BAXTER'S DYING THOUGHTS. 29 book, perform that by cooperation which no one part can do, I have elsewhere manifested. (1.) Many strings, indeed, have many motions, and so have many effects on the ear and fantasy, which in us are sound and harmony: but all is but a percussion of the air by strings, and were not that motion received by a sensitive soul, it would be no music or melody ; so that there is nothing done but what each part had power to do. But intellection and volition are not the conjunct motions, of all parts of the body, re- ceiving their form in a nobler intellective nature, as the sound of the strings maketh melody in man : if it were so, that receptive nature still would be as excellent as the effect importeth. (2.) And the watch, or clock, doth but move according to the action of thé spring, or poise ; but that it moveth in such an order as be- cometh to man a sign and measure of time, this is from man who ordereth it to that use. But there is nothing in the motion but what the parts have their power to cause ; and that it signifieth the hour of the days to us, is no action, but an object used by a rational soul, as it can use the shadow of a tree, or house, that yet doth nothing. (3.) And so a book doth nothing at all, but is a mere objective ordination of passive signs, by which man's active intellect can understand what' the writer, or orderer, did intend; so that here is nothing done beyond the power of the agent, nor any thing in the effect which was not in the cause, either formally or eminently. But for a company of atoms, of which no one hath sense or reason, to become sensitive and rational by mere conjunct motion, is an effect beyond the power of the supposed cause. But as some think so basely of our noblest acts, as to think that contempered agitatedatoms can perform them, that have no natural intellective, or sensitive, virtue or power in themselves, so others think so highly of them, as to take them to be the acts only of God, or some universal soul in the body of man ; and so 'that there is no life, sense, or reason, in the worldbut God himself, (or such an universal soul;) and so, that either everyman is God, as to his soul, or that it is the body only that is to be called man, as distinct from God. But this is the self-ensnaring and self-perplexing te- merity of busy, bold, and arrogant heads, that know not their own capacity and measure.. And on the like reasons, they must at last come, with others, to say, that all passive matter also is God, and that God is the universe, consisting of an active soul and passive body. As if God were no cause, and could make nothing, or nothing with life, or sense, or reason. But why depart we from things certain, by such presumptions as these? Is it not certain that there are baser creatures in the world than men or angels ? Is it not certain that one man is not
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