Nevertheless, a higher degree of assurance than that to which it is
possible to advance this, or any argument drawn from the light of
nature, was necessary, especially to overcome the shock which the
imagination and the senses received from the effects and the appearances
of death, and the obstruction which thence arises to the expectation of
either a continued or a future existence. This difficulty, although of a
nature no doubt to act very forcibly, will be found, I think, upon
reflection to reside more in our habits of apprehension than in the
subject: and that the giving way to it, when we have any reasonable
grounds or the contrary, is rather an indulging of the imagination than
anything else. Abstractedly considered, that is, considered without
relation to the difference which habit, and merely habit, produces in
our faculties and modes of apprehension, I do not see anything more in
the resurrection of a dead man than in the conception of a child; except
it be this, that the one comes into his world with a system of prior
consciousness about him, which the other does not: and no person will
say that he knows enough of either subject to perceive that this
circumstance makes such a difference in the two cases that the one
should be easy, and the other impossible; the one natural, the other not
so.
Pages:
597
598
599
600
601
602
603
604
605
606
607
608
609
610
611
612
613
614
615
616
617
618
619
620
621