QUESTIONS ON CHAPTER IV. Of how many kinds are inquiries concerning the human mind? What do they respect? With which is true philosophy mostly concerned? Define the mind. Explain. What is said of the creation of the first man? What is meant by the essence of mind? What do we know of it? What is said of the question to Marivaux? What do we know of the essence of matter? What is said of resolving the essence of mind or of matter into its properties? What do those who do this make the mind? What is said of the theory that makes the essence of mind caloric? What of the theory of monads? What has been the consequence of not duly limiting inquiries on this subject? To what have some been led? To what others? What do we know of the mind? How do we define matter? How mind? What is said of the materiality or immateriality of mind? State the properties of matter, as contrasted with those of mind. What is the inference? What is said respecting the personal identity of the human mind? By what are all the arguments against our identity contradicted? What is said of a man executed for murder? CHAPTER V. IMMORTALITY OF THE HUMAN MIND. Is the human mind immortal? A more interesting inquiry could scarcely engage attention. Whether we are to exist as intelligent beings only during the fleeting moments of this life, or forever, is a question sometimes pressing upon us with resistless force. Childhood and youth, filled with earthly pleasures and prospects, often think little of the future; but age, sickness, approaching death awaken serious consideration, and send many an anxious thought beyond the grave. Indeed, there are to most persons, quite early in life, seasons of anxious inquiry concerning the future state. is the design of this chapter to meet persons thus disposed with such considerations as may serve to resolve doubts. WHY THE MIND'S IMMORTALITY IS DOUBTED. It All virtuous men, in their senses, wish to live forever. Why, then, if our immortality is clearly revealed in the Scriptures, is it so often doubted? The chief cause of doubt probably lies in the difficulty of conceiving how we can exist as living and conscious beings after our bodily senses have perished. We are at present so dependent upon them; our seeing, hearing, tasting; our intercourse with friends, and with the world at large; all our intellectual and social enjoyments, are so related to the sensuous organs, that it is hard to see how the one can continue to exist without the other. At first view, all that pertains to and constitutes the living being seems to perish with the body. But this view is hasty ab superficial. A more philosophical and thorough obse vation leads to a very different conclusion. NO MAN CAN PROVE THAT THE MIND IS NOT IMMORTA No man has ever proved, nor can prove, that human mind is not immortal. Much as man may do the arguments for its immortality, they must confess t they can bring no proof to the contrary. The most t can claim is, that they know nothing of what lies beyʊs this life. But their ignorance can have no wei whatever in deciding the question. Ignorance is ative, and of course has no weight in a case to: decided only by evidence. We may then positive reassert, that no man can show that there is not & other and higher mode of being awaiting us hereaf EVEN SUPPOSING THE MIND MATERIAL, IT IS NOT NECESSARILY MORTAL. If matter is eternal, as materialists assert, and if : nind is material, then why may not the mind be as during as the matter of which it is made? If matter immortal, and matter makes mind, why may not be immortal? But it is said that the mind is a result. a peculiar organization of matter, and as that organiz tion is destroyed by death, the mind of course perishe Let us see. The human mind is either a material substance of pure spirit. If a material substance, it has been show in the preceding chapter, that the matter must be diff ent from any with which our senses are conversant. may, then, be matter of so refined and ethereal a chara ter as to be independent of this gross, visible organiz tion. What we know of matter in its more subtile for proves this. The wonderful operations of light, calo: attraction, polarization, electricity, galvanism, not o prove that matter exists in forms invisible to mortal eye but that the more refined and ethereal the matter, the more mighty are its operations. What more subtile, more nearly approaching our conceptions of spirit, than caloric or electricity? And what more mighty? If, then, the materialist choose to hold his ground that there can be no existence which has not matter for its basis, we will here meet him on his own ground. In condescension to his habits of thought, grant him that the essence of whatever exists must be matter; still, as has been shown, the essence of mind may be matter so ethereal as that the dissolution of this visible body can have no effect to destroy it. The dissolution of the body may but serve. to free it of the grossness which encumbers it, and send it forth on freer wing to higher modes of being. The question of the mind's immortality does not, then, necessarily turn on the question of its immateriality. Even if man could prove the mind material, he could not prove it to be consequently mortal. ARGUMENT FROM THE MIND'S IMMATERIALITY. But if the mind is pure spirit, as all facts seem to prove, the dissolution of the body cannot destroy it. The dissolution of the body is only a physical change. It is not an annihilation, but only a change of organic combinations. It does not, of course, touch a purely spiritual existence. The mind being strictly one and indivisible, not organic, but spiritual,-its existence is, of course, independent of the body. Dr. Thomas Brown holds on this subject the following argument, which is so much to my purpose, that I quote it entire: "The body, though it may seem to denote a single substance, is but a single word invented by us to express many coexisting substances; every atom of it exists after death as it existed before death; and it would surely be a very strange error in logic, to infer, from the continuance of every thing that existed in the body, the destruction of that which, by its own nature, seemed as little mortal as any of the atoms which have not ceased to exist; and to infer this annihilation of mind, not merely without any direct proof of the annihilation, but without a single proof of the destruction of any thing else since the universe was founded. Death is a process in which every thing corporeal continues to exist; therefore, all that is mortal ceases to exist. It would not be easy to discover a link of any sort that might be supposed to connect the two propositions of so very strange an enthymem. The very decay of the body, then, bears testimony, not to the destruction, but to the continuance of the undying spirit. The mind is a substance distinct from the bodily organs, simple and incapable of addition or subtraction, and nothing which we are capable of observing in the universe has ceased since the universe began. When every thing external fades upon our eye, does the spirit within, that almost gave its own life to every thing external, fade likewise? Or is there not something over which the accidents that injure or destroy our mortal frame have no power that continues still to subsist, in the dissolution of all our bodily elements, and that would continue to subsist, though not the body only, but the earth, and the sun, and the whole system of external things were to pass into new forms of combination, or to perish, as if they had never been, in the void of the universe? There is within us an immortal spirit. We die to those around us, indeed, when the bodily frame, which alone is the instrument of communion with them, ceases to be an instrument, by the absence of the mind which is obeyed. But though the body moulders into earth, the spirit, which is of purer origin, returns to its purer source. What Lucretius said of it is true, in a sense far nobler than that which he intended." * "Cedit item retro de terra quod fuit ante, In terram; sed quod missum est ex ætheris oris, HOW MUCH THIS ARGUMENT PROVES. Admitting the strict immateriality and unity of the mind, this argument for its independence of the body is * Brown's Philosophy, vol. ii. p. 461. |