of speaking this same separation of it be no death or true manner of dying secondly by being subjected unto damnation which as we know is called in Scripture a second death But as for the annihilation of it or of the body that is it which we deny and so to do we have just reason In fine as Generation is nothing but the union of the parts and not the creation or absolute production of them so again Death and Corruption is nothing but the disunion or dissolution of them and in no wise the annihilation according as this wise Authour would perswade us As for the article of the Resurrection it proves nothing against the perpetuity of the soul for we never read of any resurrection besides that of the body wherefore to averre a resurrection of souls were a grand foolery and a doctrine never debateable or heard of amongst Christians till this silly Authour came to teach it And so much for his first chapter CHAP. III. Scripture no way a favourer of the souls mortality HIs places cited out of Scripture in favour of his errour are so impertinent as that it were no small piece of folly to examine them one by one They all of them signifie that man shall die or sometimes that for example Joseph or Simeon is not as Gen. 42.36 all which how they are to be expounded and understood may sufficiently appear by that which hath been said in the precedent chapter and how again they make nothing at all against the souls immortality Touching the words of Ecclesiastes c. 3. the answer is that they were no determinations or resolves but a history or an account given of what sometimes came into his thoughts and what obscurities and desolations of soul he had and what lastly was one of the first difficulties that troubled him and stirred him up unto a sollicitous enquiry for certainly this one verity of the immortality of mans soul is that which is to order mans designs to regulate his actions and to put life and vigour into them this being a truth most fundamentall Wee see this one was it which moved Clemens Rom. l. 1. recogn if he be the true Authour of that which passeth under his name to a serious inquiry and care for the finding out what he was to do whom to consult what to esteem most and in fine what to fear or hope most and how to order all the passages of his life This is the question that usually troubles men first of all till a resolution be had suffereth their hearts not to be at quiet every man at first suspiciously as Solomon did asking of himself as Seneca in Troade gallantly expresseth saying Verum est an timidos fabula decipit Vmbras corporibus vivere conditis Cum conjux oculis imposuit manum Supremusque dies Solibus obstitit Et tristes cineres Vrna coercuit Non prodest animam tradere funeri Sed restat miseris vivere longius An toti morimur nullaque pars manet Nostri cum profugo spiritus halitu Immistus nebulis cessit in aera Et nudum tetigit subdita fax latus Is it a truth or is' t our fears Have buzz'd a fable in our ears That mans hovering spirits do live And their interred corps survive When grieved consorts hands do close Their eyes and their last dayes oppose Our bright Hyperions beamy light And drowns the slender shades in night Then when our bones to ashes burn To be confin'd within an urn Be not the funeralls our fate But there must be a longer date For wretched man Or doth he die Intirely and intombed lie Or may he not forthwith consume And vanish all in slender fume Then when his wandring spirit flies And mingles with the aiery skies And when the dismall funerall torch His side insensible doth scorch After this sort do anxious and afflicted spirits oftentimes argue and dispute within themselves laying before their eyes all the doubts and difficulties imaginable before they descend to the making of any conclusion at all or to the determining of any setled doctrine Thus and no otherwise did Solomon when first revolving in his thoughts the matter of the souls condition and touching upon the various suspicions of men concerning it with no small sense and anguish of mind at length Eccles c. 12. drawing to a conclusion he determines saying Let the dust return unto the earth from whence it came and the spirit unto God who gave it And this text alone is sufficient to confound the Adversary and to confute whatsoever he hath endeavoured to draw out of Scripture for mans totall corruption and mortality I adde according to good Expositours that Solomon in this place representeth not what he himself did judge nor what a rationall man ought to judge but rather what Epicureans and voluptuous persons did or were wont to judge according either to the desires or at least to the apparences of sense for according to them man and beast do breathe out their lasts alike but this judgement of theirs Solomon absolutely condemns as appeareth plainly by that which before hath been alledged out of him CHAP. IV. His argument out of reason viewed and examined WHat the severall fancies were of heathen Philosophers touching the nature and definition of the soul is not much regardable sundry of them being so monstrous and absurd But it is a thing very considerable that amongst so many stragling and wild conceits all or most of all at least of the noblest and the best Philosophers have taught the immortality of the soul it self howsoever in other businesses concerning it they might sometimes disagree Permanere animos arbitramur saith Cicero Tuscul l. 1. consensu nationum omnium qua in sede maneant qualesque sint ratione discendum est and again in his Hortensius as witnesseth Saint Augustine l. 14. c. 19. de Trinitate Antiquis Philosophis hisque maximis longeque clarissimis placuit quod aeternos ammos divinosque habeamus We are perswaded by the consent of all nations that souls remain but must learn of reason of what quality they are and in what places they remain Again in Somnio Scipionis he determineth saying Infra Lunam nihil est nisi mortale caducum praeter animos generi hominum Deorum munere datos Beneath the Moon there is nothing which is not corruptible excepting souls alone bestowed upon mankind by the munificence of the Gods Thus Cicero who in his book de senectute delivers himself more at large as also in the first book of his Tusculan questions and also bringeth reasons for what he saith This assertion of Cicero for consent of Nations and Philosophers in this truth hath been shewed to the eye by the great diligence and learning of Augustinus Steuchus commonly called Eugubinus in the 9 book of his excellent work de perenni Philosophia in which he voucheth to this purpose the authorities of Phereâ—ides Syrus who as Cicero witnesseth was the first that delivered
Augustus c. do all note this contrariety of desires in man but none do note the same to be in beasts for even Plutarch in his Gryllus doth observe the contrary Thus we see what opposition reason finds in man from sense but reason cannot be contrary unto it self nor doth it struggle and strive with its own powers and dictamens and therefore it is a different power from sense And so much in answer to this chapter omitting the particular examination of his other inferences of absurdities as he calls them against the doctrine of immortality because either they are answered beforehand in that which hath been said already or else are such wretched fluffe as they can afford no matter for any sensible answer or serious undertaking CHAP. V. Arefutation of certain shifting Answers given unto sundry Texts of holy Scripture THe first place 2 Cor. 5.6.8 where Saint Paul declareth that while we are present or at home 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 in the body we are absent from our Lord but he desireth rather to be absent from the body and to be present with our Lord. Out of this it may be inferred not that immediately after death we all shall be present with God and attain to glory as this Authour idlely objecteth but that during the time of our absence from the body we may be present with Christ and enjoy God whether this be immediately after death or no about which point we do not now contend His answer is that the Apostle speaks not of the interim betwixt Death and the last Judgement but of the state of the Resurrection This Glosse of his corrupts the Text for the state of the Resurrection is not the state of separation or separated souls but the Apostle speaks plainly and expresly of absence or peregrination from the body which is the state of separation during which state he might as he saith be present with Christ I do not deny but that in the precedent and subsequent Texts he may speak also of the Resurrection but it does not therefore follow that he speaks of that state onely and as for his words they clearly bear witnesse to the contrary therefore after death and before any re-union with the body the soul remaineth And by this clear sense his second shift is taken away whereby he seeks to elude a like place of the same Apostle Phil. 1.23 24. Gen. 35.18 It is said of a woman that her soul was departing therefore there was such a thing as a soul that continued after death He answers that the meaning was she died Be it so yet the words do not import that onely but besides that this dying of hers was by the departing of her soul from her body and not by the perishing or destruction of the soul departing For example when we say The enemy is departed from such or such a place we do not mean he is slain but onely gone and do intimate that he is still alive She could not die saith he if her soul were living This is both false and also absurd for it was not the living of her soul which made her live but the being of it living within her body and the informing of it with the same as then this presence and union of a living soul made her live so on the contrary side the taking away of this presence and dissolving this union must make her die to which effect the living of her soul afterward or the dying of it was a businesse impertinent for whether it after lived or died it being once separated she was dead and remained no woman any longer for the soul of a man or woman is not a man or woman though indeed the Platonicks together with Cicero Macrobius and Hierocles not knowing any thing of the Resurrection and of glorified bodies yet being sure that man was to remain and be rewarded after death they knew not how to defend this truth without their holding an errour viz. that the soul onely was the man and the body but as a prison of it but Aristotle he was wiser than to think so for he defined man not Anima rationalis but Animal rationale and this Doctrine is truly Christian and Philosophicall taught expresly by Marcus Varro apud Augustinum lib. 19. de Civit. dei cap. 3. His choice of the three opinions is saith S. Augustine of Varro that man is neither soul alone nor body alone but body and soul together and therefore that the supream good of man which is to make him happy consists in the goods of both that is to say of soul and body and by Saint Athanasius in his Creed Anima rationalis caro unus est homo Aquinas 1. p.q. 75. c. 4. A reasonable soul and flesh is one man and by Saint Methodius Bishop of Olympus in Lycia and afterwards of Tyrus in excerptis apud Photium Cod. 224. 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 A man according to nature is most truely said to be neither a soul without a body nor yet a body without a soul but a compound of them both joyned together in one form and beauty Thus he with whom consenteth the Prince of Roman Historians Crispus Salustius l. de Bello Jugurth Nam uti genus hominum compositum ex corpore et anima est c. For as the race of man is compounded of body and soul c. All these according with Aristotle who would not feign false principles for the avoiding of true difficulties which he could not solve though now they dissolve of themselves the Article of the Resurrection and of glorified bodies having been revealed to us which before was Mysterium à seculis absconditum A mystery hidden from the beginning of the world But after all this light some mens eyes it seems were dazzeled with it and by name John Wicliffes who as we may see in Waldensis tom 1. l. 1. ar 2. c. 33. 34. adhered still to the false opinion of Plato concerning the souls being the whole man and also stood stifly in the defense thereof his reasons for it are examined and effectually impugned by the same Waldensis in the places cited Dicaearchus an ancient Peripatetick ranne into another extreme holding that man was nothing else but body and that he had no soul at all neither mortall nor immortall which grosse errour of his needed no confutation but was hissed out of the schools as an open and manifest falshood Besides if it had not been manifestly false yet needed it no other confutation then those arguments by which the immortality thereof is proved to be a truth because according to the received old Maxime Rectum est index sui et obliqui The rest of the Authours evasions of this nature are forestalled and prevented by this that hath been answered already and so without any more ado about them may be dismissed Fear not them saith Christ who kill the body but are not able to kill the soul Therefore when the body is killed
their materiality namely by conceiving them conformably unto it self that is to say after a manner abstracted and immateriall declaring thereby the spirituality of it's being for it is as great a signe of a spirituall Being to understand a matter immaterially as it is to understand a spirit that hath no matter Thirdly I answer that although our power apprehensive does attire spiritual substances in formes corporeall by reason of the imaginative faculty upon which it borders yet the judging and discursive faculties do not so for these two cast of all figures and resemblances corporeall determining Angels for example to be spirits purely and devoid of all figure and corporeity as also in like sort that privations though apprehended as positive entities yet are not so in so much as the soul by meanes of judgement and discourse goes further then the phantasy and findes out truths which the phantasy could not tell it by thus surmounting forms corporeall shewes her independency upon the body and that some of her acts be inorganicall By this then it appeares that the apprehension of spirituall objects under lineaments corporeall is but the first enterteinment of them which though it do argue some imperfection in the soul concerning her manner of being yet not in the being it self Wherefore as on the one side this imperfect way of apprehension argues the soul to be in a degree inferiour unto Angels or pure Intelligences so on the other side the acts of judgement and of discourse which it doth exercise afterward do sufficiently evict that it is in a degree superiour to corporeall entities I exemplify for declaration sake God when he first arrives in our understanding by the out-portalls of simple apprehensions appeares unto us in the habite of a body an Angel in the likenesse of a man Time drest up in wings in his hands a sithe and houre-glasse Death like a raw-bon'd sire armed with a dart c. but forthwith Judgement and Discourse do waite upon them dismissing Apprehension and being thus stepped in devest this Time for example pull of his strange disguize bid him lay down his sithe clippe his wings and break his houre-glasse and to appeare in no other likenesse but his own that is to say without colours or lineaments corporeall and thus having disrobed him of his borrowed attire the soul judges of him as he is and gathers new verities of him by discurring And as the understanding proceeds in this one example so it does in others of the same nature thus the difficulty which Melinaeus made hath found out a solution A fifth head of probation is from the appetite of man that can be satiated with nothing but eternity the desire of which is universall and infinite This desire being generall must needs be from Nature and therefore right and not a vicious rapacity or greedinesse as Pliny seems to make it and so being right cannot be frustrate This argument is urged earnestly by Alex. Valignanus l. contra Japonios apud Possevinum parte 1. Biblioth l. 10. c. 4. Thomas Carmelita l. 11. de salute omnium Gentium procur c. 12. and by sundry other learned men and it seems to be very efficacious because this same appetite of perpetuity is very vehement restlesse and incessant and besides universall yea Pliny himself acknowledgeth as much Wherefore as from the generall and pressing appetite of meat we do inferre rightly a convenient provision of sustenance ordered by nature so in like sort from this ingrafted longing after a perpetuity we may inferre no lesse rightly a provision of immortality ordeined for us One Pontius a late Scotist in his Philosophia universa secundum mentem Scoti excepteth against this argument and divers others also with whom not being willing to wrangle we returne him no other answer but this viz. that he who is more in love with the determinations of any one Master be he never so eminent then he is with truth especially in doctrines of concernment is not an Eagle of the right breed nor deserves the name of a Philosopher It may be here objected that if an appetite were a good argument to prove a satisfaction it would prove we should never dye because against death man hath a great and naturall aversion I graunt it proves that either we shall not dye or else at least should not have died if we had remained in that state of innocency in which Adam was created for death entred into the world onely by sinne but this punishment of death is not of the soul but of man and againe the death of man is no more but a separation of soul and body out of which the death of the soul does not follow but that of the body onely for although a body cannot live without a soul yet no reason can be given why a soul cannot live without a body nay on the contrary side though we may easily understand how a soul may be annihilated yet it is a thing hardly intelligible how it should dy The soul is a form assistent as well as an informant and therefore may well subsist without an actuall informing It appeares that this appetite is naturall First because it is universall and followes the whole species Secondly because it cannot be supprest from breaking out into actuall and vehement longings after immortality out of which it followes first that immortality is a thing possible because nature does not incline us to impossibilities secondly that the appetite is right and rationall and cannot be erroneous as Scotus did object it might for at least in the generalities the works of nature be the works of a high intelligence thirdly that this immortality is not onely possible to be obteined but also shall be atteined Neither if this argument from naturall appetite be a good one would it follow thence as Abulensis in c. 22. Matth. q. 224. conceiveth it would namely that the Resurrection would be a naturall effect and might be proved by reason this I say doth not follow because as Aquinas teacheth 4. d. 43. q. 1. a. 1. lib. de veritate q. 24. a. 10. ad 1. in supplement q. 75. a. 3. Ferrariensis l. 4. con Gen. c. 79. the inclination of nature and her power be both of one latitude and therefore because no naturall efficient is able to reunite a body once separated nature does not incline unto it and so not unto the resurrection Wherefore that unto which nature does incline us is onely to a continuance of the soul with the body and not to a restitution of it after it is once separated from it in so much that if any longing do remaine still in man to have a body by way of resurrection it is but as hote embers the remnants of an ancient fire It is then in this case as it is in the desiring of having all our limbs perpetually entire for if by chance any be cut off as it is not then in the power of nature
