errors, and the uncertainty of the ancient philosophers
with regard to the immortality of the soul. When they are desirous of
arming their disciples against the fear of death, they inculcate, as
an obvious, though melancholy position, that the fatal stroke of our
dissolution releases us from the calamities of life; and that those can
no longer suffer, who no longer exist. Yet there were a few sages of
Greece and Rome who had conceived a more exalted, and, in some respects,
a juster idea of human nature, though it must be confessed, that in
the sublime inquiry, their reason had been often guided by their
imagination, and that their imagination had been prompted by their
vanity. When they viewed with complacency the extent of their own mental
powers, when they exercised the various faculties of memory, of
fancy, and of judgment, in the most profound speculations, or the most
important labors, and when they reflected on the desire of fame, which
transported them into future ages, far beyond the bounds of death and of
the grave, they were unwilling to confound themselves with the beasts
of the field, or to suppose that a being, for whose dignity they
entertained the most sincere admiration, could be limited to a spot of
earth, and to a few years of duration. With this favorable prepossession
they summoned to their aid the science, or rather the language, of
Metaphysics. They soon discovered, that as none of the properties of
matter will apply to the operations of the mind, the human soul must
consequently be a substance distinct from the body, pure, simple, and
spiritual, incapable of dissolution, and susceptible of a much higher
degree of virtue and happiness after the release from its corporeal
prison. From these specious and noble principles, the philosophers who
trod in the footsteps of Plato deduced a very unjustifiable conclusion,
since they asserted, not only the future immortality, but the past
eternity, of the human soul, which they were too apt to consider as a
portion of the infinite and self-existing spirit, which pervades and
sustains the universe. [52] A doctrine thus removed beyond the senses
and the experience of mankind, might serve to amuse the leisure of a
philosophic mind; or, in the silence of solitude, it might sometimes
impart a ray of comfort to desponding virtue; but the faint impression
which had been received in the schools, was soon obliterated by the
commerce and business of active life. We are su