ruptible, and then say if all this is not subtly intended to
support the belief that this incorruptible substantiality of the soul
renders it capable of receiving from God immortality, for it is clear
that as He created it when He implanted it in the body, as St. Thomas
says, so at its separation from the body He could annihilate it. And as
the criticism of these proofs has been undertaken a hundred times, it is
unnecessary to repeat it here.

Is it possible for the unforewarned reason to conclude that our soul is
a substance from the fact that our consciousness of our identity--and
this within very narrow and variable limits--persists through all the
changes of our body? We might as well say of a ship that put out to sea
and lost first one piece of timber, which was replaced by another of the
same shape and dimensions, then lost another, and so on with all her
timbers, and finally returned to port the same ship, with the same
build, the same sea-going qualities, recognizable by everybody as the
same--we might as well say of such a ship that it had a substantial
soul. Is it possible for the unforewarned reason to infer the simplicity
of the soul from the fact that we have to judge and unify our thoughts?
Thought is not one but complex, and for the reason the soul is nothing
but the succession of co-ordinated states of consciousness.

In books of psychology written from the spiritualist point of view, it
is customary to begin the discussion of the existence of the soul as a
simple substance, separable from the body, after this style: There is in
me a principle which thinks, wills, and feels.... Now this implies a
begging of the question. For it is far from being an immediate truth
that there is in me such a principle; the immediate truth is that I
think, will, and feel. And I--the I that thinks, wills, and feels--am
immediately my living body with the states of consciousness which it
sustains. It is my living body that thinks, wills, and feels. How? How
you please.

And they proceed to seek to establish the substantiality of the soul,
hypostatizing the states of consciousness, and they begin by saying that
this substance must be simple--that is, by opposing thought to
extension, after the manner of the Cartesian dualism. And as Balmes was
one of the spiritualist writers who have given the clearest and most
concise form to the argument, I will present it as he expounds it in the
second chapter of his _Curso de Filosofia