connected and interdependent, and mind and matter might then be found to be after all but two sides of one and the same substance.1 "Man," says John Milton, "is a living being intrinsically and properly one and individual, not compound or separable,-not, according to the common opinion, made up and framed of two distinct and different natures, as of soul and body.'

"2

This, which is properly a scientific question, has unfortunately been too often regarded as a theological one, and the doctrine of the materiality of the mind or soul held to directly involve its immortality. "The principle," says Dr. Abercrombie, "seems to have been too much lost sight of in the discussion of this subject that our speculations respecting the materiality of the rational human soul have no influence on our belief of its immortality. This momentous truth rests on a species of evidence altogether different, which addresses itself to the moral constitution of man. .. Though we were to suppose, with the materialist, that the rational soul of man is a mere chemical combination which, by the dissolution of its elements, is dissipated

1 "When we find within us two ideas which have entered by different routes, we ought to mistrust the tendency which induces us to assert a difference and, above all, an absolute difference between their objects. . . . It is possible then that the sensation and the internal movement of the nervous centres may be at bottom one and the same unique event condemned by the two ways in which it is known always and irredeemably to appear double. . . . There is nothing to prevent the molecular movements from being the infinitesimal elements of the whole sensation."-H. Taine. "It is we who make separate sciences in consequence of the constitution of our faculties, limiting our channels of apprehension to a few special points of contact with the external."-Dr. Maudsley.

2 "The union of the soul and body appears to me essential and indissoluble. Man without a body is, in my opinion, man no longer; and God has thought and willed him embodied, and not otherwise.

According to this passage (in Genesis), we cannot doubt that the body or a body is essential to human personality and to the very idea of man."-A. Vinet.

to the four winds of heaven, where is the improbability that the Power which framed the wondrous compound may collect these elements again and combine them anew for the great purposes of his moral administration?" To the same effect John Locke says: "All the great ends of morality and religion are well enough secured without philosophical proofs of the soul's immateriality, since it is evident that He who made us at first begin to subsist here sensible, intelligent beings, and for several years continue us in such a state, can and will restore us to the like state of sensibility in another world, and make us capable there to receive the retribution He has designed to man according to their doings in this life". "Milton's conclusion is that at the last gasp of breath the whole man dies, soul and body together, and that not till the Resurrection, when the body is revived, does the soul live again, does the man or woman live again, in any sense or way, whether for happiness or misery."-D. Masson. "That the spirit of man should be separate from the body, so as to have a perfect and intelligent existence independent of it, is nowhere said in Scripture, and the doctrine is evidently at variance both with nature and reason."-John Milton.

The great distinguishing doctrine of Christianity is not the immortality of the soul, but the resurrection of the body. That the soul of man is immortal was a

1 "Are the souls of the millions on millions of human beings who have died since Adam, are those souls already either with God and the angels in heaven or down in the diabolic world, waiting to be rejoined to their bodies on the Resurrection Day? They are not, says Milton; but souls and bodies together, he says, are dead alike, sleeping alike, defunct alike, till that day come.". "-D. Masson.

2 "Though mankind have at all times had a persuasion of the immortality of the soul, the resurrection of the body is a doctrine peculiar to Christianity, aud met with no little opposition even in the apostolic age."-Dr. James Beattie.

common belief among the Ancients, from whom it found. its way at an early period into the Christian Church, but the most influential of the early Fathers were strenuously opposed to it, holding that the human soul was not essentially immortal, but only, like the body, capable of immortality. "God alone," says Justin Martyr, "is uncreated and incorruptible; but all other things beside Him are created and perishable. For this reason souls both die and are punished." 1

Some theologians are apt to expatiate on the sinfulness of the flesh, the worthlessness of the body, as contrasted with the purity of the spirit, the value of an immortal soul. But this is to misunderstand the teaching of Scripture, and to separate what God has inseparably joined together in this life, and will unite for all eternity in the world to come.2 "The original

1 "The belief that the soul is inherently immortal belongs to the old-world philosophy, and found its way at a later period into Christian theology," but "the leading teachers of the early Church, Justin Martyr, Theophilus of Antioch, Irenæus, Arnobius, Athanasius, and others, taught that the human soul, as at first created, is not necessarily mortal or inherently immortal, that it is capable both of mortality and immortality, and that it lives as long as God wills, or returns when He wills to that state in which it was before its birth."-D. Milne. "Some of the most influential of the early Christian writers were materialists, not as holding the soul to be the mere result of bodily organisation, but as holding the soul itself to be material-corporeal. . . . It appears that in those days the vulgar held the soul to be incorporeal, according to the views of Plato and others, but that the orthodox Christian divines looked upon this as an impious, unscriptural opinion. Justin Martyr argues against the Platonic nature of the soul."-S. T. Coleridge. (See also Edward White: Life in a Risen Saviour.)

"The immortality of the Gospel is not simply the immortality of the soul, it is the immortality of humanity. It is man that is to live hereafter, and whose whole nature, so to speak, is to be perpetuated for ever."-T. Binney. "The souls of the blessed shall not only be glorious, but their very bodies shall be filled with glory.”— Jeremy Taylor. "You live again in the body,-in the very body as to all essential properties, and to all practical intents and purposes in which you live now. I am to live not a ghost, a spectre, a

matter of which we speak," says Milton, "is not to be looked upon as an evil or a trivial thing, but as intrinsically good and the chief productive stock of every subsequent good." "The union with matter, or the coming into a corporeal state, may be in fact not a degradation to mind, but the very means of its quickening, its birth into the world of knowledge and action. A little attention to what is involved in the idea of corporeal existence will incline us to believe that it is the basis of intellectual activity, of moral agency, and of communion or sociality among intelligent orders."Isaac Taylor.

The question more immediately before us, however, is: Does the mind or spirit of man, whatever it may be, in its actings in and through the body, leave a material impression or trace in its structure of every conscious action it performs, which remains permanently fixed, and forms a material record of all that it has done in the body, to which it can afterwards refer as to a book and recall to mind, making it again, as it were, present to it? "Why," asks Dugald Stewart, "should it be imagined that any step is made towards materialism by supposing that an invisible book exists in the sensorium, by the interpretation of which we are enabled to perceive external objects, and by a reference to which we recover as in a tablet the knowledge which has happened to escape from the memory?" "The question," he continues, "it ought always to be remembered, is not about the nature of the thing read, but about the nature of the reader."

spirit, I am to live then as I live now, in the body."-Dr. R. S. Candlish. "I think that the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection meets the materialists so far as this-that it does imply that a body or an organisation of some sort is necessary to the full development of man's nature."-Dr. T. Arnold.

In speaking of matter and material impressions in connection with memory, we would not be understood to mean anything that can be perceived by or made apparent to the senses. When we think of matter we usually imagine it as something that can be apprehended by the senses, or by some of the mechanical aids which we employ to extend their powers. We rarely think of the material kingdom as extending vastly beyond the utmost limits that we are able to reach by such means, and that all the properties which we attribute to matter stretch immeasurably beyond our utmost ken.1 In general, then, we may say that we infer the existence of matter where we find properties manifested that we know to belong to it.

The minuteness of the particles of bodies that may be perceived by the senses has often been dwelt upon. Thus a grain of musk has been kept freely exposed to the air in a room the doors and windows of which were constantly open for a period of ten years, during which time the air thus continually changed was completely impregnated with the odour, and yet at the end of that time the particle was not found to have diminished perceptibly in weight. The taste of strychnine is apparent

1 "There can be no doubt that there is as much in the animal structure beyond the reach of the microscope as there is in the vast universe around us beyond the reach of the telescope."-Sir B. Brodie. "This present visible universe no more exhausts the totality of things in space than it does in time; around it, and beneath it, and within it are modifications of material existence, of which we can form only a very vague conception."-Dr. C. Beard. "The intimate researches of modern physical science leave no room to doubt that there are many agencies in activity about us which, although they make themselves known in their ultimate consequences, are not directly cognizable either by the eye, the ear, the touch, the taste, or the smell."-Isaac Taylor. "We cannot detect the difference between the nerve element of a brain exhausted by exercise and incapable of further function, and that of a brain reinvigorated by sleep and ready for a day of energetic function.”—-Dr. Maudsley.