OPINIONS

OF THE

ANCIENT, INTERMEDIATE, AND MODERN PHILOSOPHERS AND DIVINES,

CONCERNING THE

IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL.

Futurity.—“ It is indeed a wide ocean,” said the Abbé, “full of waves and dangers, storms and tempests; and, like the Atlantic before the adventurous Genoese first crossed it, no one comes back to tell us what is beyond. But as to the eye of Columbus, enlightened by true genius, it was self-evident that, to harmonize with the known world in which he dwelt, there must be another continent beyond the wide Western sea; so, to the eye of the religious man, enlightened by revelation, it is self-evident that beyond the ocean of time there must be another world to equalize all that is unequal in this.”

"The soul is an inseparable portion of the great universal mind; in other words, of Brahma. Like the Being from whom it emanates, it is, therefore, indestructible. It knows no distinction of time: it is free, immutable, eternal. The wind cannot pierce it, fire cannot burn it, water cannot drown it, the earth cannot absorb it. It is beyond the reach of the elements, invulnerable, invisible, universal, subsisting in all places, and at all times, and victorious over death."-Sacred Books of the Brahmins.

HOMER AND HORACE.

THERE is in man a desire of immortality. This desire is universal, being found in all who are capable of forming a notion of a hereafter. There never was that person who could subdue it; not even the des

pairing wretch who flies to death for succour, and embraces the hope of annihilation as his only refuge. At the very instant he dreads an immortality which he fears will be miserable, and withdraws himself from a life which he finds so, he wishes there were no such reason for choosing death, and preferring the utter extinction of his being; which is a manifest argument, that he hath not yet put off the general desire of immortality. This desire betrays itself in the most professed enemies to the notion of a future state, and the immortality of the human soul.

Not able to suppress the desire, they only change the object, and from themselves transfer it to their memory. Epicurus, as little as he cared for his soul's living out of his body, was willing to believe that his name would live, and when dying, flattered himself with the thoughts of surviving in the memory of his scholars, and with the reputation which his philosophical works would procure him. And Horace, a disciple of his, built the same hope upon the imperishable immortality of his poems. Says he, "I have erected a monument more lasting than brass, and loftier than the kingly elevated pyramids; which not the wasting rain, nor the unrestrained north, or a numberless series of years, and the flight of time, shall be able to destroy. I shall not wholly die, and a great part of me shall escape the goddess of death." -Smart's Translation, Book 3, Ode 30.

Homer is full of hints and passages that suppose the separate existence of human souls, and there can be little doubt of its being the received opinion of the

age he lived in. Let the following quotations from the works of this wonderful genius suffice-namely, in those remarkable lines which he puts into the mouth of Achilles, after the death of his beloved Patroclus.

"Tis true, 'tis certain; man, though dead, retains
Part of himself; th' immortal mind remains:
The form subsists without the body's aid,
Ærial semblance, and an empty shade!

This night my friend, so late in battle lost,
Stood at my side, a pensive, plaintive ghost;
Even now familiar, as in life, he came,

Alas, how diff'rent! yet how like the same.

Pope's Translation, Book 28.

Elysium, or Place of Happiness, where the souls of good men shall inhabit after death.

Elysium shall be thine; the blissful plains
Of utmost earth, where Radamanthus reigns.
Joys ever young, unmix'd with pain or fear,
Fill the wide circle of th' eternal year:
Stern winter smiles on that auspicious clime;
The fields are florid with unfading prime:
From the bleak pole no winds inclement blow,
Mould the round hail, or flake the fleecy snow:
But from the breezy deep, the blest inhale
The frequent murmurs of the western gale.*

Odys. 4. v. 765.

* The above quotations embody the sentiments of the Greeks, during the Homeric age, on the immortality of the soul. Plato and other philosophers of his time, appear to differ but little from the great father of poetry, history, and philosophy, on this subject.

"The Soul, being in its nature one simple, uncompounded thing, cannot be divided, nor consequently perish; perishing being nothing else but the separation of those parts which before were some way or other held together. Immortality is an endless progression, or continuance in life. But now, what never had life may be incorruptible; as a point of matter that is without parts, or, if that cannot be, without all pores, so as to be in no danger of a dissolution. Or that which once enjoyed life, may, for what appears at first view, lose it again, the substance remaining safe and uncorrupted. Incorruptibility in a living substance is indeed a good step towards the proof of its immortality, but still is no more than a step."

PHOCYLIDES.

In Phocylides are some sentences which express a clear belief of souls surviving the grave. "Immortal souls," he says, "free from old age, live for ever." "All the dead are equal, but God governs souls." "We hope to see the remains of the dead come out of the earth into light, after which they will be gods; for incorruptible souls remain in the dead. The spirit is the image of God given to mortals." According to this, the soul continues attached to the body some time after it is dead, which was the opinion of the Egyptians, and the cause, as it is thought, of their endeavouring to preserve the bodies so long by embalming them, and keeping them in their houses.-Gales, Opusc.

PYTHAGOREANS.

According to the Pythagoreans, the human soul is not of a nature so distinct from the body but that it has both some connection with it, and some properties in common with it. "The source of vice," says Timæus, "is in pleasure and grief, desire and fear, which, being excited in the body, get mixed with the soul, and have obtained various names from their various effects, as love, desire," etc., so that the passions are common to the soul and the body, though they are first excited in the latter.

They maintained, however, the superiority of the mind to the body, as when Archytas says, "In all human things wisdom is most excellent, as the sight is more so than the other senses, the mind than the soul, and the sun than the stars." Here we have two parts of the soul, or of the man, distinguished by their respective names, the former signifying the seat of intelligence, and the other that of mere animal life.

Timæus explains this division of the soul farther, when he says, "One part of the human soul is endued with reason and intelligence, but the other is without reason, and stupid. The former is the more excellent, but both have their seat about the head, that the other parts of the soul, and of the body too, might be subservient to it, as being under the same tabernacle of the body. But that part of the soul which is without reason, and which is prone to anger, has its seat about the heart; and that which has