What are we to think of a child with two heads, which is otherwise well formed? Some say that it has two souls, because it is furnished with two pineal glands, with two callous substances, with two "sensoria communia." Others answer that there cannot be two souls, with but one breast and one navel.
In short, so many questions have been asked about this poor human soul, that if it were necessary to put an end to them all, such an examination of its own person would cause it the most insupportable annoyance. The same would happen to it as happened to Cardinal Polignac at a conclave: his steward, tired of having never been able to make him pass his accounts, took a journey to Rome, and went to the small window of his cell, laden with an immense bundle of papers; he read for nearly two hours; at last, finding that no answer was made, he thrust forward his head: the cardinal had been gone almost two hours. Our souls will be gone before their stewards have finished their statements; but let us be just before God—ignorant as both we and our stewards are.
See what is said on the soul in the "Letters of Memmius."
SECTION VIII.
Different Opinions Criticised—Apology for Locke.
I must acknowledge, that when I examined the infallible Aristotle, the evangelical doctor, and the divine Plato, I took all these epithets for nicknames. In all the philosophers who have spoken of the human soul, I have found only blind men, full of babble and temerity, striving to persuade themselves that they have an eagle eye; and others, curious and foolish, believing them on their word, and imagining that they see something too.
John Locke.
I shall not feign to rank Descartes and Malebranche with these teachers of error. The former assures us that the soul of man is a substance, whose essence is to think, which is always thinking, and which, in the mother's womb, is occupied with fine metaphysical ideas and general axioms, which it afterwards forgets.