the reprehender with greater force then it can be cast upon them by him or any man Now although it be a thing not evident that the spirits seeming to appear are really the souls of such or such deceased persons yet have we no reason to think otherwise but if that they are their good or evill Angells which by divine appointment do act in their behalf and likenesse yet even by that it will appear that those souls are still alive for God himself did often appear by such deputies and manifest himself to Moyses and Abraham by the apparition of his Angels But yet it is a thing no lesse reasonable to judge that they are humane spirits that make an apparition in themselves or at the least in their deputies then to judge that they are spirits Wherefore whoso question 's whether these appearing spirits be souls or no but rather deluding Devils putting on their likenesse may as well doubt whether on the contrary side those same Devils be really Devils and not the souls of men or again whether those living men whom our eyes daily do behold be really men or rather not some delusive apparitions I would fain learn why men contrary to the doctrine of Aristotle Epicurus should distrust their senses in judging every thing to be the same it seems unlesse they see some urgent reason to the contrary Surely in behalf of such apparitions there may be just reasons given because it is not unlikely that souls which had so much dealing in the world during the time of their habitation in the body and contracted so many obligations of justice might after death have something remaining here for them to rectifie and to give notice of unto the living whom it doth concern Besides say that they who appeared were Devils and not souls yet this alone would argue immortality for to Doggs and Horses or such like who have no relation to a future life neither Devils nor souls doe appear neither were it to any purpose that they should I add that if no returnes of souls were to be admitted but that being once gone from hence they were never to be heard of more many men would be afraid that indeed our soules were nothing but a breath or a slender exhalation which after it was once dissipated was never again to be drawn together and consequently that all the reasons brought for immortality were but sophisticall and found out to flatter us in that opinion for so indeed it fell out with Epicurean and wicked men who pleased themselves with Nō est agnitus qui sit reversus ab inferis There was never any known to have returned from the Dead which is as much as to say There were never any Ghosts or souls of men that did appear unto the living after death In the first Edition of this small Tract this argument of Apparitions brought up the rear but it pleased the Censurer of it in Oxford to dash it quite out though for what reason I do not know If it were because he counted all the narrations of apparitions to be fabulous he must give us leave to preferre before him so many faithfull witnesses who have avowed them Again although he esteemed them fabulous yet seeing all men of judgement did not so he might have left the argument to go as farre as it might and every reader to censure of it as he should see cause and not thus to impose laws upon other mens understandings and presume to put down his judgement as a rule to others But contrariwise if he scraped out this argument for fear such stories of apparitions might lead the way to some doctrines which he himself was not willing to admit this his way of proceeding I must tell him seems to me to relish more of craft then ingenuity and also to be so farre from reasonable as he who uses it may justly be compared to him who after a preposterous manner would deny the Premises therefore onely because he did not like the Conclusion or to an evil Astronomer who will not frame his Hypotheses according to his 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 or celestiall apparences but contrariwise correct his apparences according to his Hypotheses Wherefore our Censurer by this course of his seemed desirous to maintain what he did hold already to be true or false rather then to correct his errours and to take right information for beating out the truth We do acknowledge that the Law the Prophets and the Gospell well understood are sufficient to instruct us and again that for our ordinary intelligence and concernments we are not to expect messengers from the dead yet this will not inforce us to discredit all the testimonies of apparitions which time hath left us or to say that in all occasions they are fruitlesse for as Tostatus reasoneth although they would do no good upon the kindred of Dives which as it seems was hard-hearted yet they might upon others and again although they did not conferre to any living mans conversion and salvation yet they might rectifie some injustices and errours committed by the dead and this for the most part is the errand for which they pretend to come as Tyraeus and other writers teach us and of this Tostatus q. 89. in c. 16. Matth. and q. 54. in c. 17. recites an example happening in his own time and also teaches that at the transfiguration the soul of Moyses appeared upon mount Tabor CHAP. VIII The Catabaptists errour about the sleeping of Souls related and refuted HAving examined our Adversaries chief arguments brought by him for proving the soul's dying and mortality it remains that we take into consideration another errour one of no small affinity with this yea and in effect all one with it namely the sleeping of soules and their being in a state insensible from the first instant of their separation from their bodies untill the generall resurrection Such as maintain this errour not daring as Zanchius l. 2. de oper creat c. 8. notech openly to deny the immortality of mens souls because it seemed over plainly contradictory to the holy Scripture and to the judgements also of the gravest and wifest Philosophers and Divines do therefore deprive them of all sense knowledge or any other vitall operation and lay them to sleep untill the judgement day in which they are to be reunited to their bodies which time is to be the first of their awaking But indeed if this tenet of theirs be viewed diligently we shall finde that this pretended sleep is nothing else but a direct death and onely different in the name and the reason is because for a spirit to be destitute of all vitall and intellectuall operation is nothing else but to be dead seeing that life is nothing else in the soul besides the perpetuall motion or action of it Wherefore in consideration and acknowledgement of this incessant activity Cicero and others delivered that the souls of men were made of fire celestiall and unextinguible borrowed
from the starres and the Poets in relation also to this did feign that Prometheus stole fire from heaven wherewith he gave life to his men of clay which he had made Now fire as we know is an element alwayes in action yea even then when it is raked up in ashes for even then it works both upon the food that maintains it and also on the adjoyning bodies Wherefore no charm no medicine soporiferous can cast the spirit of man into such a dull and deadly heavinesse as it shall not so much as have a feeling of it self nor be awaked by any other voice then that of the last trumpet which shall with a dreadful found call all to judgement and which noise shall be heard even by bodies then which there is nothing more dead or more corrupted nothing farther off from life as having the atomes of which they were composed now all disordered and scattered with the wind and therefore that soul which can be rouzed up by a voice no lower must needs be more then a sleep or laid down to rest Sleep is a thing different from Death though nearly allied unto it as Seneca doth signifie in the Prosopopeia following Et tu somne domitor laborum Pars humanae melier vitae c. Sharp sorrows tamer steep that art Of life humane the choicer part Astrea's off-spring here beneath Faint brother unto pallid Death Consanguineus Lethi Sopor saith another Sleep is Death's kinsman but how near we will not examine and yet so near we are sure as to a spirituall or intellectuall substance they are both one and one of them as destructive of life in it as the other because though they in themselves be things distinct yet sleep is as deadly to the soul as death it self is to the body and can agree as little with it because though sense can rest from action yet reason cannot in regard there is a greater and a more eminent kinde of vivacity in the one then in the other If the Authours of this phantasie would be understood let them declare first what kinde of Entity they take a spirit to be secondly seeing a spirit hath no body to rest nor senses to shut up nor vitall or animall spirits to repair what this sleep of a spirit is I mean how they will define it If they cannot do this then are they bunglers and speak they know not what and therefore not regardable If they say it is a cessation from action and from possibility immediate of action then hath a spirit no life left in it more then a stone or a dead body and so in this case to sleep and to dy signify the same thing though in terms that are different Yet say that they indeed could tell us what kind of thing this sleep should be that same is not enough unlesse besides they do prove it strongly for such extravagancies as this is are not to be admitted without convincing arguments to make them good Let us hear then what their arguments be and let us consider also of what weight CHAP. IX Volkelius his Arguments for this Errour examined and refuted VOlkelius a known man and a most principall Socinian is the stoutest Champion in this attempt therefore let us hear him what he saith Holy men saith he after their change of this present life with death are said in the Scripture not to be any longer Psal 39.14.37.10 Jerem. 21.15 Matth. 2.18 Thren 5.6 and being dead do neither live actually nor understand c. And though the spirits of men return to him that gave them as shall be demonstrated elsewhere yet that those same spirits be persons which do any thing or be sensible or do now enjoy pleasures everlasting is a thing so farre off from being taught us by the holy Scripture as on the contrary side it is easily shewed to be repugnant to them and that also by reasons very evident For Paul affirmeth that if the resurrection of the dead were not to be hoped for a vain thing it were to think of piety or for the Truth 's sake to undergo so manifold calamities and that of all men the Christians would be the most miserable Which assertion of his could not be true of the souls of men without the resurrection were setled in such pleasures and authority as that they did not onely enjoy a good eternall but were also in a state to give assistance unto others because that same felicity of theirs would be so great as scarcely no accession might be made unto it by the resurrection Thus reasoneth Volkelius My answer to the first part is by denying it to be said in Scripture simply and absolutely that souls departed or men departed have no Being at all but onely that they have no being upon the earth in regard that by dying they cease not only to be men any longer of this world but even to be men as before death they had been and this must needs be the true meaning of the places quoted by the Adversary in the Margin and not that other which he pretendeth because it is a thing most evident both in reason and in holy Scripture also that the parts of which men are composed be not annihilated by death without any remnant of Being left them but that they cease onely to be united or to be men in respect of which deficiency alone it might be truely affirmed of men as it is in Scripture that after death they are not in being To the second part I say that although the soul after separation from the body be not a person humane or an entity compleat yet still hath it a stable subsistence and leaveth not to be a substance intellectuall or a spirit Wherefore it doth not follow that because the soul is not a person or a compleat entity after separation that therefore it can have no action but must either sleep or dy The soul be it separated or united is a spirit a spirit is intellective an intellective substance can neither dy nor wholly cease from action as before hath been proved and therefore is not capable either of sleep or slumber or in any danger of being benummed and much lesse of death To the third I answer that the Apostle speaketh there not of Christian souls being miserable but of Christian mens being so and therefore let the souls be never so happy after death yet if there should be no resurrection the men could be never otherwise then miserable yea farre more miserable then any other men because in this life they should be afflicted in a higher degree then others and in the next they should not be at all You will say What matter is it if the men be miserable in this world and never happy in any world so the souls in the next world be made happy In opposition to this I say Yes it is a matter and a very great matter also if we will weigh things rightly for to be miserable in
THE GRAND PREROGATIVE OF HUMANE NATURE Namely The Souls naturall or native immortality and freedome from corruption shewed by many arguments and also defended against the rash and rude conceptions of a late presumptuous Authour who hath adventured to impugne it By G. H. Gent. Now first published according to the perfect Copie and the Authours mind Math. 22.32 I am the God of Abraham the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob God is not the God of the dead but of the living LONDON Printed by ROGER DANIEL and are to be sold by Antony Williamson at the Queens Armes in St. Pauls Church-yard An. 1653. THE PREFACE SO great and sovereigne to Man hath been the benignity of indulgent Nature as that she hath not only bestowed upon his soul above those of other creatures the high and singular Prerogative of immortality but hath moreover imparted to him light whereby he might come unto the knowledge of it and by that same knowledge be excited to make a diligent inquiry after the obligations that follow on it and how also in this life he may make his best advantages and preparations for the next Neither is this same Truth of immortality any new discovery but acknowledge of old by the Heathenish and Pagan Nations of which thing we in the Work ensuing are to give in a large evidence by our producing the many testimonies of a full and frequent Senate of ancient Sages who being destitute of revelation had nothing but nature to instruct them in this same verity Against these powerfull impulsives and clearer notions of truth the adverse party hath nothing to oppose but mere surmises or suspicions such namely as the Authour of the Book of Wisedome out of their own mouths recordeth saying There hath not any one been known to have returned from below Or else such as Pliny doth imagine who grafteth the opinion of immortality not upon an innate or naturall longing and appetite as he should have done but contrariwise upon a false ambition and greedinesse in man of never ceasing to be Or againe as Lucian who brings nothing to make good what he conceiveth besides down-right impiety dressed up and set forth with facetious scoffes and derisory jestings wherewith neverthelesse sundry ill-affected spirits and feebler understandings are easier perswaded then with solid arguments The Chorus of Seneca afterwards alleadged moved as it may seeme with no better or stronger arguments then these is driven as by a storme into dark and doubtfull cogitations touching the souls mortality and so also is another Chorus consisting of Mahumetan Alfaquies in the English Tragedy of Mustapha By such shadowes also as these a late Philosopher was affrighted and before him some of the ancients so farre forth as to be made imagine that even granting the soul should survive the body yet that it would not thence follow it were perpetuall but that contrarywise in tract of time it might decay and vapour it self at length to nothing burning or wasting out it 's own substance like a torch or candle or at least have a period of duration set it connaturally to the principles of constitution beyond which it was not to passe but at that term or point presently and naturally to extinguish or return to nothing of which vain phantasy we are to consider more hereafter But if suspicions may come to be examined we shall find that there be other sort of them perswading the souls mortality that seeme more hollow and deceitful then the former are as namely a depraved appetite or an unbridled and untamed sensuality that sollicites perpetually to be satisfied and is desirous without feare of future reckonings in the other world to wallow for the present and tumble like a swine in the mire of dirty pleasures and to conceive some shadow of security for it that so with the old Epicureans it might merrily say Ede bibe lude post mortem nulla voluptas Eate and drink and play thy fill There 's after death nor good nor ill Doubtlesse these later perswaders seem to be more ruinous and corrupt then the former and of more dangerous consequence And thus we see that on either side there want not suspicions namely as well for concluding of mortality as of immortality if we will be guided by them But into this high Court of judicature wherein causes so weighty and so grave as this are to be decided suspicions and dark imaginations will not be allowed for evidence or be able to cast the businesse either way To these other proofs which after I alleadge I adde this one which I have placed in the frontispiece of this Treatise namely these words of Christ Matth. 22. partly recited by him out of Exodus I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaak and the God of Jacob. God is not the God of the dead but of the living By force of which Text the Sadduces who denied there surrection were convinced and not onely they but this Authour also against whom we deale for the place proves the soul's immortality as well as the bodies resurrection Because if God be the God of Abraham after death then must his body one day rise againe to the end that being reunited with the soul there might result an Abraham again if he be the God also of the living then must his soul continue living without any intermission from death for as without a body there is no Abraham so without a soul there is no vivens or thing endued with life If you object that it is sufficient if it live then when the body is to rise though not before I answer that this intermitted living neither is nor can be sufficient because then according to this same supposition the soul must have a revivall and refuscitation for the which we have no warrant any where and feign it we must not or if we do it will want weight and be rejected It follows then that the soul of man after the departure of it from the body must either alwayes live or never and so by consequence seeing the soul must live once more it must live alwayes that is to say not onely at the resurrection as this Authour feigneth but continually from the time of the separation to the time of the reunion and so after everlastingly And this is the conclusion was intended And thus much touching the argument of the Treatise following Now touching the Adversary I am to let you know that if the Readers had not deserved much more regard then he and besides if the matter had not required some elucidation more then his objections did an answer I had been wholly silent and spared all this labour I have taken Peradventure it may seem to some that over and above an answer given to this erroneous Authour the paines bestowed in opening the cause of the soul's indeficiency and also the tracing out the severall paths which lead unto the places from whence arguments are to be raised for the proving
severall pieces for the composition of it according as every simple or ingredient of Diacatholicon for example is not Diacatholicon but contains something in it of which it is to be made up and from which as from differing heterogeneall parcels collected and united by an artificiall mixtion it results and for want of putting this difference or restraint Sennertus his own doctrine and explication of Democritus may seem defective But though we may approve of Physicall Atomes for the composition of naturall bodies yet we do not thereby allow of Atomes Mathematicall or indivisibles with Zeno of which point see Arriaga and our learned countreyman and Philosopher Compton otherwise called Carleton Neither again do we with Epicurus and some other old Philosophers maintain any casual meeting or accidentall confluence of them but contrariwise an assembling of them in generation by the force of seminall or spermatick virtue descending from the forms into the sperme or seeds and by the Creatour infused at the first creation into the forms As for the composition it self abstracting from these particulars it was also taught by Anaxagoras when he affirmed all to be in all or every thing and to have a preexistence in the bosome of nature even before such time as by the operation of seminall causes forms be accomplished and made to appear in their own likenesse upon this theatre This is also the judgement of Athanas Kircherius a late learned writer l. 3. de magnete part 3. c. 1. where he shews how rich compounds earth and water be as Chymick industries for separation have discovered insomuch as he noteth there is contained in them a 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 or generall magazine the common matter being from the first creation not lean and hungry but foeta and praeseminata with forms partiall and incompleat This also is the inchoations of forms and the rationes seminales pre-existent which many learned men have often favoured expresly taught by the great Albertus 1. Phys tract 3. c. 15. 16. 1. part summae tract 3. q. 14. ar 2. memb 2. tract 6. q. 26. ar 2. memb 1. part 2. tract 1. q. 4. ar 1. memb 2. Which doctrine of his being explained in this sense declared lies no way within the danger of the objections of Gandavensis Durandus Dominicus de Flandria or Thomas de Argentina who all proceed against it according to a way of understanding though true in it self yet quite different from this and also as we may justly think from the true meaning of Albertus or of Jacobus de Viterbo related by the afore-nominated Argentina l. 2. sent dist 18. ar 2. and there impugned by him The same doctrine for inchoations of forms in the matter before generation I mean not in materia prima but in secunda praeseminata is largely declared proved and defended by our learned countreyman Jo. Bacon a Carmelite l. 1. Quodlibet q. 6. and also in 2. sentent dist 18. q. unica in which latter place he shews that this doctrine is according to the meaning of S. Augustine These same inchoations are the rationes primordiales concreated with the matter in whose bosome they lie as it were a sleep untill such time as by the genitall power and agency of forms which are in perfection and displaid they be called out and united not accidentally but substantially into one Compositum which Compositum when it is to be dissolved all those unfolded seminall reasons do shrink up again and withdraw themselves into the self same beds from which they came And this is the doctrine of Albertus and Bacon although they do not descend to such particulars as be expressed here but hold themselves aloof according to the custome of the Schools in more generall principles and expressions This lastly is nothing else but in a good sense an eduction of forms ex potentia materiae which is Aristotles and his Disciples Doctrine for it cannot be thought that Aristotle ever intended to presse or squeez any forms out of the dry skeleton of matersa prima which matter is a principle onely receptive and no promptuary out of which to educe a form by virtue of any naturall agent whatsoever for in such a spare entity as that what fecundity is imaginable And so much touching the original of forms which is one of the abstrusest and nicest points in all philosophy and that which by vulgar Authours is meanliest handled and by the wisest is known but by conjecture Thus his main argument is answered after which all the rest will fall down headlong with any light touch though but of a finger Immediately after this he argueth out of Gen. 3.19 where Adam is told that for his disobedience he must turn into that dust of which he was made out of which he concludes that all and every part of Adam must be converted into dust which if it be so as he saith then not onely his earthly particles but his aiery watery and fiery parts must to dust also and not onely his body but his soul if he have any must be turned into the same matter See what fine conclusions follow out of this mortall souls philosophy It sufficed then that so much of his body or of the whole man was to return to dust as had been made up of it And by this alone the commination of God is fulfilled without any more ado After this he comes upon us with his false Latine saying as followeth Death reduceth this productio entis ex non-ente ad Non-entens returns man to what he was before he was that is not to be c. and by and by citing impertinently two or three places of Scripture falls to another argument drawn from the resurrection As for the Latine word Non-entem whether it be right or no we will not examine but apply our selves to the consideration of the sense which is as faulty as the Latine can be know therefore in brief that death did not reduce Adam to non ens but to non Adam it did not cause him absolutely not to be but onely not to be man or Adam any longer And forasmuch as concerns his body it is confest and certain that it was not turned by death or mortality into nothing or non ens but into dust which is an ens or something that is to say his body was not annihilated but corrupted and to die is not wholly to be destroyed but partially onely which act is all one with dissolution Now if to the totall mortalizing of man it be not necessary that his body be destroyed then can it not be needfull that his soul should be so and thus our adversaries stout argument is more then mortalized for it comes to nothing which man by dying doth not We will not deny him but that the soul of man did die and die again as much as it was capable of death for first it died by the being separated from the body although indeed according to a philosophical propriety
this verity in writing also of Trismegistus and the Chaldean monuments of Plato likewise Pythagoras Aratus Philo Cicero Plotinus Jamblichus Hierocles and sundry others as also of Aristotle the Prince of the Peripateticks who is judged by the greatest searchers into his doctrine to have directly taught the immortality although he had not declared himself in that point as in many others nor as others have done peradventure concealing himself on set purpose because he for want of light from divine revelation was not able to tell what to do with them after death nor was he willing to make up his matter with fictions poeticall as his master Plato had done before him and this very reason of Aristotles reservednesse in this point is rendred by Tostatus Paradox 5. c. 54. 55. For this cause peradventure he held it more expedient to leave his judgement of the souls immortality to be gathered out of the consequence of his doctrine and words let fall here and there as it were by chance rather then to deliver it in expresse terms or to handle the question on set purpose It was enough for him 1. Ethic. c. 11. to have said that the fortunes of posterity good or bad were a concernment of the dead because out of this one assertion his mind might come to be known for of a certain that which is not can have no concernment wherefore the souls of the deceased were supposed by Aristotle to have a being and consequently to be still alive and also to live intellectually because first of all as the Philosopher teacheth Viventibus esse est vivere To be and to live is with creatures indued with life all one thing so that with them to kill is as much as to annihilate secondly by the same reason Intellectualibus esse est intelligere With creatures intellectuall their being is to be intellectuall or to live intellectually so that if the intellectuall part of them be extinguished they perish wholly and have neither life nor being left them In consideration of this we may say that it is no matter at all to Bucephalus for example whether those of his race proved jades or metall'd horses and why is this because Bucephalus is extinguished hath no life nor being but contrariwise according to Aristotle it is a matter to the predecessours whether their posterity prove good or bad happy or miserable and why then must this be but because these have life though Bucephalus had none these have a being intellectuall Bucephalus hath none at all Other places also of Aristotle are consonant to this as we may find in Javellus l. 3. de Animae q. 3. and again tract 1. de Indeficientia Anima in the Conimbricenses tract de Animasepar disp 1. art 2. and lastly in Albertinus tom 1. Corollariorum Moreover Plutarch in l. de Consol ad Apollonium out of Aristotles book de Anim. ad Eudemum reciteth this passage following as the words of Silenus unto Midas Wherefore saith Silenus O most noble and happy seeing we esteem those who are departed this life to be happy and blessed we hold it a thing very wicked to speak of them any thing that is false or contumelious by that they now are made partakers of a better and more noble nature and this opinion of ours is so ancient that the Authour and the beginning thereof be wholly unknown but by an infinite descent of ages hath been devolved upon us Thus reporteth Plutarch and it is not unlike but Aristotle who alledged it was of the same mind and this is probable so much the more because his chief scholar Theophrastus a man almost equall to himself is confessed to have been very positive in this doctrine of immortality The same Philosophers also are diligently alledged by Monsieur Plessy in his book de veritate Relig. Christianae c. 15. which is every where extant Besides the same doctrine of immortality hath been constantly taught by the learned Aben Sina or Avicen in the last book of his Metaphysicks and also in his Almahad in which treatise he maintaineth constantly the immortality of the soul but earnestly impugneth the bodies resurrection and withall which is most false and improbable defends that Mahomet in his law never taught it but onely parabolically and for fashion sake complying with the peoples rudenesse whereby they were not sensible of any doctrine teaching a felicity that was spirituall Another Arabick Authour who goes under the name of Aristotle is of the same minde with Avicen Seeing saith he it is manifest out of the books of the ancient and already proved that the soul or minde is not a body nor doth perish but remain c. Thus he l. 1. de divin sap secundum Aegyptios c. 2. p. 1. 12. consonantly to other Philosophers though afterwards in the very next chapter most absurdly he affirms as much of the souls of Beasts But his reason was because he thought the souls of men did after their separation passe into the bodies of brute beasts by a transmigration Pythagoricall Afterwards c. 4. he addeth saying If our fore elders had been doubtfull of the souls immortality they had never for the confirmation thereof by natures dictamen made a law against which no man is but he who is entangled in vice And a little after The soul therefore passing out of this life and gotten into the other world doth not at all perish Lastly l. 3. c. 1. and again l. 12. a. c. 10. ad 17. he by many arguments assayeth to prove that the soul is void of corporeity Thus he of whose credit and excellency see the judicious censure of Doctour Guiliel Dunal in Synopsi doctrina Peripateticâ—â— ultimo .. Amongst the Poets let us heart ancient Epicharmus who as Plutarch relateth out of him pronounced sentence as followeth touching one departed this life A collection was first now a dissolution follows and he is returned from whence he came the earth downward the spirit upward So he in Plutarch l. de Consol ad Apollonium Conform to whom is Euripides in Supplic Res unde quaeque sumserat exordium Eò recipitur spiritus câ—â—le redit Corpusque terra Each part returns from whence 't was given Mans corps to earth his soul to heaven Next unto these I produce Manilius yet not as a light Poet but as a sage Philosopher he flourished in the time of Caesar Julius This same Authour l. 1. Astronomicoon speaking of the Galaxia and indeavouring to give a reason of it writeth on the manner following Nec mihi celanda est famae vulgata vetustas Mollior ex niveo lactis fluxisse liquorem Pectore reginae divum coelumque colore Infecisse suo quapropter lacteus orbis Dicitur nomen causa descendit abâ—ista An major densa stellarum turba Corona Contexit flammas crasso lumine candet Et fulgore nitet collato clarior orbis An fortes animae dignataque nomina coelo Corporibus resoluta suis terraque remissa
the soul is not neither can man kill it and why I pray you but because it is immortall This objection can never be solved neither will all his trifling about the signification of the word Hell serve his turn for let Hell be what it will and where it will yet still it runs that the soul cannot be killed But what the true and formall signification of the word 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 is we way find expresly declared by Eustathius in 1. Iliad and Anastasius Sinaita quaest 90. contrary to the dreams of this man and in particular that formally it does not signifie the Grave and if it did yet it could be no place for souls that remained unkilled and quick for it were a very cruell course to bury souls alive or to cast them quick into the grave Moreover that there is no Hell before the Resurrection is more than he hath proved or any other for him or else that none shall see God till then even in the mean time abstracting from the controversie that is agitated betwixt the Schismatick Greeks on the one side and the Orthodox Greeks and Latines on the other for the most schismaticall Greeks did not deny Hell or Heaven before the day of judgment but onely that till then neither all men nor devils were made happy in the one or tormented in the other for the Schismaticks themselves acknowledge that the Martyrs have the prerogative of the first Resurrection that is to say that they are happy before the Resurrection of their bodies and before the rest of the just or which in substance is all one they are admitted into Heaven and to the clear vision of God or again whether or no they will allow the vision of God to be the happinesse of the blessed yet felicity is Heaven wheresoever it is or in whatsoever good thing it consists and again eternall torments appointed for the reprobate be truely a Hell whether it be in the centre of the earth or else in some other region This day saith Christ unto the Thief thou shalt be with me in Paradise but not in body therefore in soul alone and therefore also his soul still lived after his bodies dying He answers that Christ himself was not in Paradise that day But this is a foppery for though Christs humanity was three nights and dayes in the lower parts of the earth yet his Divinity was that day every where and besides his soul was happy still and carried its Paradise along with it so that the good Thief might be with Christ that day and be in Paradise also as the sacred text doth assure us he was Christ said Luke 22. Father into thy hands I commend my spirit And Steven Acts 7. said Lord Jesus receive my spirit But if the spirit died there was nothing to be received He answers that his spirit was his life This shift was frivolous for his life was to be lost and destroyed and so was not commended into the hands of any Apoc. 6.10 11. I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God c. and they cried with a loud voice c. Therefore they were then extant and alive or else they could not have been seen nor cry But it is certain that one impiety cannot be defended without more and therefore as formerly he depraves the Scripture saying not with the Scripture 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 The souls of the slain or of the men slain but with such miscreants as himself The slain souls and that they cried but like the bloud of Abel But if it were meant no otherwise then thus the bodies might then have cried also as well as the souls The Text saith it was the souls of the slain and if the souls also had been slain the Text would not have uttered it in that manner as now it doth for it were an impertinent manner of speaking to talke of the souls of the slain if the souls had been slain and dead as well as the bodies The other places as that of Ecclesiastes I have urged as also the other of the Apostle who desired to be dissolved that he might be with Christ and this later I have enforced so farre as I suppose it convinces and is unanswerable as the rest also are Behold here by example of this poore silly man how bold and sawcy ignorance is growne since the time that darknesse fell upon the face of the earth for is not this with Simon Magus Acts 13.10 of set purpose to pervert the right wayes of our Lord and to thrust men headlong into perdition But setting complaints aside which even when they are necessary be not gratefull let us examine the later remnants of this Authours follies and so leave him if it may be to repentance for them yet first take into consideration some other verityes which concerne this argument CHAP. VI. The rationall Soul of man ingenerable and incorruptible VVE have seen already that by the consent of the wisest of all times and nations the rationall soul is not subject to corruption and that it hath not a period of time assigned it beyond which it must not passe nor that it may simply leave to be and be annihilated as it were by the principles of nature it self they not requiring any longer conservation from the beneficence of the first cause but contrariwise to be deserted by it as a late Authour vainly and without any probability at all imagined much according to the old phantasie of the Stoicks who as Cicero l. 1. Tusc not without indignation and signes of derision rehearseth Vsuram nobis largiuntur tanquam cornicibus diù mansuros aiunt animos semper negant They allow us a date as they do to Crowes they grant our souls shall continue long but that for ever they deny it dealing in like manner with Souls as some did with Oracles whose silence they ascribe to no other cause than impotency of speaking any longer the spirit that fed them exspiring of it self as being wasted and consumed with age One would judge saith Cicero these men spake not of Oracles but of falsedges which by long keeping would grow unsavoury and stale Certainly these that judge thus of Souls and spirituall substances make an estimate of them as they would do of trees whose timber is of severall solidity and duration as if some of them were like Cedar wood or Oake which would last long others as Chesnut or Elme which be not of so long continuance others again like Ash or Maple which rotte within a while This is light Philosophy worthy of derision more than confutation and is a device not acknowledged by our Authours before alleadged who give no limitation to the life of souls but determine absolutely a perpetuity For my part before such time as I can assent to their Philosophy in this point I desire to be satisfied by them what reason they can shew why the first cause should at a certain date
the whole and afterward to be happy onely by the halfes is a great and capitall inconvenience Let the soul be where it will and as happy as can be yet if the body do not rise again but ly trampled under foot be triumphed over by death everlastingly the condition of man as man would be very miserable that of a Christian more then of an ordinary man Besides as the soul findes pain and contentment by the body in this life so ought it afterwards or else it would want somewhat of the former perfection To the fourth part I answer that notwithstanding the soul be happy before the resurrection yet great will the advantage be that both the soul and also the whole man shall get at that great day For then at that time man recovers himself is put into a new possession of what he lost by death now what I beseech you can be dearer and more welcome unto man then he himself is neither can his victory over death be compleated till then neither again is his crown of glory finished before that recovery be made Besides this the soul also gains not a little portion of felicity by this recovery for so think many grave Doctours both ancient and modern but what is the certainty or the particulars that is a mystery which we know not yet some may guesse that as at the resurrection there is an accession of one essentiall half of man added to the soul which is the other half essentiall so also there is one half greater or lesse of felicity that doth then accrew and is not one half of felicity a notable accession and a great advantage It may well be for ought Volkelius knowes to the contrary that the soul during the state of separation shall have allotted to it by the verdict of the first Judgement which is a judgement of souls such a portion onely or proportion of felicity as belongs unto it under the title of being a forme assistent in which capacity it might act divers things by it self without assistance or cooperation of the body but at the resurrection the same soul shall have by a verdict of the second Judgement which is a judgement of men another portion of felicity allotted to it so much namely as might correspond unto the soul as it is a forme informing and makes up together with the body organicall one compleat agent which compleat agent is the Authour and Actour of the greater part of all the actions of this life See Estius in a. sent dist 45. § 7. ad 4. So that the former portion of felicity hath a correspondence to the soul alone the later portion both to soul and body not as they are severall but as united and knit up into one All this whether it be true or no I know not but yet thus much I know that it may be true for ought that Volkelius hath said and therefore is it sufficient to break the force of his argument and wholly to evacuate it till he have proved the contrary My conclusion is that as in death there is a sorrowfull departing and the farewell between soul and body is a very sad one so in like sort at the resurrection when they meet never after to be divorced there needs must be a joyfull interview between them and those second nuptials be a most solemne festivall a day of light and exultation in which the mutual congratulations will be unexpressible And therefore let Volkelius imagine what he pleases the soul by the last day and by the resurrection will be a mighty gainer and receive new joyes new treasures of felicity To the alledged place of the Apostle to the Corinthians I answer that it makes nothing at all for Volkelius his purpose because it is not said there that without the resurrection there is no felicity but onely that our faith was void unlesse Christ had risen and if our faith were void then would all promises of comfort and felicity be void also and so by consequence neither our souls nor our bodies should attain to happinesse Out of which defect it would also follow that Christians of all other men should be the most miserable because they in this life should have more afflictions fewer comforts then other men in the next life have none at all nor any thing wherewith to recompense them for their labours abstinences and sufferings here But say that the souls might be compleatly happy although there should be no resurrection yet neverthelesse even in this case the condition of a Christian would be more sad and more unhappy then that of other men so farre forth as concerns his body at the least which is one half of man and one essentiall part and also is that of which the Apostle doth in this place principally entreat and so the Adversaries argument can conclude no way You may further object that in sundry places of holy Scripture dying men are said to sleep for example with their fathers and this manner of speaking is very frequent But the answer is manifest because this word sleep is meant of the body onely which being dead lies in the sepulchre quietly as in a bed and is at the great day to be called up again as one that wakened out of a sleep a very dead one Besides this word sleep when meant of the soul is onely a symbolicall expression My Conclusion is with S. Hierome ad Pammach Incorporalem aternam animam in modum glirium immobilem torpentemque sentire non possumus We cannot be perswaded that the incorporeall and everlasting soul is like to a Dormouse immoveable and benummed or to Swallowes that sleep all winter So thought this ancient Doctour and for our own part we can be as soon perswaded that the soul may dream as that it should sleep and if we will believe Albertus magnus in 4. dist 44. ar 41. to hold that separated souls should dream were a thing ridiculous and therefore no lesse to think that they can sleep or slumber Again as Carolus Bovillus noteth it is a thing contrary to nature reason and Philosophy to put any substance destitute of connaturall operation wherefore either grant the operation or else take away the substance and so let the souls of men either be active and awake or else let them not be at all for to say they are and yet are not operative is a grosse non sequitur and not to be admitted by men of reason Wherefore if we grant the soul to be a substance intellectuall then to go consequently to this we must also grant it to be immortall and again if both intellectuall and immortall that then also it can never cease from the exercise of connaturall operations and so lastly can never be a sleep I end this chapter with the magistrall doctrine of the learned B. Tostatus l. de statu Animae Concl. pr. 1. of Avila The souls saith he if they remain immortall after death
circles of humane mortality just as the ignorant vulgar did conceive that the Sun when it goes down to us did lye concealed and bathed it self in Tethis salt waves untill the following morn began to call upon it Can I say these reasons of persuasion be counted weak that were able from age to age to carry on the doctrine of immortality against the violent streams of death and dissolution which seemed to be diseases irrecoverable and by them a man brought into a state that is desperate and never to be altered and therefore it was an usual saying Mors ultima linea rerum Death is the utmost line of things beyond which there is no going and as it were the pillars of Hercules with the Nil ultra graven on them Neither were those same reasons able after corruption and ashes to reare up a single frame of life for perpetuity onely in the soul of man but also to attempt it for the body yea and to come very neare the absolute proving of it and the evicting of a Resurrection as a thing due unto the principles of nature and as a sequele also of the attribute of Justice divine in consideration of which two reasons it appeares that albeit the Resurrection cannot be naturall yet it is a very neare borderer upon nature and that we may so speak not distant from it three fingers breadths the intervall or distance between them being no more then the want of a naturall agent that might be able to reunite the soul and body after separation Whereupon I conclude that the Resurrection of the body is none of the hardest articles of our faith but contrariwise such a one as may be persuaded easily In confirmation of this truth I cannot passe over in silence a memorable conference between Almaricus king of Jerusalem and William B. of Tyrus recorded by Tyrius himself libro 19. capite 3. de bello sacre The question propounded to by the king was this viz. Whether setting aside the doctrine of our Saviour and of the Saints that followed him the Resurrection could be proved by any evident and convincing arguments To which being moved with the newnesse of the word I answered That the doctrine of our Saviour and Redeemer was sufficient who in many places of the Gospel doth teach us most manifestly that the Resurrection is to be and that he is to come as Judge to judge both the living and the dead the world by fire as also that he will give unto the elect a kingdome prepared for them from the constitution of the world to the wicked fire everlasting prepared for the Devil and his angels Besides the pious assertion of the Apostles and Fathers of the old Testament may be sufficient To which he made answer All this I firmly hold but yet do desire a reason wherewith I might prove it to one who should deny this and did not receive the doctrine of Christ namely that the Resurrection is to come and after death another life To whom my answer was Take upon you then said I the person of one so affected and let us try whether or no we can finde out any thing Content said he Then I You do confesse that God is just Then he I hold nothing to be more true Then I replied Is it justice to return to the just good things for their good deeds and to the wicked evil things for their wickednesse Then he It is very right Then I But in our present life this is not done because in this world good men finde nothing but afflictions and adversities but the wicked enjoy a continued prosperity as dayly examples do teach us Then he It is a certainty Then I proceeded Therefore this is to be done in another life because God cannot be otherwise then a just rewarder therefore there is to be another life and a resurrection of this body of ours in which we deserved good or evil and therefore ought to receive a reward accordingly Then he This pleases me exceedingly and by it all my doubting is taken off Thus farre are the words of the grave and faithfull historian Guil. Tyrius Besides this the soul being a forme of a body organicall is not in a full perfect state nor in a full contentment without the body as Argentina in 4. d. 49. Tostat c. 4. Deut. q. 7. c. 25. Matth. q. 63. Aquin. in supplem q. 75. ad 4. 1 2. q. 4. a. 5. 4. con Gentes c. 79. Ferrarien ibid. Albertus l. 7. Comp. c. 16. do evict for indeed all formes informing do receive perfection from the matter informed by them as well as communicate perfection to it and again in things created every totall entity is more perfect then a part as S. Bonaventure clearly sheweth in 4. d. 43. q. 1. CHAP. XI Mans being by Procreation no argument of his Soul's mortality THat mans soul must have the being by generation because the man himself hath his being by it is no good consequence and the reason why some have been deceived in judging it a good one or that of due his soul ought to be generated as well as the souls of Beasts hath been partly a false apprehension what the true nature and essence of generation was partly also what was the perfection essence of man As for the first misprision it was that generation was not only to make the composituÌ„ or whole to be but also the parts by the conferring unto them not onely the being parts but also the simple Being or the being â—â—â—ties that is to say not onely the formality of them but even the naturality which conceit of theirs is a false conception and against all reason and principles of Philosophy for by them we are clearly taught that it is Man which is procreated or made by generation and not his soul his body is made or framed by it and not the matter of which it is composed For it is a received maxime and most true touching the power of naturall causes at least though no farther Quòd ex nihilo nihil fit Of nothing there is nothing to be made out of which it follows that before generation both matter and formes of all corporeall things must have before-hand a being in rerum natura at least an incompleat one and cannot possibly have it from generation Wherefore by the work of generation they are not made or receive any new absolute entity but onely are collected ordered and at last substantially linked and united one with another which union is not by a sole approximation contiguity or juxta-position that I may so speak of one of them with another as it falls out in artificiall compounds where colours for example though they be not pictures yet being thus or thus chosen formed and united make up such or such a picture but it is by a continuity or an inward and substantiall knot which is in our power better to conceive then explicate and yet not to
divers have laboured to extinguish by denying with the old Academicks and late Socinians that there is any certainty in it and by becoming so witty as to know nothing His regall sceptte I mean his naturall liberty by the command of which the Empire of his little world was swaied is wrested out of his hands and voiced to be wholly forfeited and not any longer to appertain unto him His crown and life was the immortality of his better part as therein chiefly being superiour to beasts and all other things irrationall but behold here also a privy but a dangerous traitour endeavours to despoil him of it so that in fine if all these treacherous assailants might have their wills he shall be wholly mortall poor feeble blind and miserable dethroned from his wonted dignity and cast down unto the lower classe of Beasts Profectò plurima homini ex homine mala as Pliny justly complaineth even though he himself be one of the Authours of those evils which come from man against himself Was it not enough that all inferiour creatures do rebell against us but we must basely and treacherously conspire against our selves The man that going from Jerusalem to Jericho fell amongst thieves had hard measure offered him for he was despoiled and wounded by them and left onely half alive but those thieves amongst whom we are now fallen be farre more cruell for they would kill us outright that is to say both in soul and body and with lesse then this will not be contented But now it is time we begin to examine what urgent reasons what killing arguments there were that moved this new Authour unto so extravagant a course of rigour against all mankind for if these be not very urgent and invincible we must conclude this man guilty not onely of much folly but also of heinous malice and temerity against the rights and prerogatives of man in defense of which we now come into the field against him CHAP. II. His first Classe of arguments examined and refuted HIs first arguments be drawn from mans creation fall restitution and resurrection the principall is this That what of Adam was immortall through Innocency was to be mortalized by transgression But whole Adam quatenus animal rationale was in Innocency immortall Ergo all and every part even whole man liable to death by sinne Upon this bungling argument or syllogisme the weight of all his cause must lean which as I perceive by the posture should have been a syllogisme if the Authour could have cast it into that form but since that might not be we will be contented to take it in grosse as it lies rather then passe it over without an answer We grant then that indeed all Adam for example by sinning became mortall and all and every part of him that is to say he was after so much of his age exspired to yield up to death and be totally corrupted or which is all one he was to have his two essentiall parts disunited and after that untill the resurrection neither he nor any of his parts thus dissevered and disunited to be Adam or a man any longer All which might be without that either the matter of his body or substance of his soul should perish or be destroyed as Thomas de Argentina expresly teacheth in 2. dist 17. ar 1. ad 1. arg And forasmuch as concerns the matter of his body it is an evident case because matter is a thing both ingenerable and incorruptible and so neither produced by his generation nor destroyed by his corruption and as by generation onely fashioned and united so again by corruption or death onely defaced and disunited or dissolved And as for the soul the other part there is no more necessity death should destroy it then there was it should destroy the matter there being no more reason for the one then for the other Wherefore Saint Paul wishing death that so he might be with Christ did not desire to be destroyed as this silly Authours doctrine would infer but to be dissolved for surely if his soul was to have been destroyed by any naturall deficiency or otherwise he could not think to be with Christ during the time of that destruction or dissolution which he wished and so his words and wishing would have been very vain seeing according to this Authour he should by his being dissolved come never the sooner to be with Christ because according to him neither alive nor dead he was to come unto Christ before the generall resurrection nay further his wish would have made against himself and his own ends because he knowing Christ a little in this life might in some small measure injoy him in it but if by death his soul be killed as well as his body he should have no knowledge at all nor comfort of Christ but be cast further off from him then he was before Now as all agree that matter throughout all mutations remaineth incorrupted so also according to the judgement of sundry knowing men and diligent inquirers into the works of nature and transmutation of naturall compounds naturall and materiall forms themselves also do not perish at their parting from their matters but onely are dissolved and dissipated lying after that separation in their scattered atomes within the bosome of nature from whence they had been before extracted by force of the seed the result of whose union was the form So that the entity of the form remains still unperished after corruption though not in the essence and formality of a form or totally and compleatly Thus teacheth the learned Authour of Religio Medici and exactly declares himself of the same mind is the famous late Physician Daniel Sennertus in his Hypomnemata though sometimes not so fully as for example when he ascribes to forms precedent the full production of the subsequent assigning a genitall power or vis prolifica in every form for multiplying of it self by which doctrine he seems to recede from his former principles of Atomes and not to stick constantly to them yea and besides to deliver a conceit which is hardly understood and which moreover seems to be improbable for who can explicate what one form doth when it multiplies another or what kind of causality it doth then exercise or by what strange influence that effect is wrought and the form made up of nothing This same doctrine of Religio Medici and that also which we deliver here touching the origination of forms was the doctrine of old Democritus expressed by him in his constitution of Atomes or minima naturalia as we find it largely expressed and illustrated by Joan. Magnenus l. de Philosophia Democriti ' Disp 2. c. 2. seqq as also by Petrus Gassendus in his voluminous work de Philosophia Epicuri tomo 1. with whom in substance agreed Leucippus as we may find by that which Laertius and others do deliver of him Not that every Atome did contain a form as Sennertus seems to think but rather
Hue migrant ex orbe suumque habitantia coelum Aethereos vivunt annos mundoque fruuntur Nor will we hide what ancient fame profest How milk that gusht from Juno's snowy breast In heaven that splendent path and circle drew From whence the name as erst the colour grew Or troops of unseen starres there joyn their light And with their mingled splendours shine more bright Or souls Heroick from their bodies freed And earthly parts attain their virtues meed This shining Orbe and from their lowly herse Ascending high enjoy the Universe And live Ethereall lives And again Jam capto potimur mundo nostrumque parentem Pars sua conspicimus genitique accedimus astris Nec dubium est habitare Deum sub pectore nostro In coelumque redire animas coeloque venire Of all the world we 're now possest And clear behold our Parent blest A part of him and from these warres Make our approches to the starres No doubt but under humane brest A sacred Deity doth rest And that our souls from heaven came And thither must return again Lo here how he doth signifie not onely the souls of men be divine and immortall but besides that they had not their originall from the earth or from any earthly agent with whom consenteth a Greek Philosopher Sallustius Emescenus in his book de Diis mundo lately published and vindicated from the moathes by Leo Allatius This Philosopher c. 8. teacheth on this sort First saith he let us know what the soul is The soul is that which makes things living or animate differ from the livelesse or inanimate Their difference consists in motion sense phantasie and intelligence The soul devoid of reason is a life that serves apparences and the senses but the rationall using reason bears rule over the sense and phantasie Indeed a soul destitute of reason follows the affections of the body for it desires and is angry without reason but a rationall according to the rule of reason contemnes the body and entring into combate with the soul irrationall if it get the better doth follow virtue if vanquisht declines to vice This of necessity must be immortall because it knows the Gods and no mortall thing can know that which is immortall besides it contemnes humane things as if they were belonging to some other person and being it self incorporeall is averse from things corporeall which bodies if they be fair and fresh it languisheth if old it begins to flourish Also every diligent soul makes use of the mind 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the soul is not generated by the body for how should any thing that wanteth reason generate that which hath it Thus Sallustius out of whose words we have first That the soul differs from the body 2. That the rationall from the irrationall or the sense 3. That the rationall is immortall and the reason why 4. That it is ingenerable and for what cause With this Greek Sallustius agrees the Roman who l. de bello Jugurth saieth Ingenii egregia facinora sicut anima immortalia sunt The egregious atchievements of the wit are like the soul immortall and by and by Omnia orta occidunt aucta senescunt animus incorruptus aeternus rector humani generis All things which rise do fall and being increased do wax old the minde is incorrupt and eternall c. From these Philosophers we descend to inquire after the disciples of Hippocrates being desirous to learn what their opinion was of which we are to make no small account they being the chief Mystae or Hierophantae of nature and men most knowing especially in the transmutation of bodies and not onely in the Anatomizing by dissection of such bodies as be organicall but also of others by the Art of Chymistry which teaches how to dissolve naturall compounds though not so farre as into their first elements yet into their secondary parts of composition True it is that divers of this excellent profession have been suspected of some sinister cogitations touching the immortall soul as namely that it was like that of beasts that is to say onely a thin and fading exhalation raised out of the pure substance of the bloud c. But I must do them right such of them as have been guilty of these thoughts or rather mean conceptions were not any of their Grandees no Apollines nor Aesculapii but contrariwise men of a farre meaner condition and onely of a midling size at the most such I say as by reason of their weaker understandings have lost themselves amongst the rubbish of materiall and grosser objects and there perished Whereas the diviner understandings have sped better as being able from materiall things to take a higher flight and by a curious inspection into the effects to finde out the first cause and mover and by the diviner operations of the soul to conclude the immortality thereof And of this eminent sort in our dayes Italy hath afforded us an Argenterius a Jul. Scal. Spain a Vallesius a Mercatus France a Fernelius a Laurentius Portugall a Zacutus Germany a Sennertus to say nothing of the great Aldrovandus Dodonaeus and others As then as Cicero observeth they were Minutuli little petty Philosophers who denied the souls immortality so also may we say that those Physicians who did the same were but an inferiour sort of men and half-witted in comparison of those other who did maintain it And as for Galen a most principall master in that profession he inclineth to the asserting of immortality for though sometimes he seem much perplexed not knowing what to determine then namely when he onely considered how the habilities of the minde held a constant proportion with the severall structures and temperatures of the body rising and falling with them yet at other times when he beheld the sublimer operations of the â—…de he durst not affirm them to be the effects of temperature nor of any corporeall principle and so being reduced into great straits confesses finally his own ignorance and that he knows not whence they do proceed as namely l. Quod anima sequatur temperaturam corporis again l. De usu spirat l. De causis pulsuum and l. 2. De causis symptom After all which l. 7. De Placitis Hippocratis he grows more resolute declaring plainly That the minde or originall of those operations is either some body Etherall or else a substance wholly incorporeall and finally l. de Conceptu his conclusion is delivered by him in these following words The soul saith he is a particle of that great soul of the Vniverse descending from the region celestiall is capable of science aspiring evermore by a way sorting to it self unto such a substance as hath affinity therewith and relinquishing things that are earthly soaring towards the highest partaking of divinity celestiall and often contemplating the heavenly mansion it gives an attendance to the Moderatour of the Vniverse Thus Galen as cited by Fernelius l. 2. de abditis rerum causis e. 4.
