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ON THE NATURE AND CONDITION OF MAN. ESSAY III,

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THE DOCTRINES OF MATERIALISM AND IMMATERIALISM.

THE immaterialist believes, that man is possessed of two natures, or modes of existence, an external and an internal one; the external, which is the body, composed of substance or matter, he asserts to be inert, impenetrable, and senseless: susceptible neither of life, motion, feeling, reflection, or rationality; whilst the internal, which is the soul, he believes to be an immortal, unsubstantial, or immaterial and ever-thinking being, by means of which it is that we become diving, moving, sentient, and reasonable creatures. The latter of these, entering into the former, at the moment of its first receiving animation, and departing from it (with a capacity of enjoying a separate eternity of existence) at the hour of its dissolution, produces, in the mean time, all the phenomena of mind, and is supposed fully to account for the existence of all such attributes and qualities, as, although evidently existing in man, become, in fact, excluded, and are rendered inapplicable, by the previous definition of matter. This is the doctrine, and the creed of the immaterialist; and all who dare dissent from it, must expect to have their opinions stigmatized as visionary, wicked, and absurd, and to be themselves branded with the opprobious epithets of unbelievers, infidels, and atheists. Let us not, however, thus be deterred from the pursuit of truth, for such has ever been the reception which it has met with from the world, and thus it was they stigmatized our predecessors and our forefathers of old time; thus we find the early Christians were persecuted as atheists, because they disbelieved in a plura lity of gods; Galileo, long since that time, was burnt for impiety in Italy, for contending that the earth revolved round the sun; and little better than a century since, the French philosophers ridiculed the system of Newton as absurd, because, by attributing to matter the properties of attraction and repulsion, it accounted for the revolution of the planets without the assistance of the ethereal and spir tual machinery which they deemed absolutely necessary to burk them into motion, & 987 2121

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The charges of atheism, of impiety, and absurdity, have, in these instances, however, been long since retorted on the heads of those who made them, whilst the opinions of their adversaries have been almost universally established; and thus, in the course of a few centuries, when truth, reason, and revelation, shall have triumphed over prejudice, error,

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and superstition; when observation and reflection shall have taught mankind the folly of such a system; and when, in the philosophy of the mind, as in every other science, they shall be content to abide by the test of experience and clear deduction, and no longer build their opinions on the extravagant delusions of theory-thus will it also probably fare with the doctrines, and the defenders of immaterialism.

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The immaterialist will tell you that every other system, except his own, is visionary, fanciful, and unfounded. What! and shall that man talk of visionary systems, who himself peoples the whole surface of the earth with spirits, with shadows, and with airy unsubstantial visions? Shall that man exclaim against fanciful and unfounded theories, who, with the potent wand of his own, imagination, conjures from the vasty deep innumerable troops of such airy beings, and visionary spectres, and then will seriously inform you that these, entering into masses of" inert, impenetrable, and sense'less matter," into mere clods of earth, will cause them to leap up, and walk, and talk, and eat, and drink, and sleep, actually mocking their fellow clods, and even deceiving themselves into the vain and absurd belief that they are reasonable erea ́tures—then, when the mummery is over, departing from them, leaving their temporary habitations to become clay and earth again-themselves to enter into a more perfect and a more blissful state of being? Surely this is to out-herod Herod, and to tread beyond the very verge of possibility! How very little, after this, appear the wonders of romance, and the fictions of poetry, and all the minor wanderings of the human imagination!

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The immaterialist affirms that every other system is absurd and foolish ;-but with what face, with what faint sha dow of plausibility, can that man talk of absurdity and folly in others, who himself not only belieyes in the existence of such spiritual beings as we have here described, but who actually asserts that such belief is rational, philosophical, and just--who, seeing that every thing which has existence is subject to decay, wisely therefore concludes, that, by depriving the soul of every possible mode of existence, he shall rationally account for its immortality :-who contends that matter and spirit, possessing no properties in common, may yet be intimately combined, and be made mutually to act upon each other-who, forced to confess that in every discoverable case, in this world, the soul never acts without the intervention of the senses, yet continues to assert that it is capable of an after and a separate existence in ano

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therand, yet more than all, who, believing that the body is only a clog, and an incumbrance to the soul, confining its powers, and chaining down its faculties, yet professes to look forward with hope and with pleasure to the day, when this same incumbrance shall be restored, and the soul, restrained in its aspiring flight, shall again be chained down within its tenement of base and worthless clay?

