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Updated: July 15, 2025
more deeply than it has ever yet been stated, the trembling immateriality, the mist-like transience of this seemingly so solid body in which we walk attired. Certain agents I found to have the power to shake and to pluck back that fleshly vestment, even as a wind might toss the curtains of a pavilion. For two good reasons, I will not enter deeply into this scientific branch of my confession.
Such was the awful and mysterious fate of the tailor, who, as a hero, could not of course die; he merely dissolved like an icicle, wasted into immateriality, and finally melted away beyond the perception of mortal sense. Mr. O'Connor is still living, and once more in the fulness of perfect health and strength. His wife, however, we may as well hint, has been dead more than two years.
But to the inorganic beings to the angels the whole of the unparticled matter is substance that is to say, the whole of what we term "space" is to them the truest substantiality; the stars, meantime, through what we consider their materiality, escaping the angelic sense, just in proportion as the unparticled matter, through what we consider its immateriality, eludes the organic.
Various pamphlets from his pen shortly appeared in rapid succession, and a few years later, while still working at shoemaking, he wrote and published his admirable 'Essay on the Immateriality and Immortality of the Human Soul, which he sold for twenty pounds, a great sum in his estimation at the time. The book went through many editions, and is still prized.
It appears, then, that to whatever side we turn, the same difficulties follow us, and that we cannot advance one step towards the establishing the simplicity and immateriality o the soul, without preparing the way for a dangerous and irrecoverable atheism.
Has the multitude of subtle distinctions, with which theology in some countries is filled throughout; have the words spirit, immateriality, incorporeity, predestination, grace, with other ingenious inventions, imagined by sublime thinkers, who during so many ages have succeeded each other, actually had any other effect than to perplex things; to render the whole obscure; decidedly unintelligible?
His tenets on immateriality have always been rejected by "common-sense" philosophers; but it should be remembered that the whole work was written at a time when the English-speaking world was disturbed by the theories of sceptics and deists, whose doctrines the pious divine sought as best he could to confute.
The first is that the question itself is unintelligible, and therefore cannot receive any answer; the second is that the popular doctrine respecting the immateriality, simplicity, and indivisibility of a thinking substance is a "true atheism, and will serve to justify all those sentiments for which Spinoza is so universally infamous."
For, however certain we may be of the immateriality of the soul in its essence, it is a perfectly well established fact that all its operations and functions, as an animating spirit in the human body, are fulfilled through the workings of material organs in the brain; that these organs are in childhood in an exceedingly immature, tender, and delicate condition; and that all sudden, sharp, and, especially, painful emotions, greatly excite, and sometimes cruelly irritate them.
I liked well to see that strange life, which even the stout, dead-in- earnest little Bohemian musicians, piping in the centre of the Piazza, could not altogether substantialize, and which constantly took immateriality from the loveliness of its environment.
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