Ecclesiastes 3:21 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

Who knoweth the spirit of man, &c.— Who knoweth the breath of the sons of man, whether it ascendeth upward; and the breath of a brute, whether it descendeth downward to the earth? We have, from Ecclesiastes 3:18 to the present, the 2nd corollary. The being of a God, his attributes, and supreme sway of his providence, are clearly evinced from the very complication of human affairs, which none but an infinite understanding could ever prevent from falling into an irretrievable confusion. But the higher we rise in our conceptions of that great Being, the lower we must descend in the notions that we have of our own worth and dignity; for our so-much-boasted-of reason, when left to itself, is incapable of ascertaining a difference in men's favour with respect to a future dispensation between themselves, and what they call the brutish part of the creation. "So dark and intricate are the ways of Providence in this world!"—By this interpretation the passage is sufficiently vindicated from any suspicion of the Sadducean heresy. The only point insisted on, and for which no philosopher who is free from prejudice will think it worth his while to quarrel with Solomon, is, that the difference between the fate of brutes and men is not to be known with certainty by the mere light of reason, unassisted by revelation. Now this differs from the heresy above-mentioned as much as the humble confession of one who owns himself to be in the dark, does from the assuming asseveration of another who talks of nothing but full evidence and certainty. See the text fully justified in this light in Desvoeux's Dissertation on the Ecclesiastes, p. 53, 54. We may just observe, that Tremellius renders the beginning of the 18th verse, I said in my heart, according to human reason, &c. See Peters on Job, p. 323.