It is obvious that this general observation may be carried further. There appears to be so little connection between our bodily powers of sensation, and our present powers of reflection, that there is no reason to conclude, that death, which destroys the former, does so much as _suspend the exercise_ of the latter, or interrupt our _continuing_ to exist in the like state of reflection which we do now.[40] For suspension of reason, memory, and the affections which they excite, is no part of the idea of death, nor implied in our notion of it. Our daily experiencing these powers to be exercised, without any assistance, that we know of, from those bodies which will be dissolved by death; and our finding often, that the exercise of them is so lively to the last; afford a sensible apprehension, that death may not perhaps be so much as a discontinuance of the exercise of these powers, nor of the enjoyments and sufferings which it implies.[41] So that our posthumous life, whatever there may be in it additional to our present, may yet not be beginning entirely anew; but going on. Death may, in some sort and in some respects, answer to our birth; which is not a suspension of the faculties which we had before it, or a _total_ change of the state of life in which we existed when in the womb; but a continuation of both, with such and such great alterations. Nay, for aught we know of ourselves, of our present life and of death, death may immediately, in the natural course of things, put us into a higher and more enlarged state of life, as our birth does;[42] a state in which our capacities; and sphere of perception and of action, may be much greater than at present. For as our relation to our external organs of sense, renders us capable of existing in our present state of sensation; so it may be the only natural hinderance to our existing, immediately, and of course; in a _higher_ state of reflection. The truth is, reason does not at all show us, in what state death naturally leaves us. But were we sure, that it would suspend all our perceptive and active powers; yet the suspension of a power and the destruction of it, are effects so totally different in kind, as we experience from sleep and a swoon, that we cannot in any wise argue from one to the other; or conclude even to the lowest degree of probability, that the same kind of force which is sufficient to suspend our faculties, though it be increased ever so much, will be sufficient to destroy them.[43]