they have self-esteem. Self-esteem is the instrument of our
conservation; it resembles the instrument of the perpetuity of the
species: it is necessary, it is dear to us, it gives us pleasure, and it
has to be hidden.

_SOUL_

SECTION I

This is a vague, indeterminate term, which expresses an unknown
principle of known effects that we feel in us. The word _soul_
corresponds to the Latin _anima_, to the Greek +pneuma+, to the term of
which all nations have made use to express what they did not understand
any better than we do.

In the proper and literal sense of the Latin and the languages derived
from Latin, it signifies _that which animates_. Thus people have spoken
of the soul of men, of animals, sometimes of plants, to signify their
principal of vegetation and life. In pronouncing this word, people have
never had other than a confused idea, as when it is said in
Genesis--"And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living
soul; and the soul of animals is in the blood; and kill not my soul,
etc."

Thus the soul was generally taken for the origin and the cause of life,
for life itself. That is why all known nations long imagined that
everything died with the body. If one can disentangle anything in the
chaos of ancient histories, it seems that the Egyptians at least were
the first to distinguish between the intelligence and the soul: and the
Greeks learned from them to distinguish their +nous+, their +pneuma+,
their +skia+. The Latins, following their example, distinguish _animus_
and _anima_; and we, finally, have also had our _soul_ and our
_understanding_. But is that which is the principle of our life
different from that which is the principle of our thoughts? is it the
same being? Does that which directs us and gives us sensation and
memory resemble that which is in animals the cause of digestion and the
cause of their sensations and of their memory?

There is the eternal object of the disputes of mankind; I say eternal
object; for not having any first notion from which we can descend in
this examination, we can only rest for ever in a labyrinth of doubt and
feeble conjecture.

We have not the smallest step where we may place a foot in order to
reach the most superficial knowledge of what makes us live and of what
makes us think. How should we have? we should have had to see life and
thought enter a body. Does a fathe