450 O$ PLANTS AND ANIMALS. The late Bishop Burnet, who was no indiligent enquirer into various knowledge, seems to determine in his Exposition of the First Articleof the Church of England, ed. 3. page 34. that one of these. two opinions is now the result of the thoughts of the learned (viz.) that either brutes are niere machines, or that they have reasonable souls. " It is certain," says he, " that either beasts have no thought or liberty at all, and areonly pieces of finely organized matter, capable of many subtle motions that come to them from objects without them ; but that they have no sensation nor thought at all about them ;" or,--But he supposes, that " human nature can hardly receive or bear this notion, be- cause there are such evident indications of even high degrees of reason among the beasts ;" he concludes therefore, " It is more reasonable to imagine, that there maybe spiritsof a lower order in beasts, that have in them a capacity of thinking and chusing ; but that it is so entirely under the impressions of matter, that they are not capable of that largeness either of thought or liberty, that is necessary to make them capable of good or evil, of re- wards and punishments; and that therefore they may be per- petually rollingabout from one body to another, i. e. by perpetual transmigrations from body to body. It is far beyond all my skill in philosophy to adjust and de- termine these differences, and to decidethis question. Some- times I think it is hard to allow even sensation to brutes, or to imagine that their Creator, who is perfect equity and goodness, should expose creatures, who are innocent and could never sin, to such a life of intense toil, anguish and misery, and to such cruel deaths as some of them sustain. At other times I can hardly avoid ascribing reason to them, when I observe so many signatures ofall the violent and the tender passions, both in their motions, their eyes, and their countenance, and so many ap- pearances of thought, contrivance, and design. Every ant and worm puzzles my reasonings, and baffles all my science. But on which side soever this question be determined, I de- sire to lay down this bar or caution against the inference that atheists or materialists would make on this subject ; and that is, that how many actions soever may be performed by brute crea- tures, without any principleof sense or consciousness, reason or reflection, yet these things can never be applied to human nature. It can never be said, that man may be an engine too, that man may be only a finer sort of machine, without a rational and im- mortal spirit. And the reason is this. Each of us feel and are conscious within ourselves, that we think, that we reason, that we reflect, that we contrive and design, that we judge and cause with freedom, anddetermine our own actions : We can have no stronger principle ofassent to any thing than present, immediate, intellectual consciousness. If I am assured of the truth of any
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