If I wish to prove that the soul is a real being, someone stops me by telling me that it is a faculty.If I assert that it is a faculty, and that I have the faculty of thinking, I am told that I am mistaken; that God, the eternal master of all nature, does everything in me, and directs all my actions and all my thoughts; that if I produced my thoughts, I should know the thought I will have in a minute; that I never know it; that Iam only an automaton with sensations and ideas, necessarily dependent, and in the hands of the Supreme Being, infinitely more compliant to Him than clay is to the potter.
I confess my ignorance, therefore; I avow that four thousand tomes of metaphysics will not teach us what our soul is.
An orthodox philosopher said to a heterodox philosopher --" How have you been able to come to the point of imagining that the soul is mortal by nature, and eternal only by the pure wish of God ? "" By my own experience," said the other." How! are you dead? "" Yes, very often.I suffered from epilepsy in my youth, and I assure you that I was completely dead for several hours.No sensation, no remembrance even of the moment that I fell ill.The same thing happens to me now nearly every night.I never feel the precise moment that I go to sleep; my sleep is absolutely dreamless.I cannot imagine by conjecture how long I have slept.I am dead regularly six hours out of the twenty-four.That is a quarter of my life."The orthodox then asserted that he always thought during his sleep without knowing anything about it.The heterodox answered him-" I believe through revelation that I shall always think in the other life; but I assure you I think rarely in this one."The orthodox was not mistaken in asserting the immortality of the soul, for faith and reason demonstrate this truth; but he might be mistaken in asserting that a sleeping man always thinks.
Locke admitted frankly that he did not always think while he was asleep:
another philosopher has said " Thought is characteristic of man; but it is not his essence."Let us leave to each man the liberty and consolation of seeking himself, and of losing himself in his ideas.
It is good, however, to know, that in 1730 a philosopher suffered a severe enough persecution for having confessed, with Locke, that his understanding was not exercised at every moment of the day and night, just as he did not use his arms and his legs at all moments.Not only did court ignorance persecute him, but the malignant influence of a few so-called men of letters was let loose against him.What in England had produced merely a few philosophical disputes, produced in France the most cowardly atrocities; a Frenchman suffered by Locke.
There have always been in the mud of our literature more than one of these miscreants who have sold their pens, and intrigued against their benefactors even.This remark is rather foreign to the article SOUL; but should one miss an opportunity of dismaying those who make themselves unworthy of the name of men of letters, who prostitute the little mind and conscience they have to a vile self-interest, to a fantastic policy, who betray their friends to flatter fools, who in secret powder the hemlock which the powerful and malicious ignoramus wants to make useful citizens drink?
In short, while we worship God with all our soul, let us confess always our profound ignorance of this soul, of this faculty of feeling and thinking which we possess from His infinite goodness.Let us avow that our feeble reasonings can take nothing away from, or add anything to revelation and faith.Let us conclude in fine that we should use this intelligence, the nature of which is unknown, for perfecting the sciences which are the object of the " Encyclopedia "; just as watchmakers use springs in their watches, without knowing what a spring is.
