the mere labor of many
hands united, and persevering in their purpose, may accomplish with very
little help from mechanics. This may be evinced by the immense
buildings and the low state of the sciences among the original
Peruvians.

The Druids were eminent above all the philosophic lawgivers of antiquity
for their care in impressing the doctrine of the soul's immortality on
the minds of their people, as an operative and leading principle. This
doctrine was inculcated on the scheme of Transmigration, which some
imagine them to have derived from Pythagoras. But it is by no means
necessary to resort to any particular teacher for an opinion which owes
its birth to the weak struggles of unenlightened reason, and to mistakes
natural to the human mind. The idea of the soul's immortality is indeed
ancient, universal, and in a manner inherent in our nature; but it is
not easy for a rude people to conceive any other mode of existence than
one similar to what they had experienced in life, nor any other world as
the scene of such an existence but this we inhabit, beyond the bounds of
which the mind extends itself with great difficulty. Admiration, indeed,
was able to exalt to heaven a few selected heroes: it did not seem
absurd that those who in their mortal state had distinguished themselves
as superior and overruling spirits should after death ascend to that
sphere which influences and governs everything below, or that the proper
abode of beings at once so illustrious and permanent should be in that
part of Nature in which they had always observed the greatest splendor
and the least mutation. But on ordinary occasions it was natural some
should imagine that the dead retired into a remote country, separated
from the living by seas or mountains. It was natural that some should
follow their imagination with a simplicity still purer, and pursue the
souls of men no further than the sepulchres in which their bodies had
been deposited;[8] whilst others of deeper penetration, observing that
bodies worn out by age or destroyed by accident still afforded the
materials for generating new ones, concluded likewise that a soul being
dislodged did not wholly perish, but was destined, by a similar
revolution in Nature, to act again, and to animate some other body. This
last principle gave rise to the doctrine of Transmigration: but we must
not presume of course, that, where it prevailed, it necessarily excluded
the other opinions; for it is not