The Religion of Nature Delineated William Wollaston (my reading book .TXT) 📖

vehicle is, and there they communicate their several motions or tremors to this material vehicle (or by their motions, or tendency to motion, press upon it), so that the soul, which inhabits it in a peculiar manner and is thoroughly possessed of it, shall be apprehensive of these motions or pressures; and moreover, that this vehicle, so guarded and encompassed by the body as it is, can be come at or moved by external objects no other way but by the mediation of the nerves; nor the soul, by consequence, have any direct intelligence concerning them, or correspondence with them, any other way. And as we suppose the soul to receive notices of things from without in this manner, so let us suppose, on the other side, that by moving its own vehicle it may produce motion in the contiguous spirits and nerves, and so move the body: I mean, when nothing renders them unfit to be moved. Let us suppose further that the soul, by means of this vehicle, feels or finds those prints and portraits, or those effects and remains left by objects on the mind in some manner or other, which cause the remembrance of words and things: I mean again, when they are not filled up or obscured by anything; or, when there are any such to be felt. And lastly, let us suppose that if the soul in its more abstracted and purer reasonings, or more spiritual acts, has any occasion for matter to serve it, the matter of this vehicle is that which is always with it, and serves it. All which it is easy to understand, and perhaps not very difficult to suppose. On the contrary, by many symptoms it appears most probable that that matter to which the mind is immediately present, and in which is its true shekinah, is not the whole gross body, but some subtle body, placed (as I have said) in the region of the brain. For there all the conveyances of sensible species conspire to meet, and there in reflection we find ourselves: when a limb is lost, the soul, ’tis true, loses an opportunity of receiving intelligence from or by it, and of using it, but perceives no loss in itself: and though the body, many parts of it at least, are in a perpetual flux and continually altering, yet I know that the substance which thinks within me now (or rather, which is I) is, notwithstanding all the changes my body has undergone, the very same which thought above fifty years ago, and ever since: when I played in such a field, went to such a school, was of such a university, performed such and such exercises, etc.592 If you would permit me to use a school term, I would say the “egoity”593 remains. Now to answer the objection, and apply all this to our purpose: Why do we not perceive external objects in our sleep or a swoon? Because the passages are become impracticable, the windows shut, and the nerves, being obstructed or somehow rendered for the time useless, can transmit no information to it. Why, however, does it not reason and think about something or other? Because, all the marks by which things are remembered, being for the present choked up or disordered, the remembrance of those objects about which it is wont to employ itself, and even of the words (or other signs) in which it uses to reason and to preserve the deductions and conclusions it makes, is all suspended and lost for the time; and so, its tables being covered, its books closed, and its tools locked up, the requisites for reasoning are wanting, and no subject offers itself to exercise its thoughts, it having yet had little or no opportunity to take in higher objects and more refined matter for contemplation. And to conclude, if it be demanded, why anyone should imagine that the soul may think, perceive, act after death, when it does not do this in sleep, etc. the answer is: because those enclosures and impediments which occasioned the forementioned intermissions, and those great limitations under which it labors at all times, will be removed with its enlargement out of the body. When it shall in its proper vehicle be let go, and take its flight into the open fields of heaven, it will then be bare to the immediate impressions of objects: and why should not those impressions which affected the nerves that moved and affected the vehicle and soul in it, affect the vehicle immediately when they are immediately made upon it, without the interposition of the nerves? The hand, which feels an object at the end of a staff, may certainly be allowed to feel the same much better by immediate contact, without the staff. Nay, why should we not think that it may admit of more objects and the knowledge of more things than it can now, since, being exposed all round to the influences of them, it may be moved not only by visible objects just at the extremities of the optic nerves, by sounds at the ends of the auditory, etc., but become, as it were, all eye to visible objects, all ear to audible, and so on? And why should we not think this the rather, because then the soul may be also perceptive of finer impressions and ethereal contacts, and consequently of more kinds of objects, such as we are now incapable of knowing? And then, this being so, why should we not presage that other endowments, as faculties of reasoning, communicating thoughts, and the like, will be proportionable to such noble opportunities of knowledge? There seems to be nothing in this account impossible, and therefore nothing but what may be.

If we do but attend, we must see everywhere that many things are by ways which we do not, nor can, understand; and therefore we must be convinced, even from