now what
is the nature of this substance, one of the operations of which is to
think. You are like a blind man who, feeling the heat of the sun and
being informed that it is caused by the heat of the sun, thinks he has a
clear and distinct idea of this luminary; because if he were asked what
the sun was, he could reply that it is a thing which heats, etc."

The same Gassendi, in his "Epicurean Philosophy," repeats several times
that there is no mathematical evidence of the pure spirituality of the
soul.

Descartes, in one of his letters to the Palatine Princess Elisabeth,
says to her--"I confess that by the natural reason alone we can make
many conjectures on the soul, and have gratifying hopes, but no
certainty." And in that sentence Descartes combats in his letters what
he puts forward in his works; a too ordinary contradiction.

In fine we have seen that all the Fathers of the first centuries of the
Church, while believing the soul immortal, believed it at the same time
material; they thought that it is as easy for God to conserve as to
create. They said--"God made the soul thinking, He will preserve it
thinking."

Malebranche has proved very well that we have no idea by ourselves, and
that objects are incapable of giving us ideas: from that he concludes
that we see everything in God. That is at the bottom the same thing as
making God the author of all our ideas; for with what should we see in
Him, if we had not instruments for seeing? and these instruments, it is
He alone who holds them and guides them. This system is a labyrinth, one
lane of which would lead you to Spinozism, another to Stoicism, another
to chaos.

When one has had a good argument about spirit and matter, one always
finishes by not understanding each other. No philosopher has been able
with his own strength to lift this veil stretched by nature over all the
first principles of things. Men argue, nature acts.

SECTION III

OF THE SOUL OF ANIMALS, AND OF SOME EMPTY IDEAS

Before the strange system which supposes animals to be pure machines
without any sensation, men had never thought that the beasts possessed
an immaterial soul; and nobody had pushed recklessness to the point of
saying that an oyster has a spiritual soul. Everyone concurred peaceably
in agreeing that the beasts had received from God feeling, memory,
ideas, and no pure spirit. Nobody had abused the gift of reason to the
point of saying that nature had given the beasts all