"Pardon, Most Exalted of Osiris, am I to look upon your question as a command?"
"Yes."
"My belief, of which I am not master, I have kept unto myself and if put into words is but spoken ignorance. To become an expert embalmer I experimented on the bodies of many animals not sacred to our gods and discovered that they were as easily preserved as the bodies of men. This forced the conclusion that if man was specially favored of the gods, it was not in bodily composition; therefore, it would seem, the body is not sacred and is unworthy of the great expenditure of time and wealth which we give it as priests of Osiris. The body after death is as the husk of a nut from which the kernel has been extracted and our people would be better off were it burned as the refuse of earth. We of Osiris, who say the body must not perish, know better than anyone else that it does perish. If there is a difference between the body of a man and an animal's, that distinction departs at death; therefore, the distinction is life or a part of life and the questions presented are: What is life? What is there in man besides matter? When an animate being dies, the body, the mortal, is left; life departs. I do not see it go; I know not where it goes. If it is a man who dies, we say the soul has left the body, because we are men; if it is an animal, we say life has left the body. What is the difference between life and the soul? All I know is that I have a body which perishes and that, distinct from the body, I have the power to think, which power troubles me more than my body, and which power I may lose when life leaves the body. My power to think is so limited that its indulgence is like pulling one's self up to the stars by one's toes. I know I cannot answer the following questions:
"'What is truth?' Though I once heard a child of five answer that truth is the right.
"'What is life?' Though I am told it is the principle of animate corporeal existence.
"'What is death?' This I do not know, since I cannot define life, as death is the cessation of life or the beginning of a higher life.
"Since animals think, some more than some men (the feeble-minded), do they have souls? If so, where do their souls go?
"Is the source of new life in the soul?
"It seems we believe souls have existed from the beginning, since they never die but are transmigrated. Is immortality a divine gift or an inherent property of the soul?
"And of you, Chief Priest of Osiris, head of our order, I would respectfully ask: