A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 09

by Voltaire

Now tell me honestly, is this power of feeling and thinking the same as that which causes you to digest and to walk? You own that it is not; for in vain might your understanding say to your stomach—Digest; it will not, if it be sick. In vain might your immaterial being order your feet to walk; they will not stir, if they have the gout.

The Greeks clearly perceived that thought has frequently nothing to do with the play of our organs; they admitted the existence of an animal soul for these organs, and for the thoughts a soul finer, more subtile—a nous.

But we find that this soul of thought has, on a thousand occasions, the ascendency over the animal soul. The thinking soul commands the hands to take, and they obey. It does not tell the heart to beat, the blood to flow, the chyle to form; all this is done without it. Here then are two souls much involved, and neither of them having the mastery.

Now, this first animal soul certainly does not exist; it is nothing more than the movement of our organs. Take heed, O man! lest thou have no more proofs but thy weak reason that the other soul exists. Thou canst not know it but by faith; thou art born, thou eatest, thou thinkest, thou wakest, thou sleepest, without knowing how. God has given thee the faculty of thinking, as He has given thee all the rest; and if He had not come at the time appointed by His providence, to teach thee that thou hast an immaterial and an immortal soul, thou wouldst have no proof whatever of it.

Let us examine the fine systems on the soul, which thy philosophy has fabricated.

One says that the soul of man is part of the substance of God Himself; another that it is part of the great whole; a third that it is created from all eternity; a fourth that it is made, and not created. Others assure us that God makes souls according as they are wanted, and that they arrive at the moment of copulation. They are lodged in the seminal animalcules, cries one. No, says another, they take up their abode in the Fallopian tubes. A third comes and says: You are all wrong; the soul waits for six weeks, until the fœtus is formed, and then it takes possession of the pineal gland; but if it finds a false conception, it returns and waits for a better opportunity. The last opinion is that its dwelling is in the callous body; this is the post assigned to it by La Peyronie. A man should be first surgeon to the king of France to dispose in this way of the lodging of the soul. Yet the callous body was not so successful in the world as the surgeon was.

St. Thomas in his question 75 and following, says that the soul is a form subsisting per se, that it is all in all, that its essence differs from its power; that there are three vegetative souls, viz., the nutritive, the argumentative, and the generative; that the memory of spiritual things is spiritual, and the memory of corporeal things is corporeal; that the rational soul is a form "immaterial as to its operations, and material as to its being." St. Thomas wrote two thousand pages, of like force and clearness; and he is the angel of the schools.

Nor have there been fewer systems contrived on the way in which this soul will feel, when it shall have laid aside the body with which it felt; how it will hear without ears, smell without a nose, and touch without hands; what body it will afterwards resume, whether that which it had at two years old, or at eighty; how the I—the identity of the same person will subsist; how the soul of a man become imbecile at the age of fifteen, and dying imbecile at the age of seventy, will resume the thread of the ideas which he had at the age of puberty; by what contrivance a soul, the leg of whose body shall be cut off in Europe, and one of its arms lost in America, will recover this leg and arm, which, having been transformed into vegetables, will have passed into the blood of some other animal. We should never finish, if we were to seek to give an account of all the extravagances which this poor human soul has imagined about itself.

It is very singular that, in the laws of God's people, not a word is said of the spirituality and immortality of the soul; nothing in the Decalogue, nothing in Leviticus, or in Deuteronomy.

It is quite certain, it is indubitable, that Moses nowhere proposes to the Jews pains and rewards in another life; that he never mentions to them the immortality of their souls; that he never gives them hopes of heaven, nor threatens them with hell; all is temporal.