Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/684

664 to determine the sizes of the atoms, or rather to fix the limits between which their sizes lie; while only last year the discourses of Williamson and Maxwell illustrate the present hold of the doctrine upon the foremost scientific minds. What these atoms, self-moved and self-posited, can and cannot accomplish in relation to life, is at the present moment the subject of profound scientific thought. I doubt the legitimacy of Maxwell's logic; but it is impossible not to feel the ethic glow with which his lecture concludes. There is, moreover, a Lucretian grandeur in his description of the steadfastness of the atoms: "Natural causes, as we know, are at work, which tend to modify, if they do not at length destroy, all the arrangements and dimensions of the earth and the whole solar system. But though in the course of ages catastrophes have occurred and may yet occur in the heavens, though ancient systems may be dissolved and new systems evolved out of their ruins, the molecules out of which these systems are built, the foundation-stones of the material universe, remain unbroken and unworn."

Ninety years subsequent to Gassendi the doctrine of bodily instruments, as it may be called, assumed immense importance in the hands of Bishop Butler, who, in his famous "Analogy of Religion," developed, from his own point of view, and with consummate sagacity, a similar idea. The bishop still influences superior minds; and it will repay us to dwell for a moment on his views. He draws the sharpest distinction between our real selves and our bodily instruments. He does not, as far as I remember, use the word soul, possibly because the term was so hackneyed in his day, as it had been for many generations previously. But he speaks of "living powers," "perceiving" or "percipient powers," "moving agents," "ourselves," in the same sense as we should employ the term soul. He dwells upon the fact that limbs may be removed and mortal diseases assail the body, while the mind, almost up to the moment of death, remains clear. He refers to sleep and to swoon, where the "living powers" are suspended but not destroyed. He considers it quite as easy to conceive of an existence out of our bodies as in them; that we may animate a succession of bodies, the dissolution of all of them having no more tendency to dissolve our real selves, or "deprive us of living faculties—the faculties of perception and action—than the dissolution of any foreign matter which we are capable of receiving impressions from, or making use of, for the common occasions of life." This is the key of the bishop's position: "Our organized bodies are no more a part of ourselves than any other matter around us." In proof of this he calls attention to the use of glasses, which "prepare objects" for the "percipient power" exactly as the eye does. The eye itself is no more percipient than the glass, and is quite as much the instrument of the true self, and also as foreign to the true self, as the glass is. "And if we see with our eyes only in the same manner as we do with