diminution of its census, so they look upon the celestial promises of prolificity made to the patriarchs of old as the highest temporal blessing. They admit in the lawgiver only a right to legislate for the good of those who are to obey his laws, not to gratify his "whimsy whamsies," and that the liberty which man claims by the dignity of his nature permits him to choose the tie, whether polyandric, monogamic, or polygamic, that connects him with the opposite sex. Mr. Parley P. Pratt ("Marriage and Morals in Utah," p. 3) is explicit upon this subject:
"If we find laws, statutes, covenants, and precedents emanating from God; sworn to by himself to be everlasting; as a blessing to all nations—if we find these have to do with exceeding multiplicity of race, and with family and national organization and increase—if such institutions are older than Moses, and are found perpetuated and unimpaired by Moses and the prophets, Jesus and the apostles, then it will appear evident that no merely human legislation or authority, whether proceeding from emperor, king, or people, has a right to change, alter, or pervert them."
The third epoch is that of Materialism. In this the Mormons are preceded, to quote but a few schools, by the classic Academics—by the Jews, who believed in a material and personal Demiurgus, and by many fathers of the Christian Church, who held the soul of man, while immortal, to be material. Matter with them, as with Newton, is an aggregate of "solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, and movable particles." Respecting the intelligence of its units and molecules—the test of true materialism—they are somewhat hazy; they deride the peripatetic dogma of perception by species or phantasms, and at the same time ignore the doctrine of Hobbes, Spinoza, Priestley, and others, who recognize no separate existence for the mind or spirit[1] except as a union of atoms or particles, which, unorganized, have neither feeling nor thought. They define matter as a something that exists in and occupies space between any two instants, and is susceptible of division, and of being removed from one portion of space to another. Unlike other metaphysicians, who confess ignorance as to the substratum of mind and matter, they boast acquaintance with the essence of all substances, solidity, which with them is not a mere property. Although the ultimate atoms of matter can not come under the cognizance of the senses, they are none the less assured of their solidity, viz., that they fill a certain amount of space, and
- ↑ "If man," says Dr. Priestley, "be a material being, and the power of thinking the result of a certain organization of the brain, does it not follow that all his functions must be regulated by the laws of mechanism, and that, of consequence, all his actions proceed from an irresistible necessity?" It is the glory of the present age, the highest result of our nineteenth century physiological and statistic studies, brought to bear by a master-mind of the age upon the History of Civilization—to establish the fact that mankind progresses by investigating the laws of phenomena; in fact, to prove, not to conjecture, that such mechanism really exists. I need hardly name Mr. Buckle.
