When we sought to carry our researches further, we were forced to recognize beings resembling matter in some things, but without the other, attributes with which matter is gifted. The elementary fire, for instance, acts upon our senses like other bodies; but it does not, like them, tend to a centre; on the contrary, it escapes from the centre in straight lines on every side. It does not seem to obey the laws of attraction, of gravitation, like other bodies. There are mysteries in optics, for which it would be hard to account, without venturing to suppose that the rays of light penetrate one another. There is certainly something in light which distinguishes it from known matter. Light seems to be a middle being between bodies and other kinds of beings of which we are ignorant! It is very likely that these other kinds are themselves a medium leading to other creatures, and that there is a chain of substances extending to infinity. "Usque adeo quod tangit idem est, tamen ultima distant!"
This idea seems to us to be worthy of the greatness of God, if anything is worthy of it. Among these substances He has doubtless had power to choose one which He has lodged in our bodies, and which we call the human soul; and the sacred books which we have read inform us that this soul is immortal. Reason is in accordance with revelation; for how should any substance perish? Every mode is destroyed; the substance remains. We cannot conceive the creation of a substance; we cannot conceive its annihilation; but we dare not affirm that the absolute master of all beings cannot also give feelings and perceptions to the being which we call matter. You are quite sure that the essence of your soul is to think; but we are not so sure of this; for when we examine a fœtus, we can hardly believe that its soul had many ideas in its head; and we very much doubt whether, in a sound and deep sleep, or in a complete lethargy, any one ever meditated. Thus it appears to us that thought may very well be, not the essence of the thinking being, but a present made by the Creator to beings which we call thinking; from all which we suspect that, if He would, He could make this present to an atom; and could preserve this atom and His present forever, or destroy it at His pleasure. The difficulty consists not so much in divining how matter could think, as in divining how any substance whatever does think. You have ideas only because God has been pleased to give them to you; why would you prevent Him from giving them to other species? Can you really be so fearless as to dare to believe that your soul is precisely of the same kind as the substances which approach nearest to the Divinity? There is great probability that they are of an order very superior, and that consequently God has vouchsafed to give them a way of thinking infinitely finer, just as He has given a very limited measure of ideas to the animals which are of an order inferior to you. I know not how I live, nor how I give life; yet you would have me know how I have ideas. The soul is a timepiece which God has given us to manage; but He has not told us of what the spring of this timepiece is composed.
Is there anything in all this from which it can be inferred that our souls are mortal? Once more let us repeat it—we think as you do of the immortality announced to us by faith; but we believe that we are too ignorant to affirm that God has not the power of granting thought to whatever being He pleases. You bound the power of the Creator, which is boundless; and we extend it as far as His existence extends. Forgive us for believing Him to be omnipotent, as we forgive you for restraining His power. You doubtless know all that He can do, and we know nothing of it. Let us live as brethren; let us adore our common Father in peace—you with your knowing and daring souls, we with our ignorant and timid souls. We have a day to live; let us pass it calmly, without quarrelling about difficulties that will be cleared up in the immortal life which will begin to-morrow.
The brutal man, having nothing good to say in reply, talked a long while, and was very angry. Our poor philosophers employed themselves for some weeks in reading history; and after reading well, they spoke as follows to this barbarian, who was so unworthy to have an immortal soul:
My friend, we have read that in all antiquity things went on as well as they do in our own times—that there were even greater virtues, and that philosophers were not persecuted for the opinions which they held; why, then, should you seek to injure us for opinions which we do not hold? We read that all the ancients believed matter to be eternal. They who saw that it was created left the others at rest. Pythagoras had been a cock, his relations had been swine; but no one found fault with this; his sect was cherished and revered by all, except the cooks and those who had beans to sell.
The Stoics acknowledged a god, nearly the same as the god afterwards so rashly admitted by the Spinozists; yet Stoicism was a sect the most fruitful in heroic virtues, and the most accredited.
The Epicureans made their god like our canons, whose indolent corpulence upholds their divinity, and who take their nectar and ambrosia in quiet, without meddling with anything. These Epicureans boldly taught the materiality and the mortality of the soul; but they were not the less respected; they were admitted into all offices; and their crooked atoms never did the world any harm.
The Platonists, like the Gymnosophists, did not do us the honor to think that God had condescended to form us Himself. According to them, He left this task to His officers—to genii, who in the course of their work made many blunders. The god of the Platonists was an excellent workman, who employed here below very indifferent assistants; but men did not the less reverence the school of Plato.
In short, among the Greeks and the Romans, so many sects as there were, so many ways of thinking about God and the soul, the past and the future, none of these sects were persecutors. They were all mistaken—and we are very sorry for it; but they were all peaceful—and this confounds us, this condemns us, this shows us that most of the reasoners of the present day are monsters, and that those of antiquity were men. They sang publicly on the Roman stage: "Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil."—"Naught after death, and death is nothing."
These opinions made men neither better nor worse; all was governed, all went on as usual; and Titus, Trajan, and Aurelius governed the earth like beneficent deities.