Abstract reasonings cannot decide any question of
fact or existence. But admitting a spiritual substance to be
dispersed throughout the universe, like the ethereal fire of the
Stoics, and to be the only inherent subject of thought, we have
reason to conclude from _analogy_, that nature uses it after the
manner she does the other substance, _matter_. She employs it as a
kind of paste or clay; modifies it into a variety of forms or
existences; dissolves after a time each modification, and from its
substance erects a new form. As the same material substance may
successively compose the bodies of all animals, the same spiritual
substance may compose their minds: Their consciousness, or that
system of thought which they formed during life, may be continually
dissolved by death, and nothing interests them in the new
modification. The most positive assertors of the mortality of the
soul never denied the immortality of its substance; and that an
immaterial substance, as well as a material, may lose its memory
or consciousness, appears in part from experience, if the soul be
immaterial. Seasoning from the common course of nature, and without
supposing any new interposition of the Supreme Cause, which ought
always to be excluded from philosophy, _what is incorruptible must
also be ingenerable_. The soul, therefore, if immortal, existed
before our birth, and if the former existence noways concerned us,
neither will the latter.
Pages:
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206