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 (greek word), 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 vous, their (greek word), their (greek word).The Latins, following their example, distinguished 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 father know how he has produced his son? does a mother how she conceived him? Has anyone ever been able to divine how he acts, how he wakes, how he sleeps? Does anyone know how his limbs obey his will? has anyone discovered by what art ideas are marked out in his brain and issue from it at his command? Frail automatons moved by the invisible hand which directs us on this Stage of the world, which of us has been able to detect the wire which guides us ?
We dare question whether the soul is " Spirit " or " matter " ; if it is created before us, if it issues from nonexistence at our birth, if after animating us for one day on earth, it lives after us into eternity.These questions appear sublime; what are they? questions of blind men saying to other blind men-" What is light?"When we want to learn something roughly about a piece of metal, we put it in a crucible in the fire.But have we a crucible in which to put the soul? " The soul is spirit ," says one.But what is spirit? Assuredly no one has any idea; it is a word that is so void of sense that one is obliged to say what spirit is not, not being able to say what it is."The soul is matter," says another.But what is matter? We know merely some of its appearances and some of its properties; and not one of these properties, not one of these appearances, seems to have the slightest connection with thought." Thought is something distinct from matter," say you.But what proof of it have you? Is it because matter is divisible and figurable, and thought is not? But who has told you that the first principles of matter are divisible and figurable? It is very probable that they are not; entire sects of philosophers maintain that the elements of matter have neither form nor extension.With a triumphant air you cry--" Thought is neither wood, nor stone, nor sand, nor metal, therefore thought does not belong to matter." Weak, reckless reasoners! gravitation is neither wood, nor Sand, nor metal, nor stone;movement, vegetation, life are not these things either, and yet life, vegetation, movement, gravitation, are given to matter.To say that God cannot make matter think is to say the most insolently absurd thing that anyone has ever dared utter in the privileged schools of lunacy.We are not certain that God has treated matter like this; we are only certain that He can.
But what matters all that has been said and all that will be said about the soul? what does it matter that it has been called entelechy, quintessence, flame, ether? that it has been thought universal, uncreated, transmigrant, etc.?
In these matters that are inaccessible to the reason, what do these romances of our uncertain imaginations matter? What does it matter that the Fathers of the first four centuries thought the soul corporeal? What does it matter that Tertullian, by a contradiction frequent in him, has decided that it is simultaneously corporeal, formed and simple? We have a thousand witnesses to ignorance, and not one that gives a glimmer of probability.
How then are we so bold as to assert what the soul is? We know certainly that we exist, that we feel, that we think.Do we want to take a step beyond?
we fall into a shadowy abyss; and in this abyss we are Still so madly reckless as to dispute whether this soul, of which we have not the least idea, was made before us or with us, and whether it perishes or is immortal.
The article SOUL, and all the articles of the nature of metaphysics, must start by a sincere submission to the incontrovertible dogmas of the Church.Revelation is worth more, without doubt, than the whole of philosophy.
Systems exercise the mind, but faith illumines and guides it.
