Taken by themselves, his utterances to Clarinda and Mrs. Dunlop might not be above suspicion. Burns had every motive for wishing favourably to impress both women, and might have feigned an interest which he did not feel, or at least have overstated his belief and understated his doubts. But here, as in his feelings towards his children, what he said when he may have been on dress-parade is confirmed by his letters to his intimates. In 1788 he wrote to Robert Muir, then dying of tuberculosis: ‘... An honest man has nothing to fear.--If we lie down in the grave, the whole man a piece of broken machinery, to moulder with the clods of the valley--be it so; at least there is an end of pain, care, woes and wants: if that part of us called Mind, does survive the apparent destruction of the man--away with old-wife prejudices and tales!... A man, conscious of having acted an honest part among his fellow-creatures; even granting that he may have been the sport, at times, of passions and instincts; he goes to a great unknown Being who could have no other end in giving him existence but to make him happy; who gave him those passions and instincts, and well knows their force.’ In the same tone he said six years later to Alexander Cunningham that the two great pillars which bear us up, ‘amid the wreck of misfortune and misery’, are the ‘certain noble, stubborn something ... known by the names of courage, fortitude, magnanimity’ and ‘those feelings and sentiments which, however the sceptic may deny them or the enthusiast disfigure them, are yet, I am convinced, original and component parts of the human soul; those _senses of the mind_ ... which connect us with, and link us to, those awful obscure realities--an all-powerful and equally beneficient God, and a world to come, beyond death and the grave.’ The countryman of Francis Hutcheson could scarcely have indicated more clearly his obligations to the Glasgow philosopher. Burns’s ‘senses of the mind’ are merely Hutcheson’s Moral Sense a little expanded. Like Channing and Emerson, having rejected the authority of the church, and with it the supernatural sanctions of Christian doctrine, Burns fell back on the authority of intuition to support concepts which he was unwilling to abandon. The idea of the deity, and His relations with mankind, which is embodied in these passages, he never deviated from; what seemed to many of his readers shocking irreverence was aimed at intolerance and hypocrisy, and not at religion. But he was not able in all moods to convince himself of personal immortality. At times he tried to argue himself into belief: ‘The most cordial believers in a Future State have ever been the Unfortunate.--This of itself; if God is Good, which is, I think, the most intuitive truth in Nature, ... is a very strong proof of the reality of its existence....’