telligence of an
elephant or the gratitude of a soul than they are in the
fabrication of the wing of a gnat or the fragrance of a flower.
Infinite wisdom and power are equally implied in each and in all.
They have shown the gross defectiveness of the comparison of the
butterfly and psyche. The butterfly, lying in the caterpillar
neatly folded up like a flower in the bud, in due time comes
forth. It is a material development, open to the senses, a common
demonstration tosensible experience. The disengagement of a spirit
from a fleshly encasement, on the other hand, is a pure hypothesis
wholly removed from sensible apprehension. There is no parallel in
the cases. So the ridiculousness has been made evident of Plato's
famous analogical argument that by a general law of nature all
things are produced contraries from contraries; warmth dies into
the

11 Plato, Phado, 98.

life of cold, and lives out of the death of cold; night is born
from the death of day, and day is born from the death of night;
and thus everywhere death springs from life, and life from
death.12 The whole comparison, considered as evidence of human
immortality, is baseless and full of astonishing sophistry. When
one hemisphere of the earth is turned away from the sun, it is
night there; when it is turned towards the sun, it is day again.
To this state of facts this revolving succession there is
obviously no parallelism whatever in the two phenomenal phases of
man, life and death, whereof one finishes its course and then the
other seems fixed forever. In like manner, when Jeremy Taylor,13
after the example of many others, especially of old Licetus,
argues soberly, as he does in a letter to Evelyn, for the
immortality of the soul from the analogy of lamps burning in tombs
for centuries with no waste of matter, there is no apposite and
valid similarity, even if the instances were not a childish fable.
An equally baseless argument for the existence of an independent
spiritual body within the material body, to be extricated from the
flesh at death and to survive in the same form and dimensions, we
recollect having seen in a work by a Swedenborgian author.14 He
reasons that when a person who has suffered amputation feels the
lost limb as vividly as ever before, the phenomenon is palpable
proof of a spirit limb remaining while the fleshly one is gone! Of
course, the simple physiological explanation is that the mind
instinctively refers the sensations broug