The immaterialist contends, that those who deny the im mortality of the soul are infidels and unbelievers, and that they must necessarily disbelieve in the religion of Jesus'; a few words on this matter will suffice, for, so perfectly apparent is this part of the subject, that, should they not succeed in retorting back the charge upon those who make it, whole pages, nay whole volumes, would fail of their effect; suffice it then to say, that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul is at direct and perfect variance with the promise of a resurrection from the dead; the terms of the two propositions are indeed directly opposed to each other; they contain at once a verbal and an actual contradiction within themselves. That they cannot therefore both be true is apparent; one of them must be false; one of them, in the very nature of things, must be nothing more than an idle and a worthless fable-we can only have our choice between them-really to retain them both (however some persons may deceive themselves) is an absolute and a moral impossibility. Jesus came to teach a resurrection from the dead, through the will and by the unaided power of the same being who first called us into existence; but, if the soul be immortal, we can have no occasion for such a resurrection; it is an event which never can be required, and which consequently never can take place. Should therefore the soul be proved immortal, Jesus was an impostor; should the soul be proved immortal, we need no longer to be Christians, no longer to look forward with anxious and with trembling hope to the day of restoration into life: the spark of immortality is within us, eternity is mixed up in the very essence of our nature, and it becomes an unalterable law of our being that we should never die! In that case, parodying, or rather applying, the words of the dramatic poet, we may triumphantly exclaim,

"The soul, secured in her existence, smiles

At the weak gospel, and belies its words."

Lastly, the immaterialist, to crown the whole, asserts that those who doubt, or who deny the existence of the spi ritual agency which he believes in, are concealed atheists,

who in fact deny the necessity for the existence of a God. To allow, he argues, that matter is capable of life and animation, that it may be so organized as to produce thought, memory, reflection, and all the phenomena of mind, is to allow that there is no necessity for the interference of a Creator-for matter, he says, may have always existed, and, upon such a supposition, have always had that power. In reply to this, we must observe that the argument, bad in itself, holds good with greater force against his own opinions, than against those of his adversaries; for surely spirits, whatever may be the case with mortal matter-yet surely spiritual beings, of a nature so exalted as to be endued with powers of immortality, may rationally be supposed capable of having existed throughout a previous eternity; and where then will be the necessity, nay the possibility, of believing in the existence of a prior cause that called them into being? Besides, in denying the possibility of the Deity's making man of the dust of the earth alone, do they not circumscribe his powers, and contradict the tenor of his revelation? And (knowing him as we do merely by the boundless display of those powers, and the facts and the promises of that revelation,) is not that in fact and in reality to doubt and to deny the truth of his existence? Yet such is actually the effect of the creed, and such the natural consequence of the doctrines, which are held and strenuously maintained by the supporters of immaterialism!

So much then, at present, for that creed, so much for those doctrines-we leave them to their defenders to enjoy in peace, and are perfectly willing to await the slow but certain operation of time for their destruction; for ourselves, we have now to proceed to a more pleasing task; having destroyed the old fabric, it remains with us to erect a new one in its stead; having exploded opinions, which, though maintained by the great majority of mankind, are evidently visionary, absurd, and impious, contradicted by revelation, and at variance with just philosophy, we have now, in the place of such, to display a belief, which, however it may have been opposed, and how few soever may be its votaries, is in fact rational in itself, clear in its doctrines, simple in its principles, and morally advantageous in its consequences; at once supported by the facts and promises of revelation, and in accordance with all we know of the real and philosophical nature of things. The belief referred to, has generally been called by the name of materialism, as contradistinguished from the system which we have already commented upon; it consists in an opinion that man is possessed of only one na

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ture, that he has no opposite or contending principles with in him, which are ever at variance with and preying upon each other; that his qualities, both bodily and mental, are all and equally the result of that species of organization, which the Great Cause of all things has in his wisdom provided should ever be productive of such effects; that when he dies he ceases to exist; and, above all, that it is only from the mercy, and the wisdom, and the power of his Creator, and not, from any indestructible source of being inherent in himself, that he can expect to enjoy a future and an eteriral state of existence.

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Leaving for the present every other view of this subject, we shall content ourselves with briefly examining it, according to the plain and popular principles of philosophy ; viewing things as we really find them in nature, to every effect assigning a sufficient cause, but to none allowing more than is absolutely necessary for its production. “And here we must first repeat the common, but too often neglećted maxim, that we know nothing either of the internal itature of things, or of the real and final causes which operate to produce them; on this subject it is perhaps, in our present state, a moral impossibility that we should possess a single idea; all we have to do with are facts, effects, and consequences, as we really find them in nature; these we must either note down immediately from observation, or elicit by experiment; but, having found them, all we have to do is to believe in their existence, and, arranging them in their proper places, connect them with the rest of our knowledge, that is, with each other, in order to the formation of a system of philosophy, which shall be as nearly accordant with the actual phenomena of nature, as it lies within our power 40 obtain. With regard, for instance, to the properties of bodies, we only know them by the effects produced by those bodies upon our senses; and whatever effects are universally found to be produced, these, however wonderful or incredible they may appear to us, we must necessarily consider as inherent and inalienable qualities, upon which our ideas and definitions of those bodies must be founded. It is, for example, by these means we arrive at the facts that fire is endued with heat, whilst ice on the contrary is cold; that hardness is a property of iron, elasticity of ivory, fluidity of water, and combustion of gunpowder; these are things, none of which we can in reality account for, or should, in the first instance, have guesed at, or suspected; but still there is one very cogent reason for inducing us to think them possible, and for believing their existence, which

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