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Updated: June 15, 2025
The rational psychology of the Wolffian school is guilty of this error, and whatever of proof it advances for the substantiality, simplicity, and personality of the soul, and, by way of deduction, for its immateriality and immortality as well as for its relation to the body, is based upon this substitution, this ambiguity of the middle term, and therefore upon a quaternio terminorum, all its conclusions are fallacious.
Shall we not more fully believe in the immateriality and eternity of our love, if it remains, like a pure thought, in those regions which are inaccessible to change and death, than if it were degraded and profaned by unworthy delights?
Yet this misapprehension appears to have been the cause of a great inconsistency in the doctrine of the Thomists and of other good philosophers: they recognized the immateriality or indivisibility of all souls, without being willing to admit their indestructibility, greatly to the prejudice of the immortality of the human soul.
IV. All those who believe the immateriality of the soul, a specious and noble tenet, must confess, from their present experience, the incomprehensible union of mind and matter.
For if these sciences receive the soul replete with images, and knowing nothing subtile and unattended with material garrulity; and if they elucidate reasons possessing an irrefragable necessity of demonstration, and forms full of all certainty and immateriality, and which by no means call to their aid the inaccuracy of sensibles, do they not evidently purify our intellectual life from things which fill us with a privation of intellect, and which impede our perception of true being?
Dust and ashes he was; dust and ashes he will be. He may be touched, and tasted, and seen, and smelt. In the immateriality of his composition no one believes; and none but Nonentitarians pretend to do so. He thinks thinking is the very condition of his existence. To think is to live. To the sum total of vital manifestations we apply the term mind.
I assert, that the doctrine of 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.
This soul imparts a portion of its winged lightness to the body it animates: the immateriality which thus passes into matter is what is called gracefulness. Matter, however, is obstinate and resists. It draws to itself the ever-alert activity of this higher principle, would fain convert it to its own inertia and cause it to revert to mere automatism.
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.
Fourthly, It is equally impossible for man to have any clear, decided idea of perfection, of infinity, of immensity, and other theological attributes. To Descartes we must therefore reply as we have done to Dr. Clarke on his twelfth proposition. Thus nothing can well be less conclusive than the proofs upon which Descartes rests the existence of immateriality.
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