Richard Baxter's dying thoughts upon Phil. I, 23 written for his own life and…

§ 32. This greatest and hardest of all Objections, doth make us confess (with Contarenus, contra Pomponatium de Anim. Immortalit.) that though by the Light of Nature we may know the Immortality of Souls, (and that they lose not their Powers, or Activity) yet without supernatural Light, we know not what manner of Action they will have in their separated state, or in ⟨p. 20⟩another world, because here they act according to objective Termination, and the Receptivity of the Sense and Phantasie, & Recipitur ad modum recipientis; and in the Womb we perceive not that it acteth intellectually at all.

But we know, That, 1. If even then it differed not in its formal •ower from the Souls of Brutes, it would not so much afterward differ in Act: And it would never be raised to that which was not virtually in its Nature at the first. 2. And we find, that even very little Children have quick and strong knowledge of such Objects as ••e brought within their reach: And that their Ignorance is not for want of an Intellectual Power, but for want of Objects, or Images of things which time, and use, and conversation among Objects, must furnish their Phantasies and Memories with. And so a Soul in the Womb, or in an Apoplexy, hath not Objects of Intellection within its reach to act upon; but is as the Sun to a Room that hath no windows to let in its light. 3. And what if its profound Vitality, Self perception, and Self-love be by a kind of Sensation and Intuition, rather than by Discursive Reason? I doubt not but some late Philosophers make snares to themselves and others, by too much vilifying sense and sensitive Souls, as if sense were but some loseable Accident of contempered Atoms: But Sensation (though diversified by Organs and Uses, and so far mutable) is the Act of a noble Spiritual Form and Virtue. And as Chamber and some others make Brutes a lower rank of Rationals, and Man another higher species, as having his nobler Reason for higher Ends; so for Man to be the noblest Order (here) of Sensitives, and to have an Intellect to Order and Govern Sensations, and connex them and improve them, were a noble work,