This was followed by what Professor Huxley calls the wonderful triangular duel between Dodwell, Clarke and Collins on the immortality and immateriality of the soul. The learned but eccentric Dodwell had put forward a treatise contending from the Bible and the Fathers of the Church that the soul was naturally mortal, but that it derived immortality by virtue of the Holy Spirit, received in baptism, and hence that no one since the apostles had power to bestow immortality save the bishops. Dodwell was a perfect pedant. His learning was, as Gibbon testifies, immense, but his method was perplexed and his style barbarous. In this case, from well-established premises, he drew the most absurd conclusions. To rest human hopes of immortality upon episcopacy was indeed a sandy foundation. Such a treatise was well calculated to please the profane and grieve the godly. Several opponents to Dodwell appeared, foremost among them Dr. Samuel Clarke, the friend of Newton, and, since the death of Locke, regarded as England’s leading metaphysician. Clarke essayed to “demonstrate” the natural immortality and immateriality of the soul. This gave occasion to Collins to call attention to the difficulties of the question, and to show how far they are from being cleared up by Dr. Clarke’s “demonstration.” Collins pointed out that Clarke failed to define his terms, and since he allowed that God might bestow the power of thinking upon matter, it followed ' that matter might think. He hinted, moreover, that scepticism as to the existence of deity began when the Boyle lecturers undertook to prove it. Swift, who, in the twelfth chapter of the Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus, pokes fun at some of Collins’s arguments, hits the metaphysicians more heavily than he hits Collins. His famous illustrations of the meat-roasting quality which inheres in a jack, though neither in the fly, the weight, nor in any particular wheel, and that of Sir John Cutler’s pair of black worsted stockings, “which his maid darned so often with silk that they became at last a pair of silk stockings,” tells as strongly against the metaphysical view as against inadequate physical explanations of psychological processes.
Collins replied to the three first defences of Clarke, and then having fully stated his case was satisfied with silence. His letters were collected and published in French in 1769, and are
