must therefore be in all respects such as to be certain of facing with a like impunity every other contingency which, for aught we know, the dimness of the future may enfold in its ample bosom. Such questions may remain open and without prejudice for independent discussion.

There is a fourth observation to be borne in mind when we set about the consideration of Butler's chapter. It does not form a necessary part of his general argument. He might, without this chapter, put in array all the facts experimentally ascertained which prove the existence in this world of a government by rewards and punishments, and the righteous character of that government; and might, with this apparatus of moral considerations, now made ready for use, build upon them the usual and irresistible arguments for a future state. From the opening sentences of the chapter, he seems to enter upon it with reluctance, and only because he thinks it practicable and needful to clear the subject from certain metaphysical difficulties as to personal identity with which it has been darkened, and which, unless removed, might bar his access to the great moral argument he desires to introduce.

Addressing himself to his task under these circumstances, his argument is partly negative, and partly affirmative. The first goes to show the futility, or insufficiency of the presumptions against survival which are drawn from the character of death. The second and more limited part goes to show substantive likelihoods, drawn from nature or experience, that the soul may survive death. In the first he is eminently successful. In the second we become sensible how scanty is the supply of material at his command. Much of the depreciation lavished on the chapter has arisen from the careless supposition that he is advancing as substantive arguments what in reality he only propounds as rebuttals of adverse presumptions.

Let us begin by taking note of his manner of supporting his first contention, namely, that death and the incidents of death afford no presumption that we are extinguished by it.

1. It is not proved by the immense change which death undoubtedly makes in us. For we know by experience that vast amounts of change in ourselves, and in inferior creatures, are compatible with continuity of identical existence. We have no absolute knowledge that the change effected by death is greater

than these changes; and until we do know it the presumption of our extinction by death does not arise. (True, none of these changes is marked by severance of essential parts: but we cannot say whether such severance constitutes a greater change than the change from the state of embryo to that of manhood, or from the egg, through the larva or caterpillar, to the moth or butterfly.)*

2. There is no ground, "from the reason of the thing," to suppose that death can destroy our "living powers"; that is to say, disable them from perception and action. For of death in itself we know nothing, but only in certain effects of it. And as we know not on what our living powers depend for their exercise, they may depend on something wholly beyond the reach of death.‡ Death gives no evidence of destroying the living powers, but only the sensible proof of their exercise. §

3. Nor is any such ground furnished by the "analogy of nature." For in no case do we know what becomes of these living powers. They simply pass from our view.

4. The power of death to destroy living beings is conditioned by their being compounded, and therefore discerptible. For as consciousness is indivisible, so it should seem is the conscious being in which it resides. ¶ And, if this be so, it follows that, the body being extraneous and foreign to the true self, no presumption can arise out of the dissolution of the body against the continued existence of the true self.

5. As we may lose limbs, organs of sense, large portions of the body, and yet the true self continues; and as animal bodies are always in a state of flux and succession of parts, with no corresponding loss or gain of the true self, we again infer the distinctness of that true self from the body, and its independence at the time of death.**

6. Even supposing the "living being" to be material, we know not its bulk, and unless it be bigger than one of the elementary particles which are indissoluble and represent the minimum, no presumption arises against its surviving death.tt

7. Much less have we to fear extinction from anything happening from any system of matter other than our bodies, and not so near to us.‡‡

Analogy I., i., 2., 3: ↑ Ibid. 4. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid, Ibid. 10, 11. ** Ibid. 12, 13, 15. tt Ibid. 14, 16. ‡‡ Ibid. 15, 20.

8. Inasmuch as our senses do not perceive but are carriers only to the perceiving organ, as is proved by cases of losing them, and by dreams, we again infer the distinctness of the living powers.*

9. Again we so infer, because our limbs are only servants and instruments to the "living person" within : † and have a relation to us like in kind to that of a staff.

10. If this argument comprehend brutes, and imply that they may become rational and moral, it holds. But it need not. The objection rests wholly on our ignorance. ‡

11. If even, as to his state of sensation, the true self of man indicate independence of the body, much more is he independent as to his state of reflection and its accompanying pains and pleasures: on which we see no effect from death. §

12. Certain mortal diseases, up to death, do not affect our intellectual powers. Is it likely that in death they will kill these powers? or that, in death, anything else will do it? ||

13. We cannot infer from anything we know about death even the suspension of our reflective condition and action. Nay, it may be the continuation thereof, with enlargement;

all this in

a course which may then be found strictly natural. ** 14. The case of vegetables is irrelevant to a question on the survival of faculties of perception and action; since they have, none.tt

In sum; there is sufficient proof of independence to bar any presumption of simultaneous or allied destruction. All such presumptions have now been rebutted and a "credibility," sufficient for the purposes of religion, indeed "a very considerable degree of probability," has been shown.‡‡

Having thus summed up the negative arguments of Butler, let us proceed to the positive, which indeed are few.

