friends you must allow me to know best.'_

If people in general had one tenth the good sense of this _impious_
Count, the fooleries of Spiritualism would at once give place to the
philosophy of Materialism, and none would waste time in talking or
writing about non-entities. All would know that what theologians call
sometimes spirit, sometimes soul, and sometimes mind, is an imaginary
existence. All would know that the terms _immaterial something_ do in
very truth mean _nothing_. Count de Caylus died as became a man
convinced that soul is not an entity, and that upon the dissolution of
our 'earthly tabernacle', the particles composing it cease to perform
vital functions, and return to the shoreless ocean of Eternal Being.
Pietists may be shocked by such _nonchalance_ in the face of their 'grim
monster;' but philosophers will admire an indifference to inevitable
consequences resulting from profoundest love of truth and contempt of
superstition. Count de Caylus was a Materialist, and no Materialist can
consistently feel the least alarm at the approach of what
superstitionists have every reason to consider the 'king of terrors.'
Believers in the reality of immaterial existence cannot be 'proper'
Materialists. Obviously, therefore, no believers in the reality of God
can be _bona fide_ Materialists; for 'God' is a name signifying
something or nothing; in other terms matter or that which is not matter.
If the latter, to Materialists the name is meaningless--sound without
sense. If the former, they at once pronounce it a name too many; because
it expresses nothing that their word MATTER does not express better.

Dr. Young held in horror the Materialist's 'universe of dust.' But there
is nothing either bad or contemptible in dust--man is dust--all will be
dust. A _dusty_ universe, however, _shocked_ the poetic Doctor, whose
writings analogise with--