=2.= We now have capacities for happiness, action, misery, &c., and there is always a probability that things will continue as they are, except when experience gives us reason to think they will be altered. This is a general law; and is our _only_ natural reason for expecting the continuance of any thing. =3.= There is no reason to apprehend that death will destroy us. If there was, it would arise from the nature of death; or from the analogy of nature. 1.) Not from the nature of death. --We know not what death is. --But only _some_ of its _effects_. --These effects do not imply the destruction of the living agent. --We know little of what the _exercise_ of our powers depends upon; and nothing of what _the powers_ themselves depend on. --We may be unable to _exercise_ our powers, and yet not lose them--_e.g._ sleep, swoon. 2.) Not from analogy. --Reason shows no connection between death and our destruction. --We have no faculties by which to trace any being beyond it. --The possession of living powers, up to the very moment when our faculties cease to be able to trace them, is a probability of their continuing. --We have already survived wonderful changes. --To live after death is analogous to the course of nature. II. _Presumptions against a future life._ =1.= That death _destroys_ us. _Ans._ 1. This is an assumption that we are compound and material beings, and hence discerptible; which is not true. 1.) Consciousness is a single, indivisible power, and of course the subject of it must be. 2.) The material body is not ourself. 3.) We can easily conceive of our having more limbs, or of a different kind, or of having more or fewer senses, or of having no bodies at all, or of hereafter animating these same bodies, remodelled. 4.) The dissolution of a succession of new and strange bodies, would have no tendency to destroy _us_. _Ans._ 2. Though the absolute simplicity of the living being cannot be proved by _experiment_, yet facts lead us so to conclude. We lose limbs, &c. Our bodies were once _very_ small, but we might, then, have lost part of them. There is a constant destruction and renewal going on. 1.) Thus we see that no certain _bulk_ is necessary to our existence, and unless it were proved that there is, and that it is larger than an indissoluble atom, there is no reason to presume that death destroys us, even if we are discerptible. 2.) The living agent is not an _internal material organism_, which dies with the body. Because --Our only ground for this presumption is our relation to other systems of matter. But we see these are not necessary to us.