IV

OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE SOUL

WHAT NOTION had the first people of the soul? The fame which all our boors have, before they have understood their catechism, or even after they understood it. They only acquire confused ideas, which they never reflect upon. Nature has been too kind to them to make them metaphysicians: that nature is perpetual, and every where alike. She made the first societies sensible that there was a being superior to man, when they were afflicted with uncommon misfortunes. She in the same manner taught them, that there is something in man which acts and thinks. They did not distinguish this faculty from that of life.

By what degrees can one arrive at imagining, in our physical being, another metaphysical being? Men, entirely occupied with their wants, were certainly not philosophers.

In the course of time societies somewhat polished were formed, in which a small number of men were at leisure to think. It must have happened that a man sensibly affected with the death of his father, his brother, or his wife, saw the person whose loss he regretted in his dream: two or three dreams of this sort must have caused uneasiness throughout a whole colony. Behold a dead corpse appearing to the living, and yet the deceased, remaining in the same place, with the worms gnawing him! This then, that wanders in the air, is something that was in him. It is his soul, his shade, his manes; it is a superficial figure of himself. Such is the natural reasoning of ignorance, which begins to reason. This is the opinion of all the primitive known times, and must consequently have been that of those unknown. The idea of a being purely immaterial could not have presented itself to the imagination of those who were acquainted with nothing but matter. Smiths, carpenters, masons, laborers, were necessary, before a man was found who had leisure to meditate. All manual arts, doubtless, preceded metaphysics for many ages.

We should remark, by the bye, that in the middle age of Greece, in the time of Homer, the soul was nothing more than an aerial image of the body. Ulysses saw shades and manes in hell; could he see spirits?

We shall, in the sequel, consider how the Greeks borrowed from the Egyptians the idea of hell and the apotheosis of the dead; how they believed, as well as other people, in a second life, without suspecting the spirituality of the soul: on the contrary, they could not imagine that an incorporeal being could be susceptible of either good or evil: and I do not know whether Plato was not the first who spoke of a being purely spiritual. This, perhaps, is one of the greatest efforts of human knowledge. We are not, at this time of day, such novices upon that subject, and yet we consider the world as still unformed and scarcely fashioned.