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

§ 10. 4. And what though Brutes have Sense and Affection, doth it follow therefore that we have none now? Or that we shall have none hereafter? Brutes have Life: And must we therefore have no Life hereafter, because it is a thing that's common •oBruits? Rather as now, we have all that the Brutes have and more, so shall we then have Life, and Sense, and Affection of a nobler sort than Brutes, and more. Is not God the Living God? Shall we say that he liveth not because Brutes live? Or rather that they live a sensitive life, and Man a Sensitive and Intellectual, because God is Essential, Transcendent Infinite Life, that makes them live.

§ 10. 4. And what though Bruits have Sense and Affection, doth it follow therefore that we have none now? Or that we shall have none hereafter? Bruits have Life: And must we therefore have no Life hereafter, because it is a thing that's common •oBruits? Rather as now, we have all that the Bruits have and more, so shall we then have Life, and Sense, and Affection of a nobler sort than Bruits, and more. Is not God the Living God? Shall we say that he liveth not because Bruits live? Or rather that they live a sensitive life, and Man a Sensitive and Intellectual, because God is Essential, Transcendent Infinite Life, that makes them live.

§ 11. 5. But if they say that there is no Sensation or Affection but by bodily Organs, I answered before to that; the Body feeleth nothing at all, but the Soul in the Body: The Soul uniteth itself most nearly to the Igneous-aerial parts called the Spirits; and in them it feeleth, seeth, tasteth, smelleth, &c. And that Soul that feeleth, and seeth, doth also inwardly love, desire, and rejoice: And that Soul which doth this in the Body, hath the same power and faculty out of the Body: And if they judge by the cessation of sensation when ⟨p. 201⟩the Organs are undisposed or dead, so they might as well conclude against our future Intellection and Will, whose operation in an Apoplexy, we no more perceive than that of Sense. But I have before showed that the Soul will not want exercise for its Essential faculties, for want of Objects or bodily Organs; and that men conclude basely of the souls of Brutes, as if they were not an enduring substance, without any proof or probability: And tell us idle dreams, that they are but vanishing temperaments, &c. which are founded on another Dream, that FIRE (or the Motive-Illuminative-Calefactive Cause) is no substance neither; and so our unnatural Somatists know none of the most excellent substances, which actuate all the rest, but only the more base and gross which are actuated by them: and they think they have well acquit themselves, by telling us of subtle acted Matter and Motion, without understanding what any Living Active-Motive Faculty, or Virtue is. And because no Man knoweth what God doth with the souls of Brutes, (whether they are only one common sensitive soul of a more common Body, or whether Individuate still and Transmigrant from Body to Body, or what else:) Therefore they make Ignorance a plea for Error, and feign them to be no substances, or to be Annihilate.