The Analogy of Religion to the Constitution and Course of Nature. Butler Joseph
them —e. g. sleep, swoon.
2.) Not from analogy.
– Reason shows no connection between death and our destruction.
– We have no faculties by which to trace any being beyond it.
– The possession of living powers, up to the very moment when our faculties cease to be able to trace them, is a probability of their continuing.
– We have already survived wonderful changes.
– To live after death is analogous to the course of nature.
II. Presumptions against a future life.
1. That death destroys us.
Ans. 1. This is an assumption that we are compound and material beings, and hence discerptible; which is not true.
1.) Consciousness is a single, indivisible power, and of course the subject of it must be.
2.) The material body is not ourself.
3.) We can easily conceive of our having more limbs, or of a different kind, or of having more or fewer senses, or of having no bodies at all, or of hereafter animating these same bodies, remodelled.
4.) The dissolution of a succession of new and strange bodies, would have no tendency to destroy us.
Ans. 2. Though the absolute simplicity of the living being cannot be proved by experiment, yet facts lead us so to conclude. We lose limbs, &c. Our bodies were once very small, but we might, then, have lost part of them. There is a constant destruction and renewal going on.
1.) Thus we see that no certain bulk is necessary to our existence, and unless it were proved that there is, and that it is larger than an indissoluble atom, there is no reason to presume that death destroys us, even if we are discerptible.
2.) The living agent is not an internal material organism, which dies with the body. Because
– Our only ground for this presumption is our relation to other systems of matter. But we see these are not necessary to us.
– It will not do to say that lost portions of the body were not essential– who is to determine?
– The relation between the living agent, and the most essential parts of the body, is only one by which they mutually affect each other.
3.) If we regard our body as made up of organs of sense, we come to the same result.
– We see with the eyes, just as we do with glasses. The eye is not a recipient, any more than a telescope.
– It is not pretended that vision, hearing, &c. can be traced clear up to the percipient; but so far as we can trace perceptions, the organ does not perceive.
– In dreams we perceive without organs.
– When we lose a limb we do not lose the directing power; we could move a new one, if it could be made, or a wooden one. But the limb cut off has no power of moving.
– Thus, our loss of the organs of perception and motion, not being the destruction of the power, there is no ground to think that the destruction of other organs or instruments would destroy us.
Objection. These observations apply equally to brutes.
Ans. 1. Be it so. Perhaps they are immortal: – may hereafter improve: we know not what latent powers they may have.
1.) The human being at one period looks as little likely to make great intellectual attainments; for a long time he has capacities for virtue and religion, but cannot use them.
2.) Many persons go out of the world who never became able to exercise these capacities; e. g. infants.
Ans. 2. If brutes were immortal, it does not prove them to be moral agents.
1.) It may be necessary, for aught we know, that there should be living creatures not moral agents, nor rational.
2.) All difficulties as to what would become of them, are founded in our ignorance.
2. That our souls, though not material, so depend upon the bodily structure, that we cannot survive its destruction.
Ans. 1. Reason, memory, &c. do not depend on the body, as perceptions by the senses do. Death may destroy those instruments, and yet not destroy the powers of reflection.
Ans. 2. Human beings exist, here, in two very different states, each having its own laws: sensation and reflection. By the first we feel; by the second we reason and will.
1.) Nothing which we know to be destroyed at death, is necessary to reflecting on ideas formerly received.
2.) Though the senses act like scaffolds, or levers, to bring in ideas, yet when once in, we can reflect, &c. without their aid.
Ans. 3. There are diseases which prove fatal, &c., yet do not, in any part of their course, impair the intellect; and this indicates that they do not destroy it.
1.) In the diseases alluded to, persons have their reflective power, in full, the very moment before death.
2.) Now, why should a disease, at a certain degree, utterly destroy powers which were not even affected by it, up to that point?
3. That death at least suspends our reflective powers, or interrupts our continuing to exist in the like state of reflection which we do now.
Ans. There appears so little connection between our powers of sensation and our powers of reflection that we cannot presume that what might destroy the former, could even suspend the latter.
1.) We daily see reason, memory, &c. exercised without any assistance, that we know of, from our bodies.
2.) Seeing them in lively exercise to the last, we must infer that death is not a discontinuance of their exercise, nor of the enjoyments and sufferings of such exercise.
3.) Our posthumous life may be but a going on, with additions. Like the change at our birth – which produced not a suspension of the faculties we had before, nor a total change in our state of life; but a continuance of both, with great alterations.
4.) Death may but at once put us into a higher state of life, as our birth did; our relation to bodily organs may be the only hinderance to our entering a higher condition of the reflective powers.
5.) Were we even sure that death would suspend our intellectual powers, it would not furnish even the lowest probability that it would destroy them.
Objec. From the analogy of plants.
Ans. This furnishes poets with apt illustrations of our frailty, but affords no proper analogy. Plants are destitute of perception and action, and this is the very matter in question.
1. It has been shown, that confining ourselves to what we know, we see no probability of ever ceasing to be: – it cannot be concluded from the reason of the thing: – nor from the analogy of nature.
2. We are therefore to go upon the belief of a future existence.
3. Our going into new scenes and conditions, is just as natural as our coming into the world.
4. Our condition may naturally be a social one.
5. The advantages of it may naturally be bestowed, according to some fixed law, in proportion to one’s degrees in virtue.
1.) Perhaps not so much as now by society; but by God’s more immediate action.
2.) Yet this will be no less natural, i. e. stated, fixed, or settled.
3.) Our notions of what is natural, are enlarged by greater knowledge of God and his works.
4.) There may be some beings in the world, to whom the whole of Christianity is as natural as the visible course of nature