In proportion as the human being develops himself, as he extends the circle of his observations upon the world and upon himself, special facts confirm the general truth of which I have just given a summary, and prove the essential distinction of the soul and the body by the essential diversity of the properties of each. Thus the body, in its organization and in its life, is subject to fixed and pre-established laws, over which man's will has no control or power; whereas the soul is essentially free, and capable of determining itself and of acting from motives foreign to the laws which govern the body. Fatality is the condition of the human being in corporeal existence; liberty is his privilege in his moral life. I say in his moral life, and the expression reveals between the soul and the body another essential and ineffaceable difference. The body is strange to every idea of morality, abandoned to the exigencies of its necessities and its appetites; it has no aspiration, no tendency but to satisfy them. The soul has needs and desires of quite a different kind, and they are often contrary to those of the body; and however often the soul may yield to the tendencies of the body, not seldom also does it withstand and surmount them; and this both in persons of obscure condition, and in those who stand in the public gaze of men. When the body is dominant in man, man tends toward Materialism; when he listens to the aspirations of soul it is, on the contrary, to Spiritualism that his nature rises. The complexity of his nature manifests itself in the development of his life as in the first instinct of his consciousness; at whatever epoch he is the subject either of his own or of our observation he cannot be called exclusively body, matter, without facts giving his assertion at each step the flattest contradiction.

Whence comes this essential and primordial fact—the fact of the complexity and yet unity of the human being? How is this union of soul and body accomplished? their mutual influences exercised, how? Here, according to religion, is the mystery; here, for philosophy, lies the problem.

Materialism is but an hypothesis adopted for the explanation of this great fact, and the hypothesis consists not in the solution of the problem, but in its suppression by the denial of the fact itself. What need, they say, to seek to explain how the union of soul and body is accomplished? Neither this complexity of the human being nor his unity in that complexity is a reality. Man is only a product and an ephemeral form of matter!

I shall not refuse myself the pleasure of refuting this hypothesis by the mouth of a contemporary philosopher, whom I shall soon myself have to combat. "Nothing," says M. Vacherot, "proves that the hypothesis of Materialism is true; on the contrary, positive facts evidence its falsity. … If the soul be only the result of the play of the organs, how is it that the soul is able to resist the impressions and the appetites of the body, to direct, concentrate, and govern its faculties? If the will be but the instinct in a different form, how explain its empire over the instinct? This fact is an irresistible argument; it is the rock upon which Materialism has always wrecked itself, and upon which it will continue to do so. … The wisdom of the ancients pronounced its decree more than two thousand years ago. 'Do we not see,' says Socrates, according to Plato, 'that the soul governs all the elements of which it is pretended that it is composed? that the soul resists them throughout the whole course of life, and subdues them in every way, repressing some harshly and painfully, as where the gymnastic or the medical method is resorted to; repressing others more gently, rebuking these, warning those, speaking to desires, to anger, to fear, as to things of a nature alien to its own? So Homer, in the "Odyssey," represents Ulysses as

"Smiting his breast, and chiding thus his heart:
Bear this, O heart, thou that hast worse endured." [Footnote 74]

[Footnote 74:
Στῆθος δὲ πληξὰς, κραδίην ἠνίπαπε μύθῳ,
Τέτλαθι δὲ, κραδίη. καὶ κύντερον ἄλλο ποτ᾿ ἔτλης.
Odyssey, Book xx, v. 17.]

"'Do you think,' adds Socrates, 'that Homer would have so expressed himself had, in his conception, the soul been a mere harmony, necessarily governed by the passions of the body? Did he not rather think that the soul ought to govern and master those passions, and that the soul is something far more divine than any harmony?'" [Footnote 75]

[Footnote 75: La Métaphysique et la science, by M. Vacherot, vol. i, p. 174; Plato, Phæd, xliii.]