ken the
credibility of the inseparable union of soul and body to eternity; and I
persuade myself that the men of sense, to whom your lordship appeals in
this case, do not find their belief of this fundamental point much weakened
by that difficulty.... But you will say, you speak only of the soul; and
your words are, that it is no easy matter to give an account how the soul
should be capable of immortality unless it be a material substance. I grant
it, but crave leave to say, that there is not any one of these difficulties
that are or can be raised about the manner how a material soul can be
immortal, which do not as well reach the immortality of the body....

"But your lordship, as I guess from your following words, would argue that
a material substance cannot be a free agent; whereby I suppose you only
mean that you cannot see or conceive how a solid substance should begin,
stop, or change its own motion. To which give me leave to answer, that when
you can make it conceivable how any created, finite, dependent substance
can move itself, I suppose you will find it no harder for God to bestow
this power on a solid than an unsolid created substance.... But though you
cannot see how any created substance, solid or not solid, can be a free
agent (pardon me, my lord, if I put in both, till your lordship please to
explain it of either, and show the manner how either of them can of itself
move itself or anything else), yet I do not think you will so far deny men
to be free agents, from the difficulty there is to see how they are free
agents, as to doubt whether there be foundation enough for the day of
judgment."

Let us now, for the sake of contrast, turn to some passages which occur in
the other train of reasoning.

"If we suppose only matter and motion first or eternal, thought can never
begin to be. For it is impossible to conceive that matter, either with or
without motion, could have originally in and from itself sense, perception,
and knowledge; as is evident from hence, that then sense, perception, and
knowledge must be a property eternally inseparable from matter and every
particle of it." There is a double fallacy here. In the first place,
conceivability is made the unconditional test of possibility; and, in the
next place, it is asserted that unless every particle of matter can think,
no collocation of such particles can possibly do so. This latter fallacy is
further insisted upon thus:--"If they will not allow mat