"
I do not know how one pictures an immaterial substance. To picture
something is to make an image of it; and up till now nobody has been
able to paint the spirit. For the word "picture", I want the author to
understand "I conceive"; speaking for myself, I confess I do not
conceive it. I confess still less that a spiritual soul may be
annihilated, because I do not conceive either creation or non-existence;
because I have never been present at God's council; because I know
nothing at all about the principle of things.
If I wish to prove that the soul is a real being, someone stops me by
telling me that it is a faculty. If I assert that it is a faculty, and
that I have the faculty of thinking, I am told that I am mistaken; that
God, the eternal master of all nature, does everything in me, and
directs all my actions and all my thoughts; that if I produced my
thoughts, I should know the thought I will have in a minute; that I
never know it; that I am only an automaton with sensations and ideas,
necessarily dependent, and in the hands of the Supreme Being, infinitely
more compliant to Him than clay is to the potter.
I confess my ignorance, therefore; I avow that four thousand tomes of
metaphysics will not teach us what our soul is.
An orthodox philosopher said to a heterodox philosopher--"How have you
been able to come to the point of imagining that the soul is mortal by
nature, and eternal