1. The fact of existence carries with it a presumption of its continuance; which presumption holds until rebutted by adverse presumption or proof. §§

2. From the fact of swoons, if not also from dreams, we know that our living powers exist when there is no capacity of exercising them.

3. From the fact that in certain mortal diseases the reflective

• Analogy, I.. i., 18. † Ibid. 19. Ibid. 21, 22. § Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. ¶ Ibid. 26-8.** Ibid. 31. tt Ibid. 29. Ibid. 32. §§ Ibid. 4, 8, 30. Ibid, 6.

powers remain wholly unaffected, he seems to infer such an independence as supplies a positive presumption of future existence.*

I shall presently refer to Butler's treatment of natural immortality; at this moment it is enough to say what is indubitable ; that he does not make use of it as an argument.

When we put the question, What is the force, in the aggregate, of the arguments which have been adduced in this chapter, and what was the author's own estimate of that force? it will not be found altogether easy to reply: and perhaps we have here felt the consequences of his having dealt with a subject extraneous to his main argument, in its not being handled with the same extraordinary exactitude and continuity. I will refer to two points in particular.

With respect to the argument of indiscerptibility, much favored by preceding writers from a very ancient date, it ought not to escape remark that Butler does not appear to place reliance upon it, as, in his summing up, he makes no allusion to it, but puts forward other topics in its stead. And yet it is an argument which, if it were sound, would dispense with every other and at once prove the whole of his case, so far as the soul, apart from the body, is concerned. But is it sound? To me it

appears wholly valueless.

For what is discerptibility? Can it be defined otherwise than as the severance in space of portions of some whole which were previously united in space? so that parts of a material substance, which necessarily exists in space, are said to be discerptible. But the soul is not, according to the ordinary acceptance of the term, material. It does not then exist in space, and is not subject to its conditions. So that the idea of discerptibility is wholly foreign to it, and can have no concern in proving either its mortality or its immortality.

Yet Clarke has advanced a very high doctrine of indiscerptibil

ity. As evidently as the known properties of matter prove it to be certainly a discerpible (sic) substance, whatever other unknown properties it may be endued with; so evidently the known and confessed properties of immaterial beings prove them to be indiscerpible, whatever other unknown properties they may be endued with."t

* Analogy, I., i., 25. Clarke's Defence of an argument used in his letter to Dodwell, page 101.

Again, Butler is evidently led to his conditional argument on behalf of the immortality of brutes by the palpable fact that they give evidence of living powers, a living agent, a true self, within and above their corporeal organs. It has been feared by some that this may lead to an inversion of the argument, and a contention that if our living being" be like theirs, little can be inferred from it as to a likelihood of independent survival. The absolute finality of death for brutes ought not, I suppose, to be taken for granted. But we must carefully eschew the recognition of any full parallelism in the application of the argument from living powers as between the two orders respectively. And this on more grounds than one. The living being in brutes may suffice to warrant our presuming it to be possibly independent of death: but it is contracted in scope and insignificant in function when they are compared with man; who has not only perception and action, but reflection; and not only reflection but conscience; and with conscience a sense of moral right and wrong, together with an array of moral powers, as to which it is to be observed that, unlike the powers merely intellectual, they as a general rule lose nothing with the lapse of years, but ripen down to the hour of death.

And again, that great argument for human survival which arises from the palpable incompleteness of the work of discipline for which men came into the world, not universally, but still in a great multitude of cases, has little or no application to the case of brutes, whose life and death do not suggest in the same way the idea of unfulfilled purpose. Much of this, however, is not within the scope of Butler's first chapter.

:

In the beginning of section thirty-two, he states that he has shown the credibility of a future life and truly may it be said that that against which no adverse presumption has been, or presumably can be, made good, is credible. But at the close of the section he says that he has proved it up "to a very considerable degree of probability"; which is a different matter.

He seems to have been perfectly successful in the business of pure rebuttal. The instrument by which he has achieved it is giving proof of our possession of living powers, and of their high character, apart from, and above, the corporeal organs: and, on the whole, it seems to be his view that the nature of these powers, together with the likelihood of their continuance (which, in the