the different tribes of brutes, there can, I think, be no fair reason to doubt. Yet it by no means follows that in them it must be also immortal. Matter, as we have already seen, is not necessarily corruptible, nor have we any reason to suppose, that whatever is immaterial is necessarily incorruptible. Immortality is in every instance a special gift of the Creator; and so wide is the gulf that exists between the intelligence of man and that of the brute tribes, that there can be no difficulty in conceiving where the line is drawn, and the special endowment terminates. It is an attribute natural to the being of man, merely because his indulgent Maker has made it so; but there is nothing either in natural or revealed religion that can lead us to the same conclusion in respect of brutes; and hence, to speak of their natural immortality is altogether visionary and unphilosophical.

In reality, the difference between this suggested hypothesis and that of the general body of immaterialists, is little more than verbal. For there are few of them who do not conceive in their hearts (with what logical strictness I stay not to enquire) that the soul, in its separate