and the self same he defineth l. de Demonstratione alledged by the ancient and learned Nemesius l. de Anima c. 1. Also before Galen Hippocrates resolved the very same whose words l. de Carne are these Of things saith he celestiall and sublime I am as it to me seems to say nothing save onely that men and other creatures which live upon the earth and are bred there have their Originall from thence and that the soul is from heaven Now will I declare my opinion Verily it seems to me that the thing which we term hote and heat is something which is not mortall So he according as we finde him cited by Fernelius in the place before quoted and so much for the honour of Physicians in order to this truth Our next authority is that of Apollonius Tyaneus that famous Pythagorean Philosopher whose life Philostratus Lemnius hath writ at large and amongst other accidents l. 8. relates of him how after his decease he appeared to a young man a student in philosophy resolving him as followeth The soul is immortall and no humane thing but proceedeth from the providence divine This therefore after the body is corrupted as a swift courser released from his bonds delivered from a troublesome servitude removeth up and down and intermingles with the gentle â—ire Thus he to whom consenteth most expresly Hierocles in his commentary upon the golden verses of Pythagoras in sundry places telling us that the the soul is not onely incorruptible but also made immediately not by procreation but the hand of God See him of the Greek and Latine edition of Paris pag. 101. 103 132. Seneca the famous Stoicks minde may be learned easily out of his three severall consolatory Tractates namely to Polybius Helvia and Martia and Epist 121. as also out of other places wheresoever occasion was given His words to Martia be these Mobilis inquieta mens homini data est c. A minde saith he restlesse and unquiet is given unto man and no wonder if we look up unto the first Originall it is no concretion of any dull or earthly body but descendeth from a spirit celestiall is to be in motion incessantly it flyeth and is carried on with a swift course c. Thus he out of whose words we may gather three things first that the soul is from above and not by any naturall generation Secondly that it is immortall Thirdly that after once it is released from corporeall Organs it acts continually and never sleepeth I will adde to these the words of the Emperour Marcus Antoninus commonly called Aurel. de vita sua l. 4. n. 13. according to Merick Casaubon's division If souls saith he remain how from all eternity could the aire hold them or how the earth retain their bodies As here the bodies after they have lyne a while within the earth are changed and being dissipated leave space for other carkasses so souls carried up into the aire after they have been there some time whether kindled or liquefied are conjoyned to the common 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 that is unto the originall minde or great soul of the world Thus he as if he had said with Solomon the spirit returns to God that made it for the great soul of the Universe or the originall minde of all is nothing else Horace consenteth saying Melior pars nostri vitabit libitinam and Tacitus in vit Jul. Agric. Siquis piorum manibus locus sive ut sapientibus placet non cum corpore extinguuntur magnae animae placide quiescas If to the spirits of the pious there be any place remaining if as wise men do conceive great souls be not together with their bodies extinguished mayest thou rest in peace To these Ovid subscribeth Metamor l. 15. Morte carent animae c. Souls be exempt from death l. ult Cum volet ille dies quae nil nisi corporis hujus Jus habet incertâ— spatium mihi finiat aevi Parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis Astra ferar nomenque erit indelebile nostrum Come when it will my Deaths uncertain hour Which of this body onely hath a pow'r Yet shall my better part transcend the sky And my immortall name shall never dy Some may here imagine that this same immortality of the better part mentioned by Horace and Ovid is according to them nothing else but a never-dying fame yet this cannot be because fame though never so lasting is no part at all of us neither better nor worse The same doctrine is constantly taught by Pythagoras as appears by his doctrine of Metempsychosis and Palingenesia as also both Jamblichus and Porphyry in their severall histories of his life do witnesse of him as also Diogenes Lacrtius Porphyr l. de Abstinentia is also of the same opinion I conclude this Jury with the judgement of Macrobius who c. 14. in somnium Scipionis after he had recited sundry and differing fancies of severall Philosophers touching the nature of the soul concludes as followeth Obtinuit tamen non minus de incorporalitate ejus quam de immortalitate sententia Neverthelesse the opinion touching the incorporeity of the soul as well as touching the immortality of it hath been prevalent Against all these therefore it imports little that Dicaearchus Messenius a Peripatetick Philosopher and Scholar to Aristotle or that Aristoxenus should as Cicero relateth in the first of his Tusculanes and in the second of his Academicks hold and defend it to be mortall or that both he and as Cicero reporteth out of him another more ancient Philosopher by name Pherecrates one of the lineage of Deucalion did think there was no soul at all neither in man nor beast And forasmuch as concerneth the same Dicaearchus we reade in Sextus Empiricus and Tertullian l. 2. Hypot c. 5 as also in Job Fr. Picus of Mirandula l. de Doctrin vanit Gentiâ—â—â— c. 14. he was of the same opinion for there is nothing so absurd which some one Philosopher or other hath not maintained Sextus Empiricus was of the same minde also as he l. adv Mathematices acknowledgeth As for Epicurus and his associates they cannot be admitted to give sentence here and therefore their adverse judgment is not prejudiciall to our cause First because the common Epicureans were slaves to voluptuousnesse and vice using Philosophy onely as a cloak wherewith to palliate their enormities Secondly because they themselves are guilty persons and that in a high manner also for although as Tostatus in Genes determineth the right Epicureans were men of great gravity yet they offended grossely against the light of nature in sundry passages of Philosophy concerning the highest verities Moreover though Petrus Gassendus in his late voluminous tractates De vita Philosophia Epicuri hath freed Epicurus from many foul objections and imputations and with much labour hath washed him and wrung him and perfumed him yet many stains do rest behind which with all his art he was not able to fetch
out neither could he sweeten him so fully but that he smells still of the hogge-sty and that also so strongly as he is not fit to enter into the Senate-house of Philosophy or to have a voice therein allowed him What was the occasion of his errour is needlesse to examine but the errour it self and the reasons brought for it by Lucretius are exactly refuted by the same Gassendus as also his other impious doctrines Neither again can the words of Pomponatius and Cromoninus be of any weight although they be men much adored by some superstitious followers of Aristotle for if we consider these two men attentively we shall find them to be wooden Idols because their chief talent lay onely in canvasing severall texts of Aristotle and foot by foot tracing out his senses and wayes of discoursing so that in fine they are rather Commentatous then Philosophers a Philosophers office being to prove his doctrines by reason and strength of argument which way these two never take but yet doubtlesse would have done if their habilities had served them for it Wherefore these men are of too low a classe to be made Judges here and have not law enough in them for the deciding of the controversie in hand After these Philosophers of name which I have alledged as favourers and asserters of immortality I produce the whole companies of the Esseni the Druides the Magi the Gymnosophists the Brachmans all which were tribes and Schools of selected spirits that in severall ages and regions did professe Philosophy and all subscribed to this one truth as we may find in Pliny Caesar Josephus Solinus Mela Philostratus Diodorus Porphyrius and others Neither can it be any prejudice to the authority of all these that during the night of Gentilisme an Epicurus or a Dicaearchus though men of note should stumble and fall into an errour but now after the sun is up it were a great shame for a Pomponatius or a Cremoninus to fall into a ditch and teach such doctrine as the wisest of the most early ages judged to be erroneus and absurd But now by the way I note how sublimely most of these heathen wise men did Philosophize when as they conclude the souls originall to be from heaven and how much above the low pitch of certain depressed spirits of this age who after their continuall poring into objects materiall and raking in the mudde of corruptible things will needs draw out of that dirt the nobler substances of our souls and natures intellectuall by assigning for them no more perfect principle then generation of which number this sorry Authour against whom we now deal is one yea and one also of the grossest that ever medled about this businesse as by his demeanour in it doth appear Hierocles in expresse terms determines saying It seems saith he that God himself produced the severall souls of every particular man and left the souls of Beasts to be produced by the hand of nature according to the judgements of Plato and of Timaeus the Pythagorean So he com in caerm aurea Pythagorae pag 133. of the Greek and Latine Edition of Paris Anni 1583. I know well that amongst these ancients the word Anima or 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 is equivocall because sometimes it is taken onely for an exhalation of purer bloud sometimes again for 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Mens or Animus 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 by which words the ruling the spirituall and intellective and lastly the immortall part of man is signified and not any materiall or fading exhalation which here by the way I note for the avoiding of exceptions and mistakings Let us come now unto our Authour who would gladly father upon Aristotle Nemesius and Ambrosius Paraeus that the soul is all the externall and internall faculties of man jointly considered Which charge is strange seeing it is well known that Aristotle defines the soul after no such way but saith it is Actus corporis Organici and a substance by which we live have sense and do understand and if a substance then can it not receive intension and remission as every young Logician hath learned The ancient and learned writer Nemesius whom the adversary alledgeth doth no way favour him First because at that time both he and sundry others did hold that rationall souls were created before their bodies but the faculties organicall and externall could not be then created Secondly because l. de natura hom c. 1. he delivers doctrine diametrically opposite to that for which this Authour doth alledge him Moreover saith Nemesius the soul is a substance because susceptible of contrarieties it is a subject but harmony a qualitie Now substance and quality be things distinct and therefore the soul from harmony and though it may have harmony in it yet is it not therefore any harmony no more then it is a virtue therefore because it is partaker of virtue Galen determines nothing of this point witnessing in his book de Demonst that he hath affirmed nothing of the soul yet that he doth say sheweth him inclinable to judge it to be a temperature therefore because the difference in manners does follow it and this he labours to confirm out of Hippocrates If this be so then doubtlesse he holds it to be mortall though not all but so much onely of it as is devoid of reason for of that portion of it he in these words makes a question ...... But that the soul cannot be a complexion or temperature of the body it appeareth hence namely because every body c. Hitherto Nemesius whose doctrine as we may see is flatly opposite to the Adversaries His pretension to Ambrose Paraeus a late writer of Chiturgery is as wide from the mark as this other before of Nemesius was as may appear plainly by the perusall of c. 5. l. 1. c. 11. l. 23. wherein his doctrine is very good and also consonant to that which is delivered commonly and we here defend Wherefore let us now hear further All the faculties of man are mortall as well those peculiar to man as those other which are common to him with beasts and if all those with his corpulent matter compleating man be proved mortall then the invention of the soul upon that ground vanisheth which thus I prove All elementary compositions or temperatures are mortall But mans faculties à minore ad majus are temperatures Ergo mortall The minor is denied namely that all mans faculties be temperatures for to instance neither the understanding nor the will be temperatures and yet are principall faculties of man He proves the minor That which is subject to intension and remission is a temperature But such are all mans faculties yea those of reason consideration science c. All that distinguisheth man from beast is augmented by learning education c. lessened by negligence idlenesse and quite nullified by madnesse Ergo. Of this killing argument there be but two propositions falle that is to say both the major and the
minor of it and then what kind of conclusion it hath we may easily judge For first it is false that every thing is a temperature universally speaking which is subject to intension and remission excepting such things onely as be subject unto them per se and by their own nature and not by accident onely and this appears in the very businesse now in agitation between us for a greater clerk then this man is will hardly ever prove that the augment or diminution which is found in the acts of knowledge do arise from any internal alteration in the intellective faculty and not contrariwise from the difference advantage and alteration in the organ or the species and forms intentionall for this reason therefore a man may understand better then a child namely not because his faculty intellective is better then a childs but onely for betternesse in the organ also a learned man better then an illiterate and a diligent then a negligent because those may have acquired more species or forms intentionall or else have kept them better then these other that be illiterate and negligent and not for any intension or remission in the faculty This I say may be the reason of the difference and is likely so to be and not any variation in the faculty it self notwithstanding any thing which this Authour hath said and therefore this proof of his is defective and of no validity In the same sense we deny the minor also for it does not follow that the faculties rationall be more or lesse because the acts of it be more or lesse in regard that there may be more causes then one of this intension or remission as namely the different perfection of the organ as well as the severall measure of the faculty it self Wherefore it belongeth to this Authour to prove that this ebbing or flowing of acts of knowledge is to be referred to the soul's or understanding's wanings and increases and not to the differences of the organs which thing since he faileth to do his argument can by no means conclude or be admitted as good He argueth again Temperature is a quality A quality may be absent without the destruction of the subject Reason and understanding may be so therefore they are temperatures or qualities and not substances immortall The minor is proved by example of madnesse falling sicknesse c. In answer First I deny it to follow that because Reason is a quality therefore it is a temperature for there be many qualities which neither are temperatures nor belong unto them because no other qualities belong to temperature but onely such as be elementary Secondly I deny absolutely that reason or understanding can be absent without the destruction of the soul or of man I know the act of reason may be absent and the effluence of it hindred more or lesse as in infants mad men a poplectick persons and such like but still the root remains and without death cannot be removed Hence I inferre against this Authour that although sundry actuall intellections may be improved or impaired by sense yet the radicall cannot but is wholly independent Nay further even some acts of the soul are in the manner of working independent of the body and wholly inorganicall as divers learned Authours have shewed Some old authours have ascribed to the soul a body Aethereall but that it self was a body Aercall or Elementary I conceive none of them ever yet affirmed What that obscure writer saith whom he calleth Woolnor I neither know nor regard for he is no classicall Authour nor hath any voice allowed him in the Philosophers Parliament The severall absurdities which afterwards this Authour labours to inferre do not follow out of the doctrine of immortality but onely out of his own mistakes erroneous and ignorant conceptions and therefore he may take them all home to himself which to do I know it must be to his great losse for throughout his whole book he swarms so much with this kind of vermine as they eat up all the substance of his undertakings and discourse He addeth Every form depends of the matter and by separation perishes But we must tell him that this is false doctrine and can never be proved If it were not so saith he then one might be generated without the other a soul without a body and a woman be brought to bed of a spirit I answer That an immortall soul cannot at all be generated as first being by it self and its own nature ingenerable and secondly having no principle here on earth either materiall or efficient that is able to beget it all agents created in this kind being impotent as afterwards we intend to shew against this Authour as also against Sennertus Religio Medici and some others What reason is there saith he mans and beasts Anatomy being both considered and compared together that mans faculties in a higher degree should be an immortall spirit more then beasts in a lower degree but both elementary and finite For the finitenesse we grant you that both are finite but not both elementary or mortall and this we collect not from the Anatomy but from the operations by which we do collect not a graduall difference betwixt the two souls bestiall and humane but an essentiall See Aquinas l. 2. contr Gent. c. 66. Ferrariensis ibid. So that call it reason which is in beasts or call it what you will that reason which is in man is essentially superiour unto it and if that of beasts be reason then doth mans reason deserve another better term whereby to signifie the essentiall preheminence of it as Campanellae himself acknowledges in divers works of his and proves in his Metaphysicks at large We know that bordering nations do a little symbolize in their natures but yet are not therefore the same so then albeit the highest of vegetables as the herba viva or the Agnus Tartaricus if there be such a plant and the Zoophyta have some resemblance to creatures of sense yet neverthelesse are they different from them and the Zoophyta themselves belong onely to one classe or other and not to both So in like sort although the most perfect of animals have acts of sensation that something resemble the apprehensive discursive and judging faculties of man yet are they wholly and essentially distinct Wherefore as some erroneously may imagine the sense in beasts is not a weak or imperfect reason nor again in man is reason a strong and perfect sense for these two faculties be wholly different even in one and the same man as manifestly appeareth First by the severall degrees of subordinate perfections found in creatures which perfections whensoever extant in severall sorts of creatures be specifically or essentially distinct as namely the degree of vegetation is distinguished from that other next inferiour to it in all things that be destitute of life so again is the degree superiour of sensation from the inferiour of vegetation wherefore in like sort
of yeares withdraw his preservative or conservative influence and why the same influence is not still as formerly to be continued or what exigence of nature there is or may be which shall make the difference I grant them that in compounded bodies a Philosophicall reason may be given of such an alteration because it may fall out that the natural impugnation of them by the a gency of second causes for their corruption or dissolution may require such a revolution of influxe Also the same may be allowed for the set time of desition of accidents permanent then whensoever they come to be deserted by the subjects which gave them their support which thing may happen to them either by the dissipation of those substances or else by the violence of some external agent that shall dislodge them In accidents that be fluent and by nature successive a reason also may be rendred why they should continually cease to be and besides at a certain terme or period exspire for altogether But yet why substances incompounded by nature permanent such as naturally cannot be corrupted nor perish by dissolution of which sort all Intelligences be all other substances intellectual as namely the rationall souls why they I say should have a fatall houre assigned them then require to be annihilated and forsaken by the sovereigne first cause these new Philosophers have not yet told us much lesse why it should be so without any requiring on their part or any naturall exigence for it Wherefore leaving these light phansies to the Authours of them we say with the Poet His ego nec metas rerum nec temporapono Imperium sine fine dedi c. To these no limits I intend But grant an Empire without end Of which point see more in our learned Carleton alià s Compton Without doubt that soul which hath withstood and survived the violent assaults of Death then when it was rent from the body and forced to surrender that beloved Fort there can be no suspicion that it should faile afterwards grow old with time decay and come to nothing and all this without any other force Besides if the soul be of a simple uncompounded nature as intellectuall substances be then can it not dissolve or which is all one perish by corruption Wherefore if the principles of nature whereby the soul is constituted admit of no desition nor ending by corruption there can be no reason given why these by exigence of nature should not require to be continually susteined in their being by conservation from the first cause and much lesse why at such or such a point of time or age they should require to be forsaken and by the withdrawing of the first causes benevolence to return unto their first nothing Wherefore I account these conceits of mortality and aiery possibilities of desition to be unworthy of any further examination but rather to be rejected as inventions of contentious and sophistick braines that love to entangle all right threads of discourse and to obscure those lights which lead men unto truth Having seen all this in favour of an immortality of the soul let us now behold as uniforme and favourable a consent of the ancient Sages for the divine originall of the same and not humane by procreation as our impious Authour labours to maintain Salluste the Greek Philosoper in the place before alleadged out of him speaks plainly and tells us it cannot be produced by generation Manilius derives its pedigree from heaven as we have heard out of him already which he elsewhere confirmeth saying Stetit unus in arcem Erectus capitis victorque ad sidera mitt it Sidereos oculos propiusque adspect at Olympum Inquiritque Jovem nec sola fronte Deorum Contentus manet coelum scrutatur in alto Cognatumque sequens corpus se quaerit in astris Cicero in Som. Scip. determineth saying His animus datus est ex sempiternis illis ignibê° quae sydera stellas vocatis quae rotundae globosae divinis animatae mentibus c. Marcus Antoninus seems to draw mens particular souls from the great and common soul of the world and the Gentiles in generall do acknowledge them to have a celestiall originall by the received fable of Prometheus who composing the bodies of men of clay or earthly substance is feigned to have stollen fire from heaven wherewith to animate and inform those bodies signifying thereby that the fires of earthly furnaces were not sufficient for so excellent a work The Philosophers of later times are for the major part of them against the production of souls by procreation amongst the rest Laevinus Lemnius l. 1. de Occultis nature Miraculis c. 11. speaks much after the manner of some Heathens before alleadged calling the soul scintillam divinae mentis which is a high expression yet not meaning as literally it seems that it is any particle of the Deïty or any substance increated but denoting onely the sublimity of it and that the originall is not from the earth With him agreeth the great speculatour Jeannes Argenterius med ad 1. Aphor. Hippoc. The famous Fernelius l. 1. de Abditis rerum causis c. 5 7. declaring that the cause of all forms in generall is from heaven Andrew Laurentius l. 1. Anat. c. 1. teacheth in expresse terms that the reasonable soul is not generated but created The same doctrine is confirmed by Zacutus Lusitanus one of the most famous able Physicians of this time who tom 1. oper l. 5. Medic. Princ. Histor hist 3. q. 3. doth in this behalf open himself very fully and giveth reasons also why the soul can be no other but a substance indeficient or immortal I omit the rehearsall of more votes and come to enquire after the cause why it cannot be generated like other forms In the head of this search I propound the doctrine of Cicero who l. 1. Tuscul hath laid the foundation of the truth Animorum inquit in terris nulla origio inveniri potest c. No origine saith he of souls can be found on earth for in the minde there is nothing that is mixt nothing concreate or bred from out the earth nothing which is humid or aëriall or fiery for in these natures there is nothing which hath the power of memory of minde or cogitation which may retaine things past or provide for the future and comprehend the present which alone be things divine neither is it ever to be found out how they might betide to man but from God onely Wherefore the nature and power of the minde is singular and different from these usuall and known natures For which cause whatsoever that is which apprehendeth which is wise and willeth and is vigorous that same is heavenly and divine and is of necessity eternall So discoursed Cicero and rightly also if I be not mistaken The pressing home of this argument will consist of three points or heads First from the nature of the soul it self which
