27. Suppositions that look strange are pardonable in our ignorance.
I am apt enough to think I have, in treating of
this subject, made some suppositions that will look strange to some readers, and possibly they are so in
themselves. But yet, I think they are such as are pardonable, in this ignorance we are in of the nature of that
thinking thing that is in us, and which we look on as ourselves. Did we know what it was, or how it was tied to a
certain system of fleeting animal spirits; or whether it could or could not perform its operations of thinking and
memory out of a body organized as ours is; and whether it has pleased God that no one such spirit shall ever be
united to any but one such body, upon the right constitution of whose organs its memory should depend; we might
see the absurdity of some of those suppositions I have made. But taking, as we ordinarily now do (in the dark
concerning these matters), the soul of a man for an immaterial substance, independent from matter, and indifferent
alike to it all; there can, from the nature of things, be no absurdity at all to suppose that the same soul may at
different times be united to different bodies, and with them make up for that time one man: as well as we suppose
a part of a sheep's body yesterday should be a part of a man's body to-morrow, and in that union make a vital part
of Meliboeus himself, as well as it did of his ram.
