A26976:37
Of the immortality of mans soul, and the nature of it and other spirits.…
Of the immortality of mans soul, and the nature of it and other spirits. Two discourses, one in a letter to an unknown doubter, the other in a reply to Dr. Henry Moore's Animadversions on a private letter to him, which he published in his second edition of Mr. Joseph Glanvil's Sadducismus triumphatus, or, History of apparitions by Richard Baxter.
London: printed for B. Simons, 1682
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
The Soul is many months here in organizing its own body in generation, and more in nourishing it to a useful state: That particular organical bodies are made ready to receive them just at death, is hard to be believed: That the matter of the Universe is still ready is past doubt. But how organized, or how the Soul worketh without Organs, we shall better know hereafter. Your opinion much favoureth the Pythagoreans; If the Soul be never out of a body, is it not as like to come into one new forming in the womb, as into we know not what or where?
The Soul is many months here in organizing its own body in generation, and more in nourishing it to a useful state: That particular organical bodies are made ready to receive them just at death, is hard to be believed: That the matter of the Vniverse is still ready is past doubt. But how organized, or how the Soul worketh without Organs, we shall better know hereafter. Your opinion much favoureth the Pythagoreans; If the Soul be never out of a body, is it not as like to come into one new forming in the womb, as into we know not what or where?
§ 5. I could wish you had printed my Letter wholly by it self before you had annexed your answer, that the Reader might have understood it; which I can hardly do my self as you have parcelled it. But we must not have what we would have from wiser men.
§ 5. I could wish you had printed my Letter wholly by it self before you had annexed your answer, that the Reader might have understood it; which I can hardly do my self as you have parcel'd it. But we must not have what we would have from wiser men.
I take it for an odd method, when I never asserted Spirits to be fire, but denied it, first to be in your Epistle feigned to have said it, and yet in the end of it for you to say that [I mean not ordinary fire, but that my meaning is more subtle and refined] and never tell the Reader what it is before you dispute it, and then through the whole answer to dispute on a wrong supposition, and in the end of the Book to confess again that I say not that Spirits are fire or material.