Now, will, recollection, and
feeling, are not bodies. Therefore the soul is incorporeal." This
makes the conscious man an

26 Jouffroy, Introduction to Ethics: Channing's trans., vol. ii.
pp. 189-191.

27 Schaller, Leib und Seele, kap. 13: Der Psychische Unterschied
des Menschen vom Thiere.

28 Crombie, Natural Theology, vol. ii.: Essay on the Immortality
of the Soul. Brougham, Discourse of Nat. Theol., sect. 5.

imperishable substantial activity. An old English writer, with
quaint eloquence, declares, "There is a proportion between an atom
and the universe, because both are quantitative. All this excesse
vanisheth into nothing as soon as the lowest substance shineth out
of that orbe where they reside that scorn divisibility."

From this brief statement of the position of the immaterialists,
without arguing it, we pass to note, in the second place, that
nearly all the postulates ordinarily claimed by the materialist
may be granted without by any means proving the justice of their
disbelief of a future life.29 Admit that there can be no sensation
without a nerve, no thought without a brain, no phenomenal
manifestation without an organ. Such an admission legitimates the
conclusion, on empirical grounds, that our present mode of life
must cease with the dissolution of our organism. It does not even
empirically prove that we may not survive in some other mode of
being, passing perhaps to an inconceivably higher stage and more
blessed kind of life. After the entire disintegration of our
material organs, we may, by some now unknown means, possess in a
refined form the equivalents of what those organs gave us. There
may be, interfused throughout the gross mortal body, an immortal
body of exquisitely delicate structure invisibly extricating
itself from the carious ruins at death. Plattner develops and
defends this hypothesis with plausible skill and power.30 The
Hindus conceived the soul to be concealed within several
successive sheaths, the innermost of which accompanied it through
all its transmigrations.31 "The subtile person extends to a small
distance over the skull, like the flame of a lamp above its wick."
32 The later Pythagoreans and Platonists seem to have believed
that the same numerical ethereal body with which the soul was at
first created adhered to it inseparably during all its descents
into grosser bodies, a lucid and wingy vehicle, which, purged by
diet and catharms, ascends again, bearing the soul t