_Secondly_, From our being so nearly related to and interested in certain systems of matter, (suppose our flesh and bones,) and afterwards ceasing to be at all related to them, the living agents, ourselves, remaining all this while undestroyed notwithstanding such alienation; and consequently these systems of matter not being ourselves, it follows further that we have no ground to conclude any other (suppose _internal_) _systems_ of matter, to be the living agents ourselves; because we can have no ground to conclude this, but from our relation to and interest in such other systems of matter: and therefore we can have no reason to conclude what befalls those systems of matter at death, to be the destruction of the living agents. We have already several times over, lost a great part or perhaps the whole of our body, according to certain common established laws of nature, yet we remain the same living agents. When we shall lose as great a part, or the whole, by another common established law of nature, death, why may we not also remain the same? That the alienation has been gradual in one case, and in the other will be more at once, does not prove any thing to the contrary. We have passed undestroyed through those many and great revolutions of matter, so peculiarly appropriated to us ourselves; why should we imagine death will be so fatal to us? Nor can it be objected, that what is thus alienated or lost, is no part of our original solid body, but only adventitious matter. Because we may lose entire limbs, which must have contained many solid parts and vessels of the original body; or if this be not admitted, we have no proof, that any of these solid parts are dissolved or alienated by death. Though we are very nearly related to that extraneous or adventitious matter, whilst it continues united to and distending the several parts of our solid body, yet after all, the relation a person bears to those parts of his body, to which he is most nearly related, amounts but to this, that the living agent, and those parts of the body, mutually affect each other.[35] The same thing, the same thing in kind though not in degree, may be said of _all foreign_ matter, which gives us ideas, and over which we have any power. From these observations the whole ground of the imagination is removed, that the dissolution of any matter, is the destruction of a living agent, from the interest he once had in such matter.