LETTER XXXV.
From the same to the same.
Marsden.
My dear Friend,
You are expecting a letter, and it shall be delayed no longer. To return to the subject of my last: my brother confessed, as I told you, that his great difficulties lay in questions without the range of Bible testimony, considered either as a system of moral virtue, or a history of mankind.
“I know enough,” added he, “to give it the palm of excellence over the several claims of Confucius, Menu, Zoroaster, and Mohammed. The nobleness of its principle, in making the love of God stand forward grandly as the only test of true religion, is sufficient to raise it beyond the finest compositions of human skill, which rest their foundations in convenience or necessity. I am likewise aware that much of what is to be admired in the best specimens of ancient wisdom, is directly imitated from the laws of Moses. I know that this lawgiver has been the means of preserving the people committed to his charge, and that too amidst the most tremendous reverses and astonishing vicissitudes of fortune for almost four thousand years by the same laws; while the boasted Grecian philosophy of the Lycurgus’, the Solons, the Platos, though indebted to him, has passed away in empty air. I know also, that the infidel hue and cry that Moses borrowed his plans of jurisprudence and morality from the Egyptians, has been transmitted through the crowd as mere sound divested of sense, and is easily arrested by the least degree of acquaintance with that mythology from which unbelievers pretend to derive the Hebraical Institutes. Could I be assured that I am to live hereafter, the Bible should unquestionably be the light and staff of my journey towards that unseen world which you are so certain of beholding, and in the existence of which there is nothing revolting to my understanding, except the difficulty of knowing myself in a disembodied state. What is to convince me of my identity?”
To this question I ventured to reply, “The argument of identity has been much misunderstood by a large portion of mankind, including almost all the sceptics whose writings I am acquainted with, and who confound this idea with that of consciousness. Now, Butler, whose book you see before you, has admirably and clearly drawn the true distinction, and shewn that consciousness takes cognizance of identity, but is not the thing itself. You may sleep for a million of years as for a single night, without destroying your identity. Were it not so, each interruption from forgetfulness, however short, or from whatever cause, whether a natural slumber, lapse of memory, epileptic fit, swoon, or contusion of the brain, would be as fatal to the continuity of self, as the longest term of oblivion.
“How then do I arrive at the idea of identity? I say by intuitive knowledge, so totally independent of the circumstances with which it is combined in the body, that these may undergo every variety of change without impairing its force. Suppose that you were taken at your birth, like Hunter, and brought up amongst the North American Indians; that you believed a tatooed chief of a particular village to be your father, and a certain squaw to be your mother. At one-and-twenty, you are brought to Europe, and discover, by a remarkable chain of circumstances, that you are not a North American Indian, but a child of British parents. You are not what you believed yourself to be; yet this has nothing to do with your identity—you are still yourself.
“Suppose again, that by successive cannon shots, you have been deprived of your limbs; your arms and legs have been shot away, and, as nearly as is compatible with continued existence, you are reduced to a mere trunk. No diminution takes place in the consciousness of your personal identity, any more than results from the gradual substitution of new particles which, it is calculated, replace those which composed the whole of the former body, once in every seven years. Memory of the past is not necessary to our belief that we are ourselves. Whole years may be blotted from our recollection, and still we have some invisible, intuitive assurance that we have continuity of being, and have not gone through any metempsychosis, which destroys it; but this knowledge is limited by certain boundaries, beyond which we have absolutely nothing to guide us, except the evidence of other people. Ask yourself solemnly, and searchingly, what is your ground for believing that, ere you saw the light, you lived during nine months in another state as different from your present condition of existence, as the present union of body and spirit can possibly be from a future mode of being in which the soul, freed from human restraint, shall expatiate with as much more liberty than it can now exert, as it enjoys at present, when compared with the former period of its imprisonment.