idea, implying merely the absence of a certain portion of opaque matter. The supposed person in the cave, therefore, would not in reality be at all mistaken in his notions and expectations; for he supposes, not that the opaque substance of the sides of the cave is necessary to his perceptions, but, on the contrary, that the interruption or absence of that opaque body is so; in which he would be perfectly right: as he would also be, in supposing that the destruction of that aperture would put an end to his perception; since that destruction would be, properly, the closing of the aperture; not the throwing down of the walls, which would, in truth, be an enlargement of it.

Now the body and the bodily senses being evidently not merely negative ideas, the destruction of them bears no analogy whatever to the supposed destruction of the cave; since that cave itself was never imagined to be, to the person enclosed, (as the bodily senses are to us,) the means of conveying knowledge, but, on the contrary, as far as it extends, of excluding it.

The question then is left, as I have said, by unaided Reason, in a doubtful state. To the

E

Christian, indeed, all this doubt would be instantly removed, if he found that the immortality of the soul, as a disembodied Spirit, were revealed to him in the word of God. He cannot question the power of the great Creator to prolong, in any way He may see fit, the life He originally gave: but this is very different from arriving at the conclusion by the evidence which unassisted reason can supply.

In fact, however, no such doctrine is revealed to us; the Christian's hope, as founded on the promises contained in the Gospel, is, the resurrection of the body; a doctrine which seems never to have occurred (nor indeed was likely to occur, from any contemplation of the change from night to day, and from summer to winter) to any of the heathen. Indeed, when any of them are struck by, and notice, any phenomenon in nature that has the appearance of a revival, they are struck by it as a contrast to the supposed fate of man. Thus we find a Greek poet, in bewailing a departed friend, lamenting, that while the herbs of the garden, which appear

See note (C) at the end of this Essay.

dead, shoot up in the succeeding spring, man, on the contrary, who appears a Being of so much greater dignity, when dead, is doomed to live no more."

"The meanest herb we trample in the field,
Or in the garden nurture, when its leaf
In autumn dies, forebodes another Spring,
And from brief slumber wakes to life again:
Man wakes no more: Man, peerless, valiant, wise,
Once chilled by death, sleeps hopeless in the dust,
A long unbroken, never-ending sleep."

GISBORNE.

As, however, even the faintest conjecture of a future existence, though it must not be confounded with a full assurance of it, is, as far as it goes, an approximation towards the knowledge of truth, so, also, notions considerably incorrect respecting that existence, if they are but such as to involve the idea of enjoyment or suffering, corresponding with men's conduct in this life,

• Οππότε πρᾶτα θάνωμες, ἀνάκοοι ἐν χθονὶ κοίλᾳ Ενδομες εὖ μάλα μακρόν, ΑΤΕΡΜΟΝΑ, ΝΗΓΡΕΤΟΝ Mosch. Epit. Bionis.

ὕπνον.

s I mean, virtuous and vicious conduct respectively; else the doctrine may even do harm instead of good. See § 9.

have so far something of a just foundation, and of a tendency to practical utility. This, however, appears by no means to have been the case with the systems of any, as far as we can learn, of those ancient philosophers, who contended the most strenuously for the immortality of the soul. For not only do they seem to have agreed, that no suffering could be expected by the wicked in another life, on the ground that the gods were incapable of anger, and therefore could not punish; but the very notion of the soul's immortality, as explained by them, involved the complete destruction of distinct personal existence. Their notion was, (I mean, when they spoke their real sentiments; for in their exoteric or popular works they often inculcate, for the benefit of the vulgar, the doctrine of future retribution, which they elsewhere laugh at,) that the soul of each man is a portion of that Spirit which pervades the Universe," to which it is reunited at death, and becomes again an undistinguishable part of the great whole; just

t Cic. de Off. lib. iii. chap. 28, &c. &c.
"See note (D) at the end of this Essay.

as the body is resolved into the general mass of matter. So that their immortality, or rather eternity, of the soul, was anterior as well as posterior; as it was to have no end, so it had no beginning; and the boasted continuance of existence, which according to this system we are to expect after death, consists in returning to the state in which we were before birth; which, every one must perceive, is the same thing, virtually, with annihilation.

Let it be remembered then, when the arguments of the heathen Sages are triumphantly brought forward in proof of the soul's immortality, that when they countenanced the doctrine of future retribution, they taught, with a view to political expediency, what they did not themselves believe and that when they spoke their real sentiments on the subject, the eternity of existence which they expected, as it implied the destruction of all distinct personality, amounted, practically, to nothing at all.

* "Whatever there is," says Cicero, (Fragm. de Consolatione,) "that perceives, that exercises judgment, that wills, is of celestial nature, and divine; and for that reason it must of necessity be eternal."