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.
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