One who neither fears the last day nor prays for it
[This is from my letter to John Adams, March 14, 1820. Mr. Adams and I reconciled our differences after our public service was over. We can reminisce about our setbacks and triumphs, but always steady were our sincere efforts toward the common good. Even during our disagreements, we both thought of each other as principled men. I find as I grow older, that I love those most whom I loved first. So I ruminate about death, and truth be told, because I continue to ruminate I forgo death. But my death is the next turn, and I shall meet it with good will; for after my friends are all gone before me, and my faculties leaving me, too, one by one, why wish to linger in mere vegetation, as a solitary trunk in a desolate field, from which all its former companions have disappeared.]
Why may not the mode of action called thought, have been given to a material organ of peculiar structure? As that of magnetism is to the Needle, or of elasticity to the spring by a particular manipulation of the steel. They observe that on ignition of the needle or spring, their magnetism and elasticity cease. So on dissolution of the material organ by death its action of thought may cease also. And that nobody supposes that the magnetism or elasticity retire to hold a substantive and distinct existence. These were qualities only of particular conformations of matter: change the conformation, and its qualities change also.
Mr. Locke, you know, and other materialists have charged with blasphemy the Spiritualists who have denied to the Creator the power of endowing certain forms of matter with the faculty of thought. These however are speculations and subtleties in, which, for my own part, I have little indulged myself. When I meet with a proposition beyond finite comprehension, I abandon it as I do a weight which human strength cannot lift: and I think ignorance, in these cases, is truly the softest pillow on which I can lay my head. Were it necessary however to form an opinion, I confess I should, with Mr. Locke, prefer swallowing one incomprehensibility rather than two. It requires one effort only to admit the single incomprehensibility of matter endowed with thought; and two to believe, 1st that of an existence called Spirit, of which we have neither evidence nor idea, and then 2ndly how that spirit which has neither extension nor solidity, can put material organs into motion. These are things which you and I may perhaps know ere long.
We have so lived as to fear neither horn of the dilemma. We have, willingly, done injury to no man; and have done for our country the good which has fallen in our way, so far as commensurate with the faculties given us. That we have not done more than we could cannot be imputed to us as a crime before any tribunal. I look therefore to that crisis, as I am sure you also do, as one ‘qui summum nec metuit diem nec optat.’ [who neither fears the last day nor prays for it]