 The correspondence between Clarke and Collins took its rise from a book published in 1706 by Henry Dodwell. Dodwell claimed on the basis of various passages from the Bible that without divine intervention the soul would perish at death. Clarke wrote a public refutation of Dodwell’s book. Besides rejecting Dodwell’s interpretation of scripture, Clarke gave a single argument to show that consciousness could not be a property of a material system since the most plausible reason, apart from appeals to scripture, for the soul being naturally mortal is that it is material. Clarke claims 