 The Catholic Church at the Fifth Lateran Council in 1553 had declared the soul immaterial and therefore immortal. Philosophers were invited to produce proof of the soul’s immateriality. There was a tradition going back to Plato that the soul is a unity without parts. Presumably having no parts it cannot fall apart. The kind of substance dualism that one finds in Descartes, for example, was intended to distinguish humans from animals. In England, the new science was both regarded suspiciously by some religious conservatives while its proponents saw it as an ally of religion. In his will, Robert Boyle provided for a series of lectures that would use the new science to defend religious orthodoxy. These Boyle lectures were aimed at defending religion against atheists, deists, Epicurean philosophers, as well as Hobbes, Spinoza, and their followers. One of Richard Bently’s sermons in 1692 was titled Matter and Motion Cannot Think. Bently claimed that even God’s omnipotence could not produce a cognitive body (Thompson 2008: 61). This claim that there was a limit to God’s omnipotence was shocking to some. Samuel Clarke gave the Boyle lecture two years in a row, 1704 and 1705, and these were published together as A Discourse Concerning the Being and Attributes of God and the Obligations of Natural Religion and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revelation. It is quite likely that Collins had read this work and so when he opposed Clarke, he surely knew who and what philosophical positions he was dealing with.