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"quod declarat eorum similitudo, qui procreantur, quae "etiam in ingeniis, non solum in corporibus, appareat." Here the words, quod nemo negat, ar from Cicero, asserting as an Axiom universally accepted, that "What"ever is born perishes," or "Whatever has a beginning "has an end." If this is really a just Axiom, there is an end of discussion. What began with the organization of the brain ends with the disorganization.

SECTION III.

ST. PAUL'S ARGUMENT.

PAUL himself avows that "God only hath immortality," (1. Tim. vi. 16,) meaning (no doubt) that in no creature can immortality be inherent and natural. According to him the resurrection even of Jesus was not in conformity to the laws of nature, but in vehement contrast: it was an extraordinary display of God's mighty power (Ephes. i. 20). Christians also ar to be "raised from the dead" by a like extraordinary exertion of divine power, because of their moral relation to the Christ, the first-fruits from the dead. Only by the Author of Nature abandoning the routine of Nature did Paul expect any future life. This position of the argument is then intelligible and clear. There is no pretence of reasoning out immortality from Physics, nor any possible clash with Physical Science. The Creator (according to him) for Moral reasons violates Physical analogies, just as in the other Christian and Jewish miracles.

All this is to me reasonable in one who believes the miraculous theory to hav adequate evidence. Against this I am not here arguing.

SECTION IV.

PLATO'S ARGUMENT.

PLATO, in the celebrated chapter of his Phaedrus, which Cicero has closely translated (Tusc. Q. I. 23) evades the Greek Axiom on which Panatius relies, by asserting that every soul is unoriginated, or, as he entitles it, unbegotten, (ayévητov), because "it moves itself," and "will never be deserted by itself." It is hard to make those Englishmen who ar unversed in ancient literature, to believe that one is not misunderstanding and garbling Plato; so incredibly absurd is his reasoning to English common sense. Nor is that all; but on religious grounds it is gravely offensiv. Plato's first words (Phaed. 51) are: "Every soul is immortal: for, what is always in "motion is immortal:"-and with him the word soul includes all animal life. Whatever moves itself, he maintains to hav had no origin in the past, and to be certain to hav no end of life in the future. This makes every living thing to be virtually a little god, uncreated and eternal. Thus all, whether oyster or man, are cöeternal with God; and man is to believe himself to be immortal, by force of the argument which makes shell-fish, worms and butterflies immortal. Whence has Plato deduced this doctrin? From his own assertion that every soul is ever in motion (devтov) and "will "not desert itself"! Can any effort at wisdom be more fatuous?

Elsewhere the past existence of every human soul is inferred by Plato from the ease with which children learn. Therefore (according to him) learning is simply remembering. The children (forsooth) knew the thing, when their souls were inhabiting other bodies, and because they remember, they seem now to learn easily.

Whatever be the merits of Plato in topics which I do not profess to understand, I cannot repress nor care to conceal my utter contempt for such argument. The very notion that my soul once lived in an earlier body destroys all moral importance in the alledged immortality. For (nearly as Cicero puts it) if my soul animated the body of a hero who fought at the side of king Agamemnon, I yet cannot identify myself with that hero. I hav no intelligible relation to him; I care nothing about him; why the more should I care about my future soul? It will not be myself, any more than was the old soul. Thus Plato's doctrin of immortality is as empty of moral as of logical weight.

SECTION V.

BISHOP BUTLER'S MODIFICATION OF PLATO'S ARGUMENT. SIGNALLY unchristian in tone and spirit as was Plato's argument, wholely destitute of the moral reasons which alone make the Christian doctrin respectable, Bishop Butler did not despair of it, and (some say) has improved upon it. He throws away the absurdity of a past eternity for the soul, and is satisfied with the doctrin that "all living power is indestructible." But this principle is not proved--nor, it seems, is it provable. No Christian can seriously alledge that in creating the souls of men and of butterflies God barred himself from destroying them: how then can they fitly be called "indestructible"? Further, in Butler's day Geology was not yet born. He did not know that rocks of vast extent and depth consist of shells once animated; while according to his theory the souls which formerly dwelt in those billions of shells either ar now roving ghosts or animate new bodies.

TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS.

THE idea of Transmigration seemed natural to an old Egyptian or Indian, or to an Arabian story teller. I scarcely believe Plato, when he represents it as not inadmissible even with Socrates. In the Sanskrit moral poetry, the Centuries of Bhartrihari, which the Rev. B. Hale Wortham has recently translated [Trubner's Oriental Series] take for granted that every human soul has lived in some earlier body. So too in our fourth Gospel, ix. 2. That the doctrin is revived in our "Hermetic Society," I now infer: for, a member writes to me, that Jesus of Nazareth "had attained full regene"ration" through the fact, that his "soul was perfected "by suffering in his former lives." But for this, I should hav dared to assert that no educated European now believes in transmigration. The ancients supposed that if the soul of Phalaris (the Greek type of cruelty) migrated into the body of a panther, that panther would be the identical Phalaris, and that thus the tyrant would be fitly punished. Morally, it is more specious to believe, that if a man cruelly misuses his horse, he will be punished after death by being turned into a horse, because (say we) "it will serve him right." The identity of an animal seems to be lost, if it be deprived of its fundamental instincts. Not only is it impossible to imagin what is meant by affirming that the soul of a horse has migrated into the body of a panther; but even into the body of a bull, seems self-confuting. The instincts of the animals ar contrasted. The same soul cannot hav opposit qualities. Identity perishes in such a transference. If it be said that some instincts ar bodily, not mental,as the proclivity to eating grass in the horse and to eating

flesh in the panther,-yet other essential instincts ar mental. The dog loves companionship with man; his gratitude for caresses and kind gifts is instinctiv, essential and purely mental. To imagin his soul passing into a hyæna and remaining the same soul, is to me a contradiction. That the ancients admitted such ideas as steps of religious thought, warns us of their mental unsoundness.

No such collision of primitiv instincts is involved in the idea of the re-birth of a deceased man in a human infant, the fundamental nature being in this case preserved. Nevertheless, knowing as we do how the mind and whole character of the child is moulded, built up and trained, and the highly complex variety of character in the human adult, acquired and made habitual in the course of a previous life,--the notion that the old soul can anyhow be identified with the unformed infant soul appears an error as glaring and indefensible, as any metamorphosis of bestial souls. Where religious fear crushes every attempt at criticism as a sin, of course all contradictions can be accepted reverently; but when a mind that has cast off traditional beliefs and aspires to think freely, propounds as truth that the same human soul has lived through a series of human bodies,-to me it betokens a state of mind too antiquated or (shall we say?) too Oriental to be argued with.

Naturalists will not even admit that the soul of a modern oyster may be the very same soul as one which animated an Ammonite or a nautilus. Hence in each new series of Geological inhabitants of our Oceans, consisting of new species, no one believes the Creativ Power to hav economized vital forces by using the old souls again and again in new bodies. Excluding this Transmigration, we hav to supplement Bishop Butler's theory by supposing that all the old souls that lived in the vast periods of time which Geology in vain tries to measure,

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