THE IMMORTAL SOUL LOCATED.
By Uriah Smith
It has been no small puzzle to the believers in the popular view to determine in what part of the human system that invisible and unimaginable entity called the immortal soul, has its special abode. Most persons, we presume, if requested to designate, as nearly as possible its invisible dwelling place, would lay their hand upon their breast. But it has been decided that it has fixed its residence "higher up," namely, in the head, or rather that it is confined there; for the soul itself seems not to be a free agent in this matter. We will listen to Dr. Fitch on the subject. He says:— "The first chamber I will notice, is the skull. This is a dark chamber, remarkable for being the room in which the brain is located; and it is also remarkable for the place where mind and matter meet. In the brain resides that inscrutable and awful being, the human soul. The eye does not see, the ear does not hear, all the senses are only means and instruments that convey knowledge to the soul. The soul is imprisoned in this dark chamber. Its food is knowledge. No man can explain, no man can comprehend it. It is an emanation from the Most High; and in control, holds the same relation to man's body that the Almighty does to it. Imprisoned now, it will one day leave its prison-house, and wing its way to immortality."
—Fitch's Lectures, pp. 22, 23. "The eye does not see, the ear does not hear," says our worthy Dr. Then it is the immortal soul that does all these things; and as a corollary we may add, that wherever there is seeing, hearing, etc., somewhere behind those operations lies an immortal soul. But animals have eyes and ears; they see, hear, feel, etc., therefore we are borne by this theory to the conclusion that every individual brute, peregrinating on four legs, more or less, bears about an immortal soul shut up in its head! Will immortal-soulists feel flattered by the introduction of this new class of associates? Will they any more accuse us of degrading man to a level with the brute, when their own theory brings them to the same level? All we contend for is that Solomon was correct when he declared that in respect to death and its concomitants, man hath no pre-eminence above a beast; and their own theory, prop it up as they will, when legitimately carried out, leads to the same results, and they cannot avoid it; for beasts are endowed more or less with all those attributes, upon which they rely to prove immortality in man. But we are told that this immortal soul is "imprisoned in this dark chamber," the skull. The question at once arises, What keeps it in this prison? If the soul is of itself an entity distinct from the body, and only clogged and hindered by the body, and vastly freer in its operations without than with it, why does it not leave? Any man who was imprisoned, imprisoned not from any fault of his, and under no obligations which would make it criminal for him to leave, would be considered very foolish, if he did not leave. Are the immortal souls of popular theology the imbecile or stupid things that they cannot act as wisely? Or is the body superior to the soul, so that it can hold it in its prison at pleasure; and so that the soul must needs wait till the body is relaxed in death, before, like a trembling fugitive, it can slip out? But we are digressing. These are independent questions having a field of their own, and inviting separate investigation. We only took our pen to congratulate our friends of the popular view, on having settled this much of their theory, that the mysterious inhabitant of their bodies is imprisoned in the skull. Let them take heed, lest at some unlucky moment their prisoner should "break jail," and leave them in the lurch. U. S.