Nothing more
repugnant to all their notions, because nothing more repugnant to
common experience, than mind without body; a mere spiritual
substance, which fell not under their senses nor comprehension,
and of which they had not observed one single instance throughout
all nature. Mind and body they knew, because they felt both: an
order, arrangement, organisation, or internal machinery, in both,
they likewise knew, after the same manner: and it could not but
seem reasonable to transfer this experience to the universe; and
to suppose the divine mind and body to be also coeval, and to
have, both of them, order and arrangement naturally inherent in
them, and inseparable from them.
Here, therefore, is a new species of Anthropomorphism,
C/LEANTHES\, on which you may deliberate; and a theory which
seems not liable to any considerable difficulties. You are too
much superior, surely, to systematical prejudices, to find any
more difficulty in supposing an animal body to be, originally, of
itself, or from unknown causes, possessed of order and
organisation, than in supposing a similar order to belong to
mind. But the vulgar prejudice, that body and mind ought always
to accompany each other, ought not, one should think, to be
entirely neglected; since it is founded on vulgar experience, the
only guide which you profess to follow in all these theological
inquiries. And if you assert, that our limited experience is an
unequal standard, by which to judge of the unlimited extent of
nature; you entirely abandon your own hypothesis, and must
thenceforward adopt our Mysticism, as you call it, and admit of
the absolute incomprehensibility of the Divine Nature.
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