o its native
seat.33 The doctrine of Swedenborg asserts man to be interiorly an
organized form pervading the physical body, an eternal receptacle
of life from God. In his terminology, "constant influx of life"
supersedes the popular idea of a self contained spiritual
existence. But this influx is conditioned by its receiving organ,
the undecaying inner body.34 However boldly it may be assailed and
rejected as a baseless theory, no materialistic logic can disprove
the existence of an ethereal form contained in, animating, and
surviving, the visible organism. It is a possibility; although,
even if it be a fact, science, by the very conditions of the case,
can never unveil or demonstrate it.

When subjected to a certain mode of thought developed recently by
Faraday, Drossbach, and others, materialism itself brightens and
dissolves into a species of idealism, the universe becomes a
glittering congeries of indestructible points of power, and the
immortality of the soul is established as a mathematical
certainty.35 All bodies, all entities, are but forms of

This has been ably shown by Spiers in his treatise, Ueber das
korperliche Bedingtsein der Seelenthatigkeiten.

30 Spes immortalitatis animorum per rationes physiologicas
confirmata.

31 Dabistan, vol. ii. p. 177.

32 Colebrooke, Essays, vol. i. p. 246.

33 Cudworth, Int. Sys., vol. ii. pp. 218-230, Am. ed.

34 On the Intercourse between the Soul and the Body, sect. 9.

35 Lott, Herbarti de animi immortalitate doctrina.

force.36 Gravity, cohesion, bitterness, thought, love,
recollection, are manifestations of force peculiarly conditioned.
Our perceptions are a series of states of consciousness. An
attribute or property of a thing is an exercise of force or mode
of activity producing a certain state of consciousness in us. The
sum of its attributes or properties constitutes the totality of
the thing, and is not adventitiously laid upon the thing: you can
separate the parts of a thing; but you cannot take away its forces
from any part, because they are its essence. Matter is not a
limitation or neutralization, but a state and expression, of
force. Force itself is not multiplex, but one, all qualities and
directions of it lying potentially in each entity, the kinds and
amounts which shall be actually manifested depending in each case
on the conditions environing it. All matter, all being, therefore,
consists of ultimate atoms or monads, each one of which is an