But the accepted meaning of the word "natural" is, something in the ordinary train, grounded on laws of so very broad and customary operation, as not to indicate any particular and occasional plan or interposition of the Divine Mind. If the writer whom I have cited employed the term in the unusual sense, he might just as allowably have said, concerning the creation of the first man or the first mammoth, the healing of the "paralytic" or the raising of Lazarus, "these were natural events, and if such, how are they to be accounted for ?" Would he then have chosen to say,-" The only answer is, that the principle, if it be one, is unknown to us"?-Certainly that would not be the answer of a theist; and I cannot but judge the tendency of the like answer, as given concerning some dreams, to be, unconsciously, atheistic also. Not that I would put any dreams, except the clearly prophetical ones of scripture, on a par with miracles: but there are others, as I judge,

which more or less approach that character, and which (whether they be termed natural or supernatural) contribute to render a great and invaluable "principle" the more known to us, namely, the special providence of the Omniscient Ruler. They do not, indeed, actually involve the divine rule or agency more than the commonest sequences involve it; but they do make it more signally and impressively apparent.1

Certain writers who have inferred from dreams, as is attempted in the following pages, auxiliary arguments for the distinct subsistence of spirit, have been stigmatized as

66

pseudopsychologists." The stigma, indeed, may have been chiefly aimed at those of them who contend for the spirit's independency of matter in a sense or degree beyond

1 Howard's promptness and punctuality in paying his debts, and his kindness to relations, were as really parts of his beneficence as his visits to dungeons; yet the former were much less impressively and signally illustrative of that quality than the latter.

PREFACE.

xiii

what facts and sound reasonings can sub

stantiate.

But Descartes, Sir Thomas Browne, and Addison, have been so named.' I had far rather incur the appellation on such grounds, and in such company, than for opinions of an opposite kind to which it might be far more justly applicable.

Those are most truly, as I judge, "pseudopsychologists," who, by the assumption that matter is all-that there is no other or spiritual substance, would make the notion of the soul itself a falsehood. That indifference appears to me quite inexplicable, which is expressed by here and there an intellectual person professing Christian belief as well as philosophic acumen, on the question whether there be really and without metaphor "a spirit in man."

1 St. Paul must not be placed in the same line. But under the same imputation he must surely come, who doubted if his "visions" were "in the body or out of the body," (2 Cor. xii. 2,) and who expected to be "absent from the body and present with the Lord." (2 Cor. v. 8.)

b

xiv

PREFACE.

Were we to surrender the great truth that so it is, that mind, while ever dependent for its existence on the will of God, is really one and indissoluble, a real unit, or spiritual monad,thus yielding up what consciousness testifies, and both reason and scripture confirm; thus granting that the soul of Bacon or of Plato might be only a congeries of particles wonderfully subtile, and his thoughts only agitations or melodies of these, how could we not discern, yet how ward off, at least one destructive inference ?-how retain the belief of man's unity, continued identity, nay, personality for, except in a spiritual being or real monad, no proper individuality' can be conceived to exist.

'The term "individual," now so vulgarized, it is true, was used by Cicero to describe the "atoms or "corpuscles" of Epicurus, (De Natura Deorum, lib. i. cc. xxiv. xxv. xxvi.) and it could there only mean physically or actually indivisible; since those atoms*_corpuscula-were, as the latter name

*ǎTOμos, insecabilis, individuus, corpusculum minutissimum. -Heder. et Scap. Lexic.

It is true, we have still stronger arguments for this spiritual existence than the phenomena of dreaming supply; but, in my judgment, where a subject is all-important, even subor

distinctly shows, considered as not “unextended." But, even were the mind supposed to be only one of these indiscerptible atoms, and the term individual applied to it,—that hypothesis, while it might remove one difficulty, would leave another untouched, and perhaps induce some greater.

The learned Howe, indeed, in his masterly and amusing irony against the Epicurean atomists,* states, that he had "not met with any that had asserted the rationality of single corporeal atoms," and so had "not fought with any adversary;" but adds, that " he knows not what time may produce."+

Had he lived to know what German philosophy can produce or reproduce, he might have been still more uncertain, generally, as to the possible products of time.

It is worth while, therefore, to notice such a hypothesis. No doubt it removes one difficulty by representing the soul or mind as not actually discerptible or dissoluble, i. e. (as we may presume would be meant) except by Omnipotence. But then it still implies,-whether intending it or not,-that this mind or soul has parts, and parts which are numberless. For, as the great mathematician Pascal writes, "however small a given space may be, we can conceive one less and less to infinity without ever arriving at an indivisible unextended

Living Temple, part i. chap. iii. Works, vol. i. pp. 44—52, folio edit. + Ibid. p. 47.