TALBOYS.
It seems a timidity unworthy of Butler to make the distinction. Such a distinction might be used to invalidate his whole doctrine.
NORTH.
It might—if granted—and legitimately. But the course is plain, and the tenor steadfast. As a child, you think that your finger is a part of yourself, and that you feel with it. Afterwards, you find that it can be cut off without diminishing you: and physiologists tell you, and you believe, that it does not feel, but sends up antecedents of feeling to the brain. Am I to stop anywhere? Not in the body. As my finger is no part of Me, no more is my liver, or my stomach, or my heart—or my brain. When I have overworked myself, I feel a lassitude, distinctly local, in my brain—inside of my head—and therewithal an indolence, inertness, inability of thinking. If reflection—as Butler more than insinuates—hesitatingly says—is independent of my brain and body, whence the lassitude? And how did James Watt get unconquerable headaches with meditating Steam-engines?
TALBOYS.
It is childish, sir, to stagger at degrees, when we have admitted the kind. The Bishop's whole argument is to show, that the thing in us which feels, wills, thinks, is distinct from our body; that I am one thing, and my body another.
NORTH.
Have we Souls? If we have—they can live after the body—cannot perish with it; if we have not—wo betide us all!
SEWARD.
Will you, sir, be pleased to sum up the Argument of the First Chapter of the Analogy?