be to make this forme to consist of both forme and matter and so to compound man of one forme and two matters one spirituall and the other corporeall yea and indeed by admitting materiality in Angels to make them lesse pure and simple then the soules of mortall men which to doe might seem to be a device in reality very simple True it is that matter taken in a large sense that is to say for potentiality and as contradistinguished to a pure actuality may be admitted in spirituall substances but yet this makes nothing for the dissolution of them into parts or for corruptibility of which kinde of materiality or composition the learned school-Doctour Thomas de Argentina hath said enough to satisfie 2. sent d. 3. q. 1. Moreover admit that properly speaking a spirituall matter were possible because some few Doctours be of that opinion and amongst the rest our countrieman Mr. Thomas Carleton aliàs Compton in his Philosophy lately published disp 9. this opinion of theirs does not take away the force of the argument first because we are not to consider what opinion this or that man does holde but contrariwise what he hath reason to hold secondly because if I hold this spirituall matter to be a thing implicatory and a fiction or that my reader do also think the same then according to our judgements at the least the argument is good and efficacious Neither is it requisite that no argument should be produced or be thought efficacious save onely such as in every Doctours judgement should be accounted such and to be concluding because then perhaps we should bring none neither for this same verity of immortality nor yet for any other wherefore although peradventure Scotus his sub-Philosopher Pontius or Arriaga or Carleton should not like of this or that argument we are not therefore to reject it as not concluding or as a proof that is not probable or conducing to the decision of the point in hand But of the impossibility and improbability of this composition of matter and forme in spirituall substances see more in Lud. Moeratius tom 1. tract de Angelis disp 3. For the neglecting therefore of shifting answers to the arguments usually brought in the behalf of immortality the advice of Mr. Carleton is very prudent who disp 10. de Anima admonisheth saying In my judgement they doe not discreetly who go about to weaken arguments used to be brought by Philosophers and Divines for the soul's immortality and might more fruitfully for the Christian Common-wealth have imployed themselves in seeking to establish this doctrine which is the foundation of virtue then in picking quarrells at the arguments for no reason is so strong which by some shiftings may not be obscured For indeed out of that which hath been delivered touching the non-traduction of the soul by any seminall way or principles of propagation the deduction of the soul's incorruptibility will be a businesse very plain and easie and this by virtue of a twofold consequence the former of which is drawn from the soul 's not generating or active generation the later from the not being generated or passive generation Touching the former it is clear that whatsoever substance doth not generate that same is immortall even by Natures universall provision and ordination for as much as in all her workes she affects one kinde of perennity or other that is to say either a perpetuity of the individuall by an indeficient stability of the natural principles or else at least in the species by the intervention of generation and corruption so that wheresoever there is no propagation or acts of generation assigned for the maintaining a secondary immortality in the species there must of necessity be granted a primary and better immortality in the individuum Hence it followeth that because a man doth not generate with his minde but with his body therefore his body is corruptible in it self and perpetuall onely in the species and again that his minde or soul is immortall in it self and subjected no way to corruption not standing in need of any help or supplies from generation Touching the later it is manifest that every entity which is not produced by generation is not generable and therefore not corruptible That it is not generable we gather hence because whatsoever entity is by nature generable every such entity requires as by a connaturall way to be produced by generation as in like manner every entity that is simple requireth whensoever it is produced to be produced by no other way but creation By this it follows that whatsoever is produced and not by generation is by Natures laws ingenerable and so by consequence incorruptible and immortall But the minde or soul of man is produced and not by generation therefore it is an entity incorruptible That it is not generated hath been proved before as also that it doth not generate for a minde or rationall Soul cannot generate nor be generated by any other agent then a rational Soul nor by any other actions then acts of reason understanding by which acts since it procreates nothing which is like it self nor intends to do it the soul is neither generated nor doth it generate therefore according to the principles of being and the laws of Nature must be immortal unsubject to death or desition not be in any possibility to be corrupted by the virtue of agents natural The learned Sennertus being moved by certain difficulties which he could not overcome was very inclinable to think the Soul is generated and that the seed it self from the beginning is animated with a humane Soul Sennertus in Hypom 4. c. 10. but he together with Justus Lipsius reflecting upon the consent of Divines unto the contrary doth with him religiously submit and subscribe Pareamus Let us obey As for the said difficulties I do not finde them very urgent but that they may conveniently be avoided as we intend to shew in the next Chapter As for the reasons themselves which prove the immortality immediately without any dependency upon traduction from parents or not traduction they are often plentifully exhibited both by Philosophers Divines as namely by Javel l. de indificentia An. written by him at the earnest request of Pomponat who was sorry for his former errour retracted it by Scaliger Exer. 307. n. 20. by the Conimbricenses Tract de Anima separata also briefly and pithily by Eustachius Assellius à S. Paulo in summa Philosophiae Renatus de Cartes in his Metaph. his Principia Philosophica and sundry others and amongst Divines by Albert. magnus 2. sent d. 19. Antoninus in summ by Aquinas in both his Summes Raymund Sebunde in his Naturalis Theoloria Barthol Sibylla in Quaest Peregg Dec. 1. Lud. Vives l. de veritate fidei Christ. Postellus in Concordia Orbis Savonarola in Triumpho Crucis Vellosillus Advertentiis in S. Aug. Greg. de Val. Tom. 1. Lessius l. de immort Jo. Mariana l. de
morte immort Ferrariens Philippus Faber Collegium Complut others especially Albertinus Tom. 1. Corol. Alexander Valignanus apud Possevinum Tom. 1. Biblioth Select Thomas Carmelita l. 11. c. 12. de conversione Gentium Bagotius tom 2. Instit d. 4. Menasseh Ben Israel de Resurr Mortuorum à c. 8. Zanchy de oper Creat l. 2. c. 8. Fromundus l. 4. de Anima Carleton in Philosophia tract de Anima q. 10. Morisanus in Philosophia tract de Anima Quaest 5. Petrus Gassendus tom 1. de Philosophia Epicuri where he musters up all the objections made by Lucretius and confutes them all which men of Learning did not only hold the reasonable Soul to be an immortall substance but also that thus much might be proved of it by naturall reason Thom. Campanella in his Metaph. very copiously This high preeminence in the Soul of immortality we trace out chiefly by the operations of it as by so many steps which lead unto the knowledge thereof because according to the rule in Philosophy sicut se habet res ad esse sic ad operari sicut ad operari sic ad esse By the nature of any thing we may search out the operations and again by the operations the nature One of the chief operations of the soul is the act of understanding by the indication of which we learn it to be immateriall and again by the being so not to be corruptible or dissolvable by any naturall agent or which is all one to be immortall These acts or operations intellectuall do by three wayes prove the immortality First because they simply are intellectuall Secondly because they terminate upon objects spirituall and are apprehensive of them Thirdly because they fall even upon materiall objects after a manner immateriall First according to Aquin. 1. p. q. 14. a. 1. Valentia ibid. Raynaud Nat. Theol. d. 2. q. 2. a. 3. Aquin. l. 10. con Gent. c. 44. and others no power or substance that is not devoid of matter can be intellectuall nor again any object directly and immediately intelligible which is not also immateriall the reason is because corporeity or matter darkens the power and confines it to singularities The words of Petrus de Aquila called Scotellus 1. Sent. dist 35. q. 1. are very pertinent and these By how much saith he any thing is freed from matter by so much is it both objectively and also actively intelligible because according to Avicenna and Aristotle Immateriality is the cause of Intellection But God is the most remote from matter and therefore is the most of all intellective Wherefore since matter and corporeity are over-grosse to admit of intellection and that the soul of man is intellective it can be neither materiall nor corporeall but contrariwise of nature elevated above matter that is to say spirituall and incorruptible Secondly The soul doth not onely understand mean objects but the highest and the purest of all that is to say all objects spirituall and God himself I grant to Aureolus that the object and the power need not be alike in nature and therefore it is no formall consequence that because the object is spirituall therefore the power must be so but yet neverthelesse the materiall consequence is very good because it is wholly necessary that the power intellective should be free from all those impediments of understanding whether like or unlike which are situate within the sphere of the object or without it and that moreover as Pet. Aureolus 2. Sent. dist 19. himself confesses there ought to be some resemblance or proportion between the object and the power at least quoad rationem cognoscentis cognoscibilis but between a materiall power and a spirituall object there is none First because the power is too low and gross Secondly because a spirituall entity is situate without the sphere or compasse of the object as for example an Angell is quite without the compasse of any eye corporeall because he is such an object as is not visible but intelligible onely that is to say perceptible onely by a power that is higher then any sense and properly intellective which the eye is not because materiall and a spirit is therefore imperceptible to our sight and beyond the lines of the object because the object of the sight is colour figure magnitude c. none of which are in a spirit And though as Arriaga teacheth in some kinde a corporeall agent may act upon a spirit for a body united to a soul as it is in man according as it is severally disposed may transmit something upon the soul cause alterations in it contristate or rejoice it yet neverthelesse can it not do any thing by way of vision because the soul hath nothing in it wherewith to terminate the sight in which case it must be wholly invisible even although it were no spirit but some other kind of entity as namely a sound is which though it partake of materiality yet is it invisible and therefore imperceptible by the eye though not by another sense For this cause it seems improbable that any corporeal eye can be enabled to see the Deity by means of any elevation or sublevation whatsoever contrary to the opinion of a late learned Grecian Leo Allatius l. de consen Eccl. Occid Orient As then one reason why an eye corporeall cannot see a spirit is because the organ of vision is corporeall so on the other side one reason why a soul may be sensible of a spirit is because the soul is spirituall and thereby prepared to receive an impression from it and also is conformably to the object a power intellective as the same object is intelligible I said before that a sound cannot be seen but I add now that it may be seen easier then any spirit can because a sound is material and therefore one degree nearer to visibility then a spirit and for this cause needing no intellective faculty to apprehend it as every spirit doth so that against the eyes seeing of a spirit there be two impediments whereas against the seeing of a sound there is but one Out of all this I deduce that if the Object be spirituall the Faculty perceiving must be no lesse Thirdly the soul doth not entertain materiall objects after a material manner but contrariwise after a manner immateriall for it abstracts them from the dross of matter the grossnesse of singularity Now it is a certainty that Vnumquodque recipitur secundū modum recipientis Every thing is received according to the form of the recipient not according to the own wherefore seeing the manner of being is correspondent to the manner of operation seeing again that the manner of the souls operation even upon things materiall is immateriall therefore the manner of being of it must be also immateriall The impression declares the figure of the seal If then the souls impression upon material objects be spirituall the soul it self is also spirituall The understanding
bitter sport as the Cat makes with the Mouse much to her sorrow while it lasts when it ends then to no lesse then her destruction Such bits as these unworthy of God unworthy of man must they swallow down who will maintain the soul's mortality The whole desire of mans heart as it is either to be happy or else not to be at all so is it either to have this happinesse perpeually or else to have it never given him Tully in the end of his Dialogue entituled Hortensius although he takes exceeding great comfort from the consideration of the soul's immortality yet neverthelesse to the end he might make all sure in case it should not be so he addeth saying But if that wherewith we are sensible and do understand be mortall and ruinous this extinguishment and setting of it cannot but be pleasant to him who hath discharged aright the offices of humane life and may without being molestfull at all be embraced by him as a repose or quiet of his life Thus pleadeth Cicero with whose resolution S. Augustine remaineth much unsatisfied wondring justly how a man of so great with as he and who places humane felicity in the contemplation of the truth could promise a pleasant good-night or set of that intellectual substance whereupon all this felicity of his is founded as if saith S. Augustine that thing did dy which we did not love or rather which we so deadly hated as in the destruction of it we should rejoyce Thus strongly argueth S. Augustine l. 14. de Trinit c. 19. Surely if we love our own soul and our felicity we cannot rejoice or take any contentment in the extinction and destruction of either but rather on the contrary side be incredibly afflicted with it and the sole remembrance of it cannot but be unpleasant and cause a most vehement contristation in the heart of man and finally let Epicurus say what he will strike such a damp into his pleasures as would be of power sufficient to extinguish them I know well that God may do with his creatures what he pleases his jurisdiction over them is illimited by any other thing then by his own justice and mercy Job in his affliction confessed this when he taught us c. 9. v. 12. Who is it can say why dost thou so and by and by after v. 17. In a whirlewinde he will crush me and multiply my wounds even without a cause What he can do we do not enquire but what he will do or hath done we may give a guesse by his other mercies towards us If things should thus go with man we might resemble his state to a Guest that should be entertained for one night with all the dainties the welcome and delight that might be and the very next morrow be sent to the gallowes there to make a conclusion of his joyes and welcome In fine whatsoever is not perpetuall is nothing and mans heart cannot receive true content from any thing which he is to loose and whose possession is without date immortall Non est mortale quod opto Our hearts aspire not after any thing which is mortall neither when we have considered well do we say within our selves Aut Caesar aut nihil but Aut aeternum aut nihil Not to be Caesar or nothing but to be eternal or not at all For as Marcus Antoninus in l. de vita sua rightly ponders like a man of wisdome after death is once come quid habet ille qui vixit tribus seculis plus illo qui vixit triduó what hath that man who lived three ages left him more than any other that lived but three single dayes This argument though it prove another life after this yet doth it not directly evict there shall be no interruption of living in the soul untill the resurrection nevertheless it perswades it strongly because the fairest way of perpetuity is by continuing it in the soul and by the leaving there a pledg for a totall accomplishment to follow after and the more because this dying of the soul is an improbable invention such as in Philosophy or Divinity hath no foundation but rather indeed is a great step to infidelity for if men have much adoe to perswade themselves that after the body is dead and rotten it shall have the ashes gathered together and rise again they would finde much more difficulty if they should think that the soul it self was mortall and to be extinguish'd and so in the whole man nothing left of life A sixth probation is from the absolutenesse and independency of humane will which matter is well followed by Aureolus in 2. sent dist 19. A seventh is drawn from the benignity and justice of God in favouring the good and giving recompense for all their labours and sorrows in this life which recompense since it is not given in this life it must be in another and so there must be another life I confesse also that this argument though it prove a second life yet doth it not exclude an interruption of living in the soul more then it doth in the body for at the resurrection a compleat recompense may be made both to soul and body notwithstanding they both had been extinguish'd for a time but yet because this fancy of the souls being extinguish'd is not proved by any one argument which is considerable therefore that same medium which proves a second life after the departure from the body proves also a continuance of the second with the first for no Philosopher or Divine of note hath hitherto been found so devord of sense as to dream of any interruption of living in the soul but that if it was to live after death it was to do it continually or if it died then it was to live no more for all eternity So that this mans reviving of souls is an errour as absurd and improbable as his resurrection of beasts which is the expresse doctrine not of Christ the great and true Prophet but of the grand Impostour and false Prophet Mahomet both in his Alcoran and the books of Sonna as Guadionolus reciteth out of him in his Book against Achmet Ben Zin a Persian Mahumetan Some labour to evade this argument by saying that no such recompense is necessary in another life because a full amends is made in this If you ask them how they tell you that Virtus divitiis animosa suis nec indiga laudis est praemium sibi Virtue is rich and is a reward unto her selfe This saying is nothing but a Stoïcall tumour or swelling which hath no solidity in it for first say it were a reward yet not rightly distributed or dilated for how small a portion of mortall men are sensible of this aiëry reward Secondly mans reward is his felicity and therefore must be both great and perpetuall but this same reward is a very slender one besides the slendernesse it is of small duration out of which it follows that this contentment received
from virtue is no sufficient recompense nor reduceth things unto equality nor lastly commends or justifies the providence of God Thirdly this contentment received in the soul from virtue cannot keep the virtuous from being miserable because this solace is received onely in the minde or soul notwithstanding which content he may be in poverty captivity sicknesse in Perillus his Bull or upon the rack in which cases as the body suffering for a good cause receives contentment from the soul so in like sort the sorrows be reciprocall for the soul is made partaker of the miseries of the body and is afflicted by means of it so that in fine here is no full and clear contentment but a mixture of joy and sorrow and consequently here is no desired reward or felicity neither of soul nor body and much lesse of the whole man who consists essentially of both and is totally to be rewarded and not the one half of him alone whether soul or body Num saith Anastasius Sinaïta quaest 73. quando oportebat certare corpus plus sudoris expressit quando autem est tempus coronarum sola coronatur anima Shall the body endure the greatest trouble in the conflict and the soul alone receive the crown or comfort this were no justice or equity Certainly a man in this state would stand in need of patience which virtue I think was never necessary for the happy man but for the afflicted nor for the enjoying of felicity but the enduring of misery In summe it were a fury to think that while these two parts of man body and soul are linked together that one half of him can be happy while the other is miserable or that the reward of the soul alone is the reward of the whole man and able to give him satisfaction But that contrariwise as the soul of man is but one half of him though indeed much the better half so likewise the felicity of the soul alone is but one half of mans felicity and so again the affliction of his body one half of his infelicity though by much the lesser See of this point Abulensis in c. 4. Deut. q. 7. Thomas de Argentina in 4 dist 49. art 4. Vincentius Beluacensis l. de Consolat ad Regem Ludov. c. 11. also our countrey-man Jo. Bacon the famous Carmelite in 4. dist 50. q. ult and principally Marsilius in 4. d. ult The Stoicks invented for man this harsh and miserable felicity for supplying the defect of their doctrine touching providence and humane felicity which they could not patch up otherwise then with such rotten stuff as this which will not hold the examination nor indeed can be without the Christian doctrine of the resurrection So that albeit reason alone without revelation cannot prove the resurrection to be because this effect exceeds the virtue of naturall causes there being allowed in nature no regress à privatione ad habitū yet reason proves that article to be very convenient credible for an accomplishment of all without which there is no way remaining either for the justifying of providence or the rewarding beautifying of man or lastly for the giving any life and encouragement to virtue Now if a reward over and above the inward contentment of the minde be due to virtue and this reward is to be of the whole man and also to be paid him after this life then must this reward be such as will fully satisfie and content him for satisfied he is to be and also satisfied by that which is a reward consequent to his actions wherefore his contentment must be eternall for nothing else can please him as elsewhere we have endeavoured to evict and as I suppose every mans own heart will tell him without book wherefore the soul which is to enjoy this must also be eternall or which in our sense is all one immortall Pontius the Scotist struggles against this argument also for the defence of his Master Scotus but the zeal of defending truth and of delivering healthfull doctrine I value above that other of defending the sayings of any one particular Master whatsoever if he be but a man as Scotus was no more Eighthly the doctrine of the soul's immortality is the foundation of virtue without which she must needs fall unto the ground this is clearly shewed by Lessius and long before him by the Platonick and Heathen Philosopher Hierocles Unlesse saith he something should subsist in us after death fit to be adorned with verity and virtue which subsistent thing without doubt is no other than the reasonable soul we should have no pure desire of honesty or virtue For the suspicion of an abolishment would choak the desites of these and divert us to corporeall pleasures of what sort soever or whensoever they might be gotten by us And according to that doctrine how could it seem the part of a prudent or moderate man not to be so indulgent to his body as to grant it all things seeing the soul in that case was preserved for the bodies sake and of it self had no existence but accrued unto man from the conformation of his body Or why under the name of virtue should we molest our body if the soul so perish with it as virtue her self can have no subsistence left for whose sake we endure death Thus farre Hierocles and that very cordially and truly If then the doctrine of the soul's immortality be the foundation of virtue doubtlesse it is a truth assured because virtue and a rationall manner of conversation taken in the generality cannot be founded upon any falsehood or uncertainty as Ludovicus Vives hath notably declared I might add here the arguments of Scaliger Exercit. 308. n. 20. of Aureolus Renatus des Cartes and divers others but these alone well explicated and considered are sufficient These are the chief seats of arguments from whence Authours do usually fetch them which how much more or lesse valid or perspicuous they may seem yet have they been held for good by the wisest Philosophers both Heathen and Christian and to be concluding But howsoever that be the verity it self hath been counted certain and evident insomuch as Aureolus himself although he found difficulty in sundry of the arguments yet did he not doubt to say speaking of the soul's immortality in 2 Sent. dist 19. This doctrine of faith is to be held undoubtedly and it is the common conception of the minde and a verity evident of it self though to give a reason for it it is not so casie So Aureolus with whom consenteth Cicero when as he said as hath been before alleadged out of him that it is the consent of all nations Now saith he if the consent of all be the voice and verdict of Nature then are we to think the same Besides how could so many Heathen Philosophers have acknowledged unanimously this doctrine of immortality otherwise then by the light of nature and common reason out of which it is plain that naturall reason doth
it is necessary that properly they alwayes understand Forasmuch as the understanding is not a power that is subject to wearinesse then when it is separated from the body therefore it shall never be tired as having no coherence with the conditions of an organe corporeall Thus defineth he CHAP. X. An estimate of the reasons for the souls immortality THere have not wanted both in this time and also in former ages some Icarian wits who I know not why have laboured to extenuate and to diminish the force of the arguments usually brought in favour of the souls indeficiency not doubting to give it out that they be not demonstrative But this exception of theirs failes more of being demonstrative then the reasons do against which they except for admit they be not properly demonstrative yet neverthelesse may they be proofes very sufficient and able to persuade any man that is unpartiall and governed by reason and also much stronger than any which hitherto have been brought against it and so are to carry the cause on their side I will not deny but that those same reasons may not be so cleare and perspicuous as some are which we have for sundry other verities the cause whereof may seem to be the souls immuring within corporeall organs as in a dark house or prison in which it being shut up although it may behold out at the windows of the body objects abroad illustrated with light yet at home by reason of the domestick obscurity it cannot do the like This same difficulty moreover is increased because the soul of man is an entity placed in the confines betwixt the two regions of substances spiritual and corporeal and so of nature more ambiguous and hard to be discerned by reason that in this posture it may sometimes seem to be belonging to one side and sometimes again unto the others and so much also the easier because the soul while it is in the body discharges a two-sold duty viz. one of a form informing as Philosophers use to call it such namely as is performed by the souls inferiour conformably to the doctrine of Aristotle the other of a form assistent agreeable to the School of Plato unto which Campanella doth subscribe Such a form as this is God unto the world and is therefore stiled Anima mundi by very many the Soul of the Universe of which sort Intelligences be according to the Peripateticks in respect of their severall Orbes and a Pilote in a ship as also other movers and directers of that nature And this double office the soul performeth because even as it is rationall it doth not onely animate the body and is it self also a formall ingredient and constitutes man in his specificall degree of being and thereby distinguishes him essentially from all other creatures which functions belong unto the soul as it is a form informing but besides all this acts the part of a form assistent residing in the body as a high Dictatour controlling it commanding and countermanding prescribing laws inflicting punishments exercising acts of jurisdiction and absolute soveraignty thereby resembling a Judge upon the bench or Prince upon his throne more then a form meerly informing whereas contrariwise the soul of a Beast lives in subjection to the body being therein compelled to follow the prescription of every sensuall appetite after a servile or slavish manner without any power to make resistance Wherefore not without good cause did Fl. Josephus stile the power of reason a Soveraignty or Empire In consideration also of this two-old office of the soul seemed it to have two names given it one relating to it as it is a form informing namely 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 or Anima the other to it as a form assistent viz. 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Animus or Mens In the former sense it is a Soul in the later a Minde which preeminence of being a Minde over and above that other of a Soul Juvenal expresseth saying Sat. 15. venerabile soli Sortiti ingenium divinorumque capaces Atque exercendis capiendisque artibus apti Sensum è coelesti demissum traximus arce Cujus egent prona terram spectantia mundi Principio indulsit Communis conditor illis Tantum animas nobis animum quoque c. For arts a wit to man was lent Afarre from heavenly towers sent Which shining light prone creatures want Nature it seems to them was scant A soul on each to us more kinde Besides a soul bestow'd a minde How inconsiderate an act it is in men of learning to seek evasions from the usuall arguments brought in favour of immortality we have noted before out of our learned countriman Mr. Carleton and again with what ill successe men do impugne both those arguments and other received doctrines in Philosophy the experience of this last age hath taught us in which we have seen the fall of many soaring spirits that have adventured upon them Telesius Patritius Ramus Basson Gassendus though in a manner but newly sprung yet are grown already into neglect and the like destiny may Des Cartes Henricus Regius Campanella expect the last of which three though he have many strange conceptions and novelties as for example touching the sense of things insensible and also his three Primalities as he calls them which he will hardly persuade unto the world and again many trifling objections against Aristotle yet by his largenesse of contemplating starts many notable Truths which other great Wits who have gone on in a streight line have not espied in regard of which verities his labours may continue longer them other of that sort are like to do We see Aristotle yet lives and lives also in esteem and his adversaries lie buried in contempt It is an old saying Qui vult infestare fortem Perit atque quaerit mortem Those who with the strong contend Must expect untimely end Those who will be ever quarrelling with Aristotle and his School about those doctrines which have passed the Test after so many examinations by the most able Wits for no small number of ages may peradventure be overmatched and return out of the fray with broken heads To impugne this or that single doctrine this or that one argument may passe for currant and peradventure also prove successfull but he that will undertake to raise a whole new frame of Philosophy and encounter with Aristotle at every turn stands in need to have the wit of Aristotle which as it appeares few of these new undertakers have had yea such bold attempts do shew the adventurers capacities not to have been very great Let the quarrellers go on and try their fortune and by experience they may finde that the arguments for immortality had deeper roots then they imagined Surely that doctrine to which the most intelligent persons of the very Heathens gave their assent either wanted not good arguments to prove it or else bad arguments had very strange and incredible successe It could not be but those proofes were
of his own kinde as totally and adequately as one beast does generate another doth not speak like a Philosopher and besides doth unjustly disparage and disgrace his own lineage and violates the rights of 〈◊〉 creation CHAP. XII A solution of the Adversaries objections together with some others of Doctour Daniel Sennertus THese former notandums having been premised we need not dwell long upon answering of objections for by them the way is opened already and that which before hath been delivered will not need any more then application Object 1. Whole man is generated by man therefore all his parts both soul and body and if both be generated then both are mortall Answ Whole man is generated by man I grant it Therefore both soul and body are generated I distinguish That both soul and body are made parts of man by generation and a creature produced like in nature to him that generates I also grant and do affirm that by doing of this onely the compleat act of generation or procreation is performed according to the received definition of generation before exhibited in the Chapter precedent But that both soul and body must be therefore made and have their entities or beings given them by procreation that consequence I deny as false and absurd yea so absurd as it suffers a thousand instances to the contrary For example a whole horse is generated both matter and form and yet his matter did not receive any being by generation and so it falls out in other creatures If then it be not necessary that the matter receive the being by procreation though the whole Animal consisting of matter and forme be truely generated what reason can there be why to the generation of the whole Animal a new being of the forme by vertue of procreation should be necessary or why can one be necessary to generation when as we see evidently the other is not or why again should we exact the new production of either of them by generation See Argenter com in Aphor. 1. Hippocr Zacutus Lusitanus tom 2. l. 3. Hist ad praxin c. 7. § sed alia when without any such act the definition of generation is fulfilled and agrees both unto the generation of beasts whose matter is not generated and to the generation of man whose forme is not generated any more then his matter is By force of this solution all his imaginary absurdities which he labours to fasten upon the non-procreation of the soul doe of themselves dissolve If the soul saith he be infused then Christ did not take whole Humanity from the seed of the woman Answ He received from the seed of the woman as much of the Humanity as was to be received thence that which he took did not come unto him by procreation nor was it so to do As for the fourteenth to the Hebrews which he cites for his purpose our answer to it is That it is not found in our books neither Greek nor Latin neither do the Editions of Raphelengius or Elzevir contain any more Chapters than thirteen If saith he we consist of soul and body and are not men without both and receive not our soules from him he means the Generatour as I suppose then Adam is the father of no man nor Christ the son of man because his manhood 's constitutive part even that which should make him a man could not be by the seed of the woman and a man is as much a father of fleas and lice which receive their matter from him as of his children Answ Surely fleas and lice whence soever they receive their matter do not proceed from him in likeness of nature as by the definition they if they were generated by man ought to do Moreover they are not generated by man but of him neither is he the agent but the patient and so is of these vermin no generatour at all proper or improper Secondly men do receive their soules by force of generation although they be not generated and so notwithstanding this non-generation of the soul Adam might truly and univocally be the father of all men and also the soul of Christ might come by the seed of the woman although it were not made or procreated by it If the soul addes he be infused after the conception then there is growth before there is life which is impossible for the soul is made the vegetative as well as the motive sensitive or rationall part Answ I grant that before the infusion of the soul there may be vegetation and this by the sole virtue of the sperme but I deny that therefore there be in man more souls than one that is than the rationall for this same force of vegetation which is in the seed holdeth it self upon the part of the matter onely and doth not performe the office of a soul or forme the substance and operation thereof being no more then to fashion an organicall body and to make it fit for the reception of the soul and the union with it after whose infusion both the vitall and animall spirits do but serve as instruments to it and to accomplish the body in making it to be so perfectly organicall as the eminency of a rationall spirit above other formes doth require to have it If the soul be not generated but infused into a dead body then saith he it is lawfull to be Nigromancer for Nigromancy is nothing but putting a spirit into a dead body and so it is imitation of God and God the onely Nigromancer and all the men in the world but Nigromantick apparitions whose spirits when they have done the work for which they were put into the bodies desert them as other conjured Ghosts do Answ See the shallownesse of this man who can neither speak right nor reason with common sense and probability He calls Necromancy constantly Nigromancy and he supposes that a soul in a dead body makes a living man and can exercise vitall actions in it or actions of life and so according to his grosse capacity if the soul be infused God must be a Necromancer and men but Necromantick apparitions for this Ignoramus it seems knowes no difference between a soul and body that are united and those that are not united but together onely nor between a body living by the virtue of the spirit and by virtue thereof doing vitall actions and another which is onely moved and inhabited by a spirit without any union with it or participation of life But supposing all were one yet were it not lawfull to be a Necromancer because nothing at all be it never so good is to be done by superstitious actions or by making any recourse unto the Devil and acknowledgement of his power by any dependency on him whatsoever more or lesse It is granted saith he that the body considered merely sensitive cannot sin and is but an instrument or as the pen in the hand of the writer Therefore if the soul be infused then of necessity the
immortall thing and not our mortall flesh is the authour of all sin and so God's immediate hand the cause of all sin That the body is onely an instrument of the soul is false See Soto of this in 4. d. 43. q. 1. a. 2. Rat. 3. for it is a living co-agent with it and a partaker both in the good and evil actions and is both rewardable and punishable with it whether in the mean time it be created or generated for this variation makes no difference in this matter of merit or demerit Neither doth the creation of the soul make God the authour of sin more than the generation of it that is to say not at all for still the soul and body are authours of their own actions and the deformity ariseth from their misdemeanour and not from God's creation or concurrence Doctour Sennertus although he admit not of any mortality in the soul yet he holds it probable that it comes by procreation and that from the first instance of conception the seed is ammated with the rationall soul which Doctrine of his by his leave inferrs mortality for whatsoever is generated is corruptible and is to go out according to the ordinary lawes of Nature at the same gate of corruption at which it entred in Neither is it true or likely or lastly any way Philosophicall to say as he doth Hypom 4. c. 10. as also in his Paralipomena c. 7. n. 3. ad Hypomn. 5. that nothing created is immortall by the principle of Nature but onely by the free will or gift of God because as it is amongst bodies some are very durable as Marble and Cedar some by and by corrupted as Flowers Fruits even out of the several natures of their composition which God hath appointed for them and not our of the free will of God immediately without any farther relation so in like sort some substances are perpetuall out of the nature of their being as spirituall substances and bodies that are simple and unmixt other some out of their own natures corruptible as those that are mixt and made up of Elements which as by some naturall agents they were knit up together so by the operation of other some they are dissolvable Souls then if generated are compounds and if so may be uncompounded by the agency and operation of causes naturall wherefore to seek an immortality onely from a decree extrinsecall without any foundation in their naturall beings seems neither to be Philosophicall nor true wherefore the immortality of Souls and Angels is not to be reared upon this weak foundation according to which a Fly may be as much immortall as an Angel one by nature according to Sennertus having no preeminence over the other the free determination of God for their perpetuall conservation being equally applicable to either of them Conformably to this position of his Sennertus Hypomn. 4. ca. 10. lib. de consens Chymic cum Arist Galeno c. 9. he will needs have the sperme alwayes animated with a reasonable soul but then consider how many more souls are cast away without any bodies organicall and humane then are actuated and preserved by bodies I ask what must become of these innumerable souls must they perish or have bodies made them at the Resurrection neither of these two can be admitted without great temerity and absurdities Besides this we know God did not inspire Adam with a living spirit while he was a lumpe of clay but when he had a face and a body that was organicall and not before Again why does the soul depart from the body but onely because it leaves to be organicall why then or with what probability can we imagine the soul is in the inorganicall sperme certainly with none at all The winde that did drive Sennertus upon this inhospitall shore was the necessity of assigning a vis formatrix or a 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 that is to say an able architect or former of humane body which though most acknowledge to be the seed yet Sennertus sees not how this can be unlesse it should be animated with the soul his reason is because the soul only is to build an house fit for it self to inhabit But this reason of his is not urgent nay more it is not likely for egges and young birds do not build their own nests but the old ones for them so that it must by this account be the parents office to erect this new building and not the childes But how sayes he can the father do this Easily and well by sending his sperme as his deputy and officer to performe that duty Argent com in 1. Aphoris Hippocr as Argenterius also teacheth which entity hath derived to it from the generatour so much natural strength and cunning as to make a sufficient architect for the effecting of this work and all this may be done with the onely form of seed without any animation of it with a soul Thus it is likely that the Acorn for example without any more form than of an Acorn collects sit particles out of the elements and materials about it and by a virtue derived from the tree on which it grew forms out and fashions the body of an Oake and for the effecting of this work the seed participates much of the nature of the tree or plant and hath ordinarily much of the same virtue Wherefore in this abstruse question or quaere that we may say something which is likely and hath for the truth thereof probable examples and instances in nature we do conceive that 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 or forming virtue is the seed's own form excited and assisted by the breeding cherishing and connaturall warmth of the maternall body which doth environ it as in the procreation of birds it seems to be where the semen of the Cock being cherished and stirred up by the ambient and incumbent warmth of the Hen is that which changes the egge and forms it into the shape of the bird from whence it came neither is it probable that in so small a coagulum or seed which came from the Cock the soul or essence of a Cock is resident Now whereas he tels us that by the blessing granted to all Creatures by the Creatour of them in these words Increase and multiply force was given to every soul to multiply another we confesse it to be true yet this not to be done by creating of the younger by the elder souls or by the giving of them new entities but rather by doing some other act out of which these forms should connaturally follow as materiall forms they do by a resultancy and immateriall by creation from a higher cause which creation is to follow and is due by a regular ordination and exigence of Nature and so they may truly be said to be given and communicated though not made by the force of generation And this is the true vis prolifica and not that other which Sennertus feignes unto himself
be common unto all mankind This phantasie of his is generally exploded as absurd and convinced for such by Albertus Magnus in his Summe and S. Thomas in his other Summe contra Gent. as also by divers others and therefore needs not to be considered anew The generall Tenet of all classicall Philosophers and the better sort of Christians is that the soul is spirituall immortall and incorruptible and that there be as many individualls thereof as there be men yea and besides that this incorruptibility thereof is not of meer grace and bestowed on it after the creation but contrariwise of nature and involved within the principles of constitution Sennertus in his Paralip holds it to be a perfection added to the nature merely out of favour and in favour of his opinion cites Damascen l. 2. c. 3. but cites the greek text lamely and Stapulensis is mistaken wholly in his translation for Damascen doth not say there as they impose upon him that Angels be incorruptible not by nature but by grace but rather the quite contrary namely That they by grace or favour have a nature that is immortall for so the Greek Text hath it By which words he teacheth us that they have their nature not by right or of themselves but by grace as all other creatures have and their immortality from nature as all other creatures have not according to which account Angels are immortall by nature that is to say by a favour antecedent to their naturall being and not subsequent unto it For the better clearing of which verity let us consider what is properly meant or signified by this terme incorruptible or immortall I note then that of this terme there are three different acceptions one proper but not ordinary a second both proper and ordinary a third neither proper nor ordinary Immortality in the first sense is supereminent that is to say such a one as hath so firm principles of constitution as be superiour to any agency and therefore whatsoever is thus immortall can neither be dissolved nor annihilated And this kinde of superexcellent immortality is proper unto God alone and no created entity can lay any claim unto it and therefore 1 Tim. 6. he is called Solus immortalis c. and of this we are not in this place to entreat In the second sense an entity is called immortall when as the principles though they be not proof against the power that can annihilate yet are not subject to dissolution or corruption therefore being once produced are to remain ever there being no reason why the cause that preserves them should at any time withdraw his sovereign influence nor any second can do them harm and so they are safe on both sides whatsoever Arriaga imagineth to the contrary Immortality taken in this sense is properly so and this is the usuall signification of the word and again in this sense it is to be understood except some other terme or some circumstance do shew the contrary The third last acception is when it is ascribed to such things which although according to the naturall principles they ly exposed to destruction either by annihilation or corruption yet are continued by the favour of some externall preservatour This improper kind of immortality our bodies should have enjoyed before the fall of Adam and shall after the resurrection and it is rather a contingent perpetuity than any naturall immunity from mortality and corruption so that a body in that state is still corruptible though not corrumpendum This difference of acception of the terme being noted I observe that our businesse here is not to inquire in the first or third sense about the souls incorruptibility but in the second onely as namely whether it be incorruptible according to the exigence and virtue of the naturall principles of constitution without recourse to externall courtesie or favour The question being stated on this sort it appeares thereby that we are not to dispute point-black the souls immortality but presupposing it to be immortall some way or other whether that same immortality be an endowment that is naturall Pomponatius and Sennertus will not grant it to be naturall and now lately one Mr. Hobbes in a prodigious volume of his called by him as prodigiously Leviathan is of opinion that no other immortality of the soul can be proved out of Scripture if any at all can besides that one of the lowest classe which is of grace and favour merely For eviction of the contrary both out of reason and Scripture I note first that the soul of man is an entity or substance intellectuall and secondly that every such entity is capable of a true felicity and is unquiet untill it do attain thereunto and thirdly that every such sublimer entity is made in a manner for it self that is to say as Adam Godham judgeth 1. Sent. q. 2. some way or other to enjoy its own being and to be settled in a full possession of it self reserving alwayes the subordination to the supremest entity and a continuall dependence thereupon This appears plainly because the whole species of man that is to say all mankinde doth earnestly desire felicity the fruition of a good so great as may give it a full content satisfaction after a subordinate way for the pleasing and rejoicing of it self In this limited sense the doctrine of Eudoxus Gnidius and of Epicurus subscribed lately and explained by Gassendus seems to draw very near the truth namely that mans felicity did consist in some high and refined pleasure not corporeal but such as is intellectuall and pure from which opinion Aristotle and Albertus in their Ethicks seem not to dissent and Aureolus is of the same mind with them In relation to this same contenting of our selves Aristotle describes humane felicity in generall terms without including God in any other terms then those of the sublimest entitie And though in reality it be God that is our Summum bonum and is that goodnesse onely which can make us happy and moreover that we stand bound to love him above our selves to observe and please him yea even although we were to reap no benefit thereby yet neverthelesse such a transcendent relation we have unto felicity and content under that very title as that abstracting from whether there were a God or no we should as earnestly defire to be happy and to enjoy our selves as we now do and again as we desire to please God in all we do and suffer and are so also we do desire felicity for the pleasing of our selves yea even independently upon any other consideration and so although we were principally made for God yet secondatily and subordinately we were made for our selves and therefore for our selves because we were made intellectuall I argue then from hence as followeth Every entity framed for the enjoying of it self and so for it self is to be perpetuall according to the exigence of nature But such is the reasonable soul and every nature
intellectuall Ergo the rationall soul and every nature intellectuall are to be perpetuall according to the exigence of nature I say according to the exigence of nature and not according to any act of grace because if we were not so then had not the efficient wrought consequently to himself and to his own ends Wherefore seeing the skilful architect of Nature knows how to work conformably to the rules of reason and to proportion his work unto the end for which he made it it followes hence that every rationall soul or substance intellectuall is by the order of nature made up immortall and incorruptible And this consequence is therefore good because it is essentiall to felicity to be perpetuall and to be an endlesse state of everlasting joy and therefore the subject in which this joy is to reside cannot be otherwise then naturally perpetuall Morcover seeing it is our soul which is directly per sc proportioned to felicity and capable thereof and our bodies onely indirectly and as it were by accident therefore immortality belongeth primarily to the soul and to the body onely by a sequel And so we argue here in conformity to that we should in other cases not unlike to this as for example upon a supposall made that the sun was created to enlighten the earth perpetually we should conclude from thence that is was framed of a nature and body incorruptible Now further that perpetuity is of the very essence of felicity or at the least an inseparable companion thereof Reason it self doth teach us our Divines do shew it plainly as by name Aquinas 1. p.q. 44. a. 3. and 1.2 q. 5. a. 4. l. 3. cont Gent. c. 62. Albertus seu Aegidius in compend l. 2. Valentia tom 2. d. 1. q. 5. p. 6. Lessins l. 3. de summ bono c. ult Estius 4. d. 49. as I perswade my self Paravicinus l. de Bono and all the rest forasmuch as of a certain true felicity ought to be devoid of care sorrow then seeing that which we possesse with delight we cannot relinquish without sorrow again what we love we cannot enjoy contentedly without our being assured not to lose it forasmuch as the onely dread or suspicion of being deprived thereof causes sorrow and is afflictive to the heart even as well though not as much as the losse it self And for this there is great reason because we do not desire alone that good which is felicity but besides to have it alwayes and to be assured of it and therefore we are unsatisfied and in pain unlesse we be really happy and withall assured so to continue Of so large a capacity is the spirit of man as that it resteth not in that alone which is present to it but besides with swift-wing'd thoughts and flying affections overtakes the future and thereafter as that same is apprehended to be good or bad pleasing or unpleasant draws from it either comfort or affliction But why is it that a man cannot be happy for a season as well as miserable for a season Jo. Pontius a late Philosopher and follower of Scotus is of opinion that he may for so he determineth q. 6. Ethic. con 3. n. 28. to whom I can by no means assent because as Cicero and Boetius do define Felicity is such a state and such a good as fully satiates and iâ— replenished with all that is justly desirable It is saith Cicero l. 3. Tuscul Secretis malis omnibus cumulata bonorum complexio And Boetius l. 3. consol pros 2. Status omnium bonorum aggregatione perfectus Wherefore it must consist either in all severall goods together or else in some one that conteins and countervails them all Wherefore though a man who is miserable now may be happy afterwards yet he who is happy now can never be miserable afterwards because happinesse that is in being now excludes misery both present and future but contrariwise misery that is now in being although it excludes a present happinesse yet not a happinesse to come The reason of which disparity is because a true and perfect happinesse includes essentially as we shewed before all good things of which number a secured perpetuity is one as on the contrary side every state of misery does not of necessity include all evill things or all the causes of infelicity and therefore not any perpetuity of them and for this reason it is that there is no repugnance why it may not have an end forasmuch as S. Dionysius defineth Bonum est ex integra causa malum ex quocunque defectu seeing that more is required to the constitution of felicity then to the destruction or abolition of it more to an efficiency then to a deficiency and so consequently although felicity cannot subsist without a perpetuity yet infelicity may contrarily to that which Pontius imagined And although felicity be the same for a day that it is for a yeare or for ever considering only the Physicall entity thereof yet considering the whole value and morall estimation thereof it is not so because an endlesse duration accruing to the possession of any good thing doth raise the value of it and the just esteem as contrariwise the same duration accruing to an evill doth make it infinitly worse and more afflictive for which cause a good which is perpetual known for such may satiate when being but for a time it cannot As for brute beasts whatsoever Mr. Hobbes conceives unto the contrary they have neither sense nor capacity of a present happinesse nor knowledge of a future And no other in former ages that I have heard of besides the false Prophet Mahomet ever asserted any happinesse to beasts whereas on the contrary part according to good Philosophy beasts neither have any happinesse nor do desire it Ignoti nulla cupido No Animal saith Aristotle l. 10. Eth. c. 8. apnd Andronicum 10. devoid of reason can be partaker of felicity because wholly destitute of the faculty contemplative The life of God is happy altogether and of man also so farre forth as he resembles him and participates of his vigorousnesse No other Animal is happy because not communicating of the hability to contemplate Such as be able to contemplate be capable of selicity and the more able to contemplate the more happy they may be and felicity extends it self as farre as that and this not by accident but per se Thus he The true reason then why beasts can have no happinesse is because they cannot possesse nor enjoy themselves for want of an understanding spirit within them and so properly speaking though they can be or not be yet can they not have any thing at all nor contrariwise lose any thing and so neither be rich nor poore happy nor miserable I argue again to the same intent Such as the operations of the soul be such is the nature of it and therefore all the proofs for immortality drawn from the natural operations do prove the soul
to have been arguments well steeled that should be of power sufficient to force theirway through the brazen wall of death and to rear up a huge pile or fabrick of another life after corruption and rottennesse of which life they could perceive few or no signes appearing in the world Wherefore although the arguments for immortality were very weighty yet they having such a strong barre laid to crosse their way no marvell if sundry of those Ancients should be brought unto a stand and the arguments as forcible as they were benummed and though not killed yet cast into a slumber For indeed because men then knew not how to dispose of souls after their separation from the body therefore they might have license granted them to speak doubtfully not knowing what to determine or to say nothing at all either pro or contra Some few we finde did contradict as by name Epicurus and Lucretius yet notwithstanding this maine obstacle the generall sense of the world was for the immortality and much more then when the other hemisphere of life came creditably to be discovered by the Messias for at that time those old reasons for immortality awaked and recovered their naturall vigour and vivacity and no wonder because this truth of immortality and that other of a life to come are mutuall inductives one unto the other and conspire so friendly as whosoever denies either of them doth disparage and weaken the other and again they give so great aides to each other as that the notice of another life made ready way for the entertainment of immortality and contrariwise the doctrine of immortality added reputation to the doctrine of the other life Moreover The incorruptible nature of the reasonable soul The state of felicity or infelicity in a life to come That God is the high Rectour of the Universe extends his providence over all and is a just and bountifull rewarder be all of them symbolizing verities and of a strict confederacy both offensive and defensive and so can hardly be overthrown I conclude this small labour as Pythagoras and Philolaus concluded their golden verses wherein the ancient doctrine is declared plainly 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Sic ubi deposito jam corpore libera coeli Templa penetrâris Deus immortalis omni Spretus ab illuvie terrarum eris integer avi And having once laid down our dust Through spacious aiery Lawnes we must And free in those large circles move Immortall like the Gods above 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 saith Hierocles the Commentatour limiting and qualifying the higher expression of the verse by admonishing his reader that albeit Gods we must be yet not simply and absolutely as the words do sound but onely so farre forth as it is possible for a separated soul to be FINIS POST-SCRIPT OVer and above those reasons brought by the Authour of the precedent work all which do prove an immortalitie naturally belonging to the soul there want not divers others that do the same as amongst the rest for example this one viz. Such as the physick and food of the soul is for curing of the maladies thereof and for the strengthening and cherishing of it such is the nature of the soul it self But the physick and food of the soul is wholly immateriall and intellectuall that is to say Reasons and Truths eternall and incorruptible Therefore the nature of the soul is such I prove the minor proposition by experience for when the minde is troubled and out of peace and order by reason of some losse or misfortune then all the Materia medica of Dioscorides or of Horstius will not make a cure if so the body be not diseased or out of tune no physicians skill will be able to prevail we must not seek in such cases as these to Galen or Celsus or Paracelsus or Avicenna no druggists shop no physick-garden can furnish us with remedies against the raging sorrows or bewitching pleasures of the minde Non est medicamen in hortis Tollere nodosum nescit medicina dolorem A sick body physicians can sometimes cure but a sick mind never If so the body be then in health and that the infirmity do not proceed from thence Philosophy in that case must do the deed and not Medicina Philosophy saith Hierocles in Proem ad aureos versus Pythagora is the purger of humane life and the perfection the purger it is because it delivers it from all corruption contrary to reason and from the mortall body the perfecter because by the recovery of the true naturall constitution it reduceth it to a similitude with the divine which two things being to be done by vertue and verity by one of them it takes away the distempers of perturbations and by the other induces a God-like form into it Thus he conformably to whom determineth the wise Emperour Marcus Aurelius Antoninus l. 2. de vita sua § 15. when having numbred up a world of miseries and perplexities which haunt this life he addeth saying What is it then that must conduct us through all these Philosophia Also the great Aegyptian King Osmanduas as we find it recorded by Diodorus Siculus l. 1. p. 2. raised a goodly structure which had graven on it this inscription Medicatorium Animi 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 that is to say a store-house for curing of the minde and this same was not an Apothecaries-shop but a Library well furnished with books wherewith to charme mens cares and cure both the vain delights and bitter anguishes of the mind whose tranquillity is not procurable by medicines or receipts but contrariwise by the good documents for example of Epictetus of Seneca or Marcus Antoninus and where all Pagan doctrines and consolations be deficient by the instructions and good counsels to be found for us in the Holy Bible in Thomas de Kempis Peraldus Petrarch de remediis utrinsque fortunae and other such like The Recipes taken from hence will work when all the materiall compounds quintessences extractions and Elixirs can do nothing as not having vertue in them nor yet subtility to penetrate Now albeit the Ethnick Moralists can do much for pacifying our disordered affections and introducing a content yet do they not come home for though they be able to persuade a generous contempt of all transitory delights and fading glories and also how to draw on a kinde of sad or disconsolate way of resolution for a constant suffering of all adversities telling us that Quidquid erit superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est and read us many such melancholy lectures yet do not they assigne us any solid reasons whereupon to build content or whereby we might receive true satisfaction but contrariwise endeavour to feed us with shadows as namely by their telling us that vertue is an ample reward unto it self and again that the miseries and affliction of this present life are not evills really though we do think them so and with such empty phantasies as these would make us give our own experience the lie Moreover they sometimes speak faintly and fearfully of the life to come and the rewards thereof by means of which alone the inequalities and the great disorders of this can be made up and reconciled with providence On this sort spake Tacitus concerning the soul of his Father in law Julius Agricola then late deceased Si quis piorum manibus locus sit si ut Sapientibus placet non cum corporibus extinguuntur magnae animae placidè quiescas If saith he to the spirits of the pious there be any place remaining if as wise men are persuaded great souls be not extinguished with their bodies mayest thou sweetly rest To strong and pressing sorrows such feeble remedies did many of the Ethnicks bring but this sovereign medicine was left for Christianity to compose and shew unto the world by the belief of which those cold sweats with which many before had been sore afflicted were prevented wholly Another naturall track whereby to trace out immortality is the universall shamefastnesse of mankinde of the own nakednesse which passion is not found to be in brute beasts and the reason of the difference between them seems to be because beasts are corruptible and are so to be but men though now they also be corruptible yet it seems they were not so to be but onely by a misadventure or mischance for mans body because composed of severall disagreeing parcells is dissolvable and may be taken in sunder by the very same way that it was put together and therefore by the own right cannot lay any just claim to a perpetuity more then other composed bodies can yet it seems that by right of the being matched with a substance intellectuall it might pretend unto it and therefore holds it a disparagement and disgrace to be reputed mortall which without such a title it could not do and seeing nakednesse betrayes it to be a piece of corruption a condition so abject and inferiour it is ashamed to be seen forasmuch as sexes be the evident marks and tokens of mortality for why are sexes but to propagate and what need of propagation but onely to provide a substitute and none provides a successour or a substitute who is not himself to be turned out and to be gone of which mean and inferiour condition as not befitting men are ashamed and in relation to this grand imperfection we finde that men labour to conceale even as much and as long as possible their amorous affections as springing out of a root of corruption Thus we see that men once in high fortunes and cast down and grown into necessity are abashed at their poor and present state whenas others that were poor and low alwayes be not so And this I conceive to be the principal reason why men doe blush at businesses of corporeall love and are ashamed of their nakednesse although hitherto I do not know any that in particular have taken notice of it Now finally how immortality is consistent with the principles of Aristotle and also how it doth follow upon them is not my intention to examine as being a long and intricate piece of work and performed by others as namely by Javellus l. de indeficientia anima and of late by Card. Augustinus Oregius in a work peculiarly intended for that purpose