hes of decay.
He may come into contact with a sphere of truths, grasp and rise
into a region of realities, conferring the prerogative of
deathlessness, not to be reached by natures gifted in a much lower
degree, although of the same kind. Such a distinction is made
between men themselves by Spinoza.26 His doctrine of immortality
depicts the stupendous boon as contingent, to be acquired by
observance of conditions. If the ideas of the soul represent
perishable objects, it is itself mortal; if imperishable, it is
immortal. Now, brutes, it is probable, never rise to the
apprehension of pure and eternal truths; but men do. It was a mean
prejudice, founded on selfish ignorance and pride, which first
assumed the total destruction of brutes in death, and afterwards,
by the grovelling range of considerations in which it fastened and
the reaction it naturally provoked, involved man and all his
imperial hopes in the same fate. A firm logical discrimination
disentangles the human mind from this beastly snarl.27 The
difference in data warrants a difference in result. The argument
for the immortality of brutes and that for the immortality of men
are, in some respects, parallel lines, but they are not
coextensive. Beginning together, the latter far outreaches the
former. Man, like the animals, eats, drinks, sleeps, builds;
unlike them, he adorns an ideal world of the eternal future, lays
up treasures in its heavenly kingdom, and waits to migrate into
it.

There are two distinct methods of escaping the fatal inference of
disbelief usually drawn by materialists. First, by the denial of
their philosophical postulates, by the predication of immaterial
substance, affirming the soul to be a spaceless point, its life an
indivisible moment. The reasonings in behalf of this conception
have been manifold, and cogent enough to convince a multitude of
accomplished and vigorous thinkers.28 In Herbart's system the soul
is an immaterial monad, or real, capable of the permanent
formation of states in its interior. Its life consists of a
quenchless series of self preservations. These reals, with their
relations and aggregations, constitute at once the varying
phenomena and the causal substrata of the universe. Mamertius
Claudianus, a philosophical priest of Southern Gaul in the fifth
century, wrote a treatise "On the Nature of the Soul." He says,
"When the soul wills, it is all will; when it recollects or feels,
it is all recollection or feeling.