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88 that they were thus preparing a triumph for their own peculiar schemes of Christianity. Neglecting, accordingly, all the presumptions for a future state, afforded by a comparison of the course of human affairs with the moral judgments and moral feelings of the human heart; and overlooking, with the same disdain, the presumptions arising from the narrow sphere of human knowledge, when compared with the indefinite improvement of which our intellectual powers seem to be susceptible; this acute but superficial writer attached himself exclusively to the old and hackneyed pneumatological argument; tacitly assuming as a principle, that the future prospects of man depend entirely on the determination of a physical problem, analogous to that which was then dividing chemists about the existence or non-existence of Phlogiston. In the actual state of science, these speculations might well have been spared. Where is the sober metaphysician to be found, who now speaks of the immortality of the soul as a logical consequence of its immateriality; instead of considering it as depending on the will of that Being by whom it was at first called into existence? And, on the other hand, is it not universally admitted by the best philosophers, that whatever hopes the light of nature encourages beyond the present scene, rest solely (like all our other anticipations of future events) on the general tenor and analogy of the laws by which we perceive the universe to be governed? The proper use of the argument concerning the immateriality of mind, is not to establish any positive conclusion as to its destiny hereafter; but to repel the reasonings alleged by materialists, as proofs that its annihilation must be the obvious and necessary effect of the dissolution of the body.

I thought it proper to state this consideration pretty fully, lest it should be supposed that the logical method recommended by Descartes for studying the phenomena of mind, has any necessary dependence on his metaphysical opinion concerning its being and properties, as a separate substance, Between these two parts of his system, however, there is, if not a

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