THREE:The Session of 1753 was distinguished by two remarkable Acts of Parliament. The one was for the naturalisation of the Jews, the other for the prevention of clandestine marriages. The Jew Bill was introduced into the Lords, and passed it with singular ease, scarcely exciting an objection from the whole bench of bishops; Lord Lyttelton declaring that "he who hated another man for not being a Christian was not a Christian himself." But in the Commons it raised a fierce debate. On the 7th of May, on the second reading, it was assailed by loud assertions that to admit the Jews to such privileges was to dishonour the Christian faith; that it would deluge the kingdom with usurers, brokers, and beggars; that the Jews would buy up the advowsons, and thus destroy the Church; that it was flying directly in the face of God and of Prophecy, which had declared the Jews should be scattered over the face of the earth, without any country or fixed abode. Pelham ridiculed the fears about the Church, showing that, by their own rigid tenets, the Jews could neither enter our Church nor marry our women, and could therefore never touch our religion, nor amalgamate with us as a people; that as to civil offices, unless they took the Sacrament, they could not be even excisemen or custom-house officers. The Bill passed by a majority of ninety-five to sixteen; but the storm was only wafted from the Parliament to the public. Out-of-doors the members of Parliament, and especially the bishops, were pursued with the fiercest rancour and insult. Members of the Commons were threatened by their constituents with the loss of their seats for voting in favour of this Bill; and one of them, Mr. Sydenham, of Exeter, defended himself by declaring that he was no Jew, but travelled on the Sabbath like a Christian. The populace pursued the members and the bishops in the streets, crying, "No Jews! No Jews! No wooden shoes!" In short, such was the popular fury, that the Duke of Newcastle was glad to bring in a Bill for the repeal of his Act of Naturalisation on the very first day of the next Session, which passed rapidly through both Houses.How much originality there may be in the anti-materialistic arguments of Plotinus we cannot tell. He certainly marks a great advance on Plato and Aristotle, approximating, in this respect, much more closely than they do to the modern standpoint. The indivisibility and permanence of mind had, no doubt, been strongly insisted on by those teachers, in contrast with the extended and fluctuating nature of body. But they did not, like him, deduce these characteristics from a direct analysis of consciousness as such. Plato inferred the simplicity and self-identity of mind from the simplicity and self-identity of the ideas which it contemplates. Aristotle went a step further, or perhaps only expressed the same meaning more clearly, when he associated immateriality with the identity of subject and object in thought.444 Moreover, both Plato and Aristotle seem to have rested the whole spiritualistic case on objective rather than on subjective considerations; although, as we have seen, the subjective interest was what dominated all the while in their thoughts. Starting with the analogy of a living body, Plato argues, both in the Phaedrus and in the Laws, that soul must everywhere be the first cause of motion, and therefore must exist prior to body.445 The elaborate scientific analysis of Aristotles Physics leads up to a similar conclusion; and the ontological analysis of the Metaphysics starts with the distinction between Form and Matter in bodies, to end with the question of their relative priority, and of the objective machinery by which they are united. Plotinus, too, sometimes refers to mind as the source300 of physical order; but this is rather in deference to his authorities than because the necessity of such an explanation seemed to him, as it did to them, the deepest ground of a spiritualistic philosophy. On the other hand, his psychological arguments for the immateriality of the soul are drawn from a wider area of experience than theirs, feeling being taken into account no less than thought; instead of restricting himself to one particular kind of cognition for evidence of spiritual power, he looks for it in every manifestation of living personality.
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