Permanent Impressions by Spiritual Powers. 57

is, in fact, in its most ultimate and perfect development, the love of infinite wisdom and unbounded power, or the love of God. Even in the imperfect life that belongs to the earth, this passion exists in a considerable degree; increases even with age; outlives the perfection of the corporeal faculties; and at the moment of death is felt by the conscious being; and its future destinies depend upon the manner in which it has been exercised and exalted.

Your vision (said the Genius,) must end with this glorious view of the inhabitants of the cometary worlds: I cannot show you the beings of the system to which I myself belong, that of the sun your organs would perish before our brightness; and I am only permitted to be present to you as a sound or intellectual voice. We are likewise in progression, but we see and know something of the place of infinite wisdom: we feel the personal presence of that supreme Deity which you only imagine; to you belongs faith, to us knowledge; and our greatest delight results from the conviction that we are lights kindled by his light, and that we belong to his substance. To obey, to love, to wonder, and adore form our relations to the infinite Intelligence. We feel his laws are those of eternal justice, and that they govern all things, from the most glorious intellectual natures belonging to the sun and fixed stars, to the meanest spark of life animating an atom crawling in the dust of your earth. We know all things begin from, and end in, his everlasting essence, the cause of causes, the power of powers."

PERMANENT IMPRESSIONS BY SPIRITUAL POWERS.

Dr. Ferriar, in his Essay towards a Theory of Apparitions, relates a remarkable Trial of Dr. Pordage, a clergyman in Berkshire, which was published under the frightful title of Dæmonium Meridionem, or Satan at Noonday, &c. Dr. Ferriar remarks: "The development of this story, which is not necessary for my purpose, exhibits the combined effects of Mysticism, Superstition, and Sensuality, which evidently produced a disordered state of the sensorium, and gave rise to the visions, which were admitted by all the parties."

The book quoted by Dr. Ferriar, (published in 1655,) is one written by a most determined opponent of Dr. Pordage, in reply to Dr. P.'s own book (published in 1654). Had Dr. Ferriar consulted that, he would have found the following passage, which would have required quite another theory than the one he has offered to explain it. It will be seen that it affirms the fact of permanent impressias, caused by the spiritual powers, upon objects in nature. Such impressions, of course, could be judged of by

the senses of other persons than the parties immediately concerned :

Now, besides these appearances within, the spirits made some wonderful impressions upon visible bodies without, as figures of men and beasts upon the glass windows and the ceilings of the house, some of which yet remain. But what was most remarkable, was the whole invisible world, represented by the spirits upon the bricks of a chimney, in the form of two half globes, as in the maps. After which, upon other bricks of the same chimney, were figured a coach and four horses, with persons in it, and a footman attending, all seeming to be in motion, with many other such images, which were wonderfully exactly done. Now fearing lest there might be any danger in these images, through unknown conjuration and false magic, we endeavoured to wash them out with wet cloths, but could not, finding them engraven in the substance of the bricks; which, indeed, might have continued until this day had not our fear and suspicion of witchcraft, and some evil design of the devil against us in it, caused us to deface and obliterate them with hammers.

It is difficult to see how, what is commonly called, delusion could have any place here. The affirmations, from their nature, if not truths, must be intentional falsehoods; yet they are most deliberately put forth, and that too, not by any one wholly obscure, but by a man well known amongst those who are interested in the mystic writers, as being of some eminence in that class; and, moreover, he makes these statements in a book written to clear himself from charges which had been of the most serious consequences to him.-Notes and Queries, Second Series, No. 166.

Dr. South has this remarkable passage upon "The Mind of Man in Spirituals affected by External Objects:

The mind of man in spirituals, acts with a corporeal dependence, and so is helped or hindered in its operations according to the different quality of external objects that incur into the senses; and, perhaps, sometimes, the sight of the altar, and those decent preparations for the work of devotion, may compose and recover the wandering mind much more effectually than a sermon or a rational discourse: for these things, in a manner, preach to the eye, when the ear is dull and will not hear; and the eye dictates to the imagination, and that at last moves the affections. And if these little impulses set the great wheels of devotion at work, the largeness and height of that shall not be at all prejudiced by the smallness of its occasion. If the fire burns brightly and vigorously, it's no matter by what means it was at first kindled; there is the same force and the same refreshing virtue in it, kindled by a spark from a flint, as if it were kindled by a beam from the sun.

Perhaps, the most remarkable manifestation of material attributes by presumed spiritualities is that narrated by Damascius, a stoic philosopher of Syria, who flourished in the time of Justinian. Speaking of him, Dr. Lardner writes: "He says expressly that in a battle fought near Rome with the Scythians commanded by Attila, in the time of Valentinian (the third) who succeeded

Materialism and Spiritualism-Personal Identity. 59

Honorius (in the year 425) the slaughter on both sides was so great, that none on either side escaped except the generals and a few of their attendants. And, which is very strange," he says, "when the bodies were fallen, the souls stood upright, and continued fighting three whole days and nights, nothing inferior to living men either for the activity of their hands or the fierceness of their minds: they were "both seen and heard, fighting together, and clashing with their armour."-Works, viii. 143. Southey thought this passage sufficiently curious for insertion in his Commonplace Book, page 143.

دو

MATERIALISM AND SPIRITUALISM-PERSONAL IDENTITY.

Isaac Taylor has well observed, in his Physical Theory of Another Life: "The doctrine of the materialist, if it were followed out to its extreme consequences, and consistently held, is plainly atheistic, and is therefore incompatible with any and with every form of religious belief. It is so because, in affirming that mind is nothing more than the product of animal organization, it excludes the belief of a pure and uncreated mind-the cause of all things; for if there be a supreme mind, absolutely independent of matter, then, unquestionably, there may be created minds, also independent.'

The question has been thus ably illustrated by Dr. Lardner, in his popular Museum of Science and Art, vol. 8:

Man's nature, it is admitted, is a compound of the material and the intellectual. According to some, to whom, on that account, the name of Materialists has been given, the intellectual is a mere function or property of the material part of our nature. According to others, the intellectual is a function of a spiritual essence, which is independent of our material organization, though inseparably connected with it during human life.

"Our nature being thus compound, let us see how far we can trace the connexion between its mere physical part and the thinking and intelligent principle which abides in it.

"There is a principle called in metaphysics Personal Identity, which consists in the internal consciousness by which each individual knows his past existence, so as to be able, with the greatest certainty of which the judgment of our minds is susceptible, to identify himself existing at any given moment with himself, existing at any former time and place. Nothing in human judgment can exceed the clear certitude which attends this consciousness. The Duke of Wellington, on the eve of his death at Walmer, had an assured certainty that he was himself the same individual intelligent thinking being, who, on the 18th of June, 1815, commanded at Waterloo the allied armies. Now, to what did this intense conviction and consciousness of identity apply?

What was there in common between the individuals who died at Walmer and who commanded at Waterloo? To reply to this question we must recur, for a moment, to our physical organization.

The human body consists of bones. flesh, and blood, each of which is, however, itself a compound substance, and the whole is largely impregnated with water. The ultimate materials of the average human body are 14 lbs. of charcoal and 10 lbs. of lime, impregnated with 116 lbs. of water, and 14 lbs. weight of the gases which form air and water, that is, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen.

Now those who think that the intellectual principle residing in the human body is nothing more than a quality or a property arising from the matter composing it, must be able to imagine how 14 lbs. of charcoal, 10 lbs. of lime, and 116 lbs of water can be so mixed up with 14 lbs. of air as to make a material thing— machine let us call it-which can feel, think, judge, remember, and reason. This power of intelligence, we know, is ascribed to the organization of the materials; but we are still left as far as ever from any explanation as to how the mere arrangement and peculiar juxta-position of the material atoms thus composing such a body, can produce the prodigious powers of intellect.

"But even admitting a supposition apparently so impossible, the question of Personal Identity will raise an insuperable objection to it. Physiologists and anatomists have proved that the matter which composes our bodies is subject to continual change, with varying rapidity, according to the habitudes and occupations of individuals. According to some authorities the average length of the interval within which the change takes place does not exceed thirty days. It is, however, generally agreed that it is a very brief period.

This, then, being the case, let us again ask, what is it that was identical in the Duke of Wellington dying at Walmer in Sept. 1852, with the Duke of Wellington commanding at Waterloo in June, 1815? Assuredly, it was not possible that there should have been a single particle of matter common to his body on the two occasions. The interval consisting of 37 years 2 months, the entire mass of matter composing his body must have undergone a complete change several hundred times-yet no one doubts that there was something there which did not undergo a change except in its relation to the mutable body, and which possessed the same thought, memory, and consciousness, and constituted the personal identity of the individual; and since it is as demonstrable as any problem in geometry, that that something which thus abode in the body, retaining the consciousness of the past, could not have been an atom, or any number of atoms, of matter, it must necessarily have been something not matter, that is to say, something spiritual-thus proving the existence of a spiritual

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61

essence connected with the human organization. Here the proof of the physical inquirer terminates. If there is nothing in the disorganization of the human body and the phenomena of death to demonstrate the simultaneous destruction of the spiritual principle, the existence of which is thus established, there is, on the other hand, nothing to prove its continued existence, and for that we are thrown upon the resources of revelation, which might, indeed, have been foreseen; for, if the continued existence of the spirit, or in other words, a future state, were capable of demonstration by the ordinary faculties of the mind, it would have been incompatible with the divine economy to have rendered it the subject of revelation. God does not suspend the laws of nature to reveal by miraculous means those truths which are discoverable by the exercise of our natural faculties."

MESMERISM AND SOMNAMBULISM.

In 1784, a Report was made to the King of France, signed, among other members of the Commission, by Franklin and Lavoisier. It speaks in strong terms of the Magnetism of this period, with its baquets, its crises, and its convulsions—against Mesmer's theory, too, of a universal fluid with flux and reflux, the medium of influence by the celestial bodies on the human system, and a universal curative agent-they express no opinion whatever, favourable or unfavourable, in regard to Somnambulism properly so called.

It is equally admitted that somnambulism, with its attendant phenomena, in the form now known to us, was observed, for the first time, by the Marquis de Puységur, on his estate of Buzancy, near Soissons, on the 4th of March, 1784; but his observations were not published until four months after the Commissioners' report was made. Bailly, and his associates, learned and candid as they were, did not condemn that which they had never seen nor heard of. To this fact Arago testifies as follows: "the Report of Bailly, upset from their foundations the ideas, the system, the practice, of Mesmer and his disciples: " but we have no right to evoke its authority against modern somnambulism, most of the phenomena of which were neither known nor announced in 1783. A magnetizer undoubtedly says one of the least probable things in the world when he tells us that such an individual, in a state of somnambulism, can see everything in perfect darkness, can read through a wall, or even without the aid of the eyes.

Bailly does not notice such marvels. The naturalist, the physician, or the more curious investigator of somnambulistic experiments, who inquire, whether, in certain states of nervous excitement, individuals are really endowed with extraordinary faculties —that, for instance, of reading through the epigastrium or the