§ 12. c'. Conscience unconditioned by matter.

There is a great deal in our intellectual structure to establish, and nothing to dispute, the proposition that THERE

EXIST IN THE SOUL ELEMENTS, DERIVING THEIR TONE, IT IS TRUE, FROM THE COURSE OF PROBATION, BUT CONTINUING INDEPENDENTLY OF CORPOREAL CONDITIONS AND OF THE

SANCTION OF THE WILL.

§ 13. The proof of this proposition may be considered as follows:

a3. From the nature of conscience itself.

The sense of guilt, as has been observed, is arbitrarily recalled to the mind in full force by involuntary circumstances, e.g. discovery, hitting upon the indices or scenes of crime, etc. As was shown in the last division, conscience, in its general sense, is incessant and unlimited by time. It acts with equal energy under circumstances of bodily ease and strength, and of bodily wretchedness and debility; in the first conceptions of childhood, and in the last consciousness of old age. It is said to be a proof of the immortality of the mind that the body can be cut away, piece by piece, while the intellectual powers remain. But even when the mind is destroyed the moral sense continues to operate.

b3. From analogy.

§ 14. a. Recalled impressions. No thought, as may be inferred from the phenomena stated above, is ever lost. The recollection of the servant-girl just mentioned, those of dying persons, those of drowning persons, serve to show, to adopt the language of President Hitchcock, that thought "may seem to ourselves to be gone, since we have no power to recall it. But numerous facts show that it needs only some

change in our physical or intellectual condition to restore the long-lost impression."*

§ 15. b. Dreaming presents similar phenomena. An important Scotch lawsuit was depending upon the recovery of papers which had been in existence fifty years back, but the genuineness of which was disputed. The trial was about to be abandoned, when a very aged man dreamed that they would be found in an out-of-the-way parcel, which had entirely escaped notice. There they were discovered. There was no divination in this. Fifty years back, when a child, the old man had seen these papers packed away in this parcel. No voluntary action on his part could recall the impression. It existed, however, to be brought to light by a power outside of himself. It existed, to adopt an illustration already given, in the same way as the machinery of a boat exists in which we may be gliding over the waters. We lose the consciousness of the incessant, though quiet action of the works by our side until, on passing the engine door, it is opened, and we see the clean and smooth limbs of the pistons gliding up and down in their giant base.

The demolition of space and time by dreams is a phenomenon with which we are all familiar. Dr. Abercrombie tells us of a gentleman who dreamed that he had enlisted as a soldier; that he had joined his regiment; that he had deserted; was apprehended, and carried back to his regiment; was tried by a court-martial, condemned to be shot, and led out for execution; at the moment of the completion of these ceremonies, the guns of the platoon were fired,

* Hitchcock's Lectures, p. 136.

and, at the report, he awoke. It was clear that a loud noise in the adjoining room had both produced the dream, and, almost at the moment, awoke the dreamer.

Lavalette, in his memoirs, mentions a procession that was five hours in passing before his dreaming vision, accompanied with such a precise, though horrible measurement of time, as to make its registry on the dreamer's mind indelible. It so happened that he was able to time the dream by his watch to be within ten minutes.*

* The evidence to be drawn from these phenomena of the immateriality of the soul has not been overlooked either by classical or Christian antiquity. In the Phædo, Plato tells us that "the body is the prison of the soul; that the soul, when it came from God, knew all, but inclosed in the body, it forgets, and learns anew." Seneca tells us, "Corpus hoc animi pondus est." "I remember," says Dendy, in his Philosophy of Mystery, from which the points, under this head, are drawn, "in Fulgosius, a legend told by Saint Austin to Enodius. There was a physician of Carthage, who was a skeptic regarding the soul's immortality and the soul's separate existence. It chanced one night that Genadius dreamed of a beautiful city. On the second night, the youth who had been his guide reappeared, and asked if Genadius remembered him; he answered yes, and also his dream. And where,' said the apparition, 'were you then lying?' 'In my bed, sleeping.' 'And, if your mind's eye, Genadius, surveyed a city, even while your body slept, may not this pure and active spirit still live, and observe, and remember, even though the body may be shapeless or decayed within its sepulchre ?'"

The same thought-the spiritual independence of the soul-is thus beautifully given by Longfellow :

His lifeless body lay

A worn-out fetter, that the soul

Had broken and cast away.

§ 16. ct. Insanity. Of the detachment of the mind from corporeal conditions when in this state, we have an illustration, taken from a statement of Robert Hall, after his first attack of mania,-"All my imagination has been overstretched. You, with the rest of my friends, tell me that I was only seven weeks in confinement, and the date of the year corresponds, so that I am bound to believe you, but they have appeared to me like seven years. My mind was so excited, and my imagination so lively and active, that more ideas passed through my mind than in any seven years in my life. Whatever I had attained from reading or reflection was present to me.”

The exemption of insane persons from many epidemic diseases, and their insensibility to heat and cold, arise from their attention being drawn from bodily suffering and external influences. "And shall not a cultivated, welldirected volition," agues, from this, Feuchtersleben, from his skeptical stand-point, "have as much, nay, greater power, than furious anger or the horrible energy of the insane?" But may not the inference be more correctly stated to consist in the proposition, that the control of the body over the soul is neither absolute nor perpetual?

§ 17. d1. Comatose state. On this point we have the following statement from Sir Benjamin Brodie :

"The mind may be in operation, although the suspension of the sensibility of the nervous system, and of the influence of volition over the muscles, destroys its connection with the external world and prevents all communication with the mind of others. It is indeed difficult to say when the external senses are completely and absolutely closed. I might

refer to numerous facts, which have fallen under my observation, as illustrating this subject, but the following will be sufficient:-An elderly lady had a stroke of apoplexy; she lay motionless, and in what is called a state of stupor, and no one doubted that she was dying; but, after the lapse of three or four days, there were signs of amendment, and she ultimately recovered. After her recovery, she explained that she did not believe that she had been unconscious, or even insensible, during any part of the attack. She knew her situation, and heard much of what was said by those around her. Especially she recollected observations intimating that she would very soon be no more, but, at the same time, she had felt satisfied that she would recover; that she had no power of expressing what she felt, but that, nevertheless, her feelings, instead of being painful, or in any way distressing, had been agreeable rather than otherwise. She described them as very peculiar; as if she were constantly mounting upward, and as something very different from what she had before experienced."

“I have been curious to watch the state of dying persons in this respect, and I am satisfied that, where an ordinary observer would not for an instant doubt that the individual is in a state of complete stupor, the mind is often active even at the moment of death. A friend of mine, who had been for many years the excellent chaplain of a large hospital, informed me that his still larger experience had led him to the same conclusion."

§ 18. Sir Benjamin records the case of Dr. Wollaston, which is a remarkable instance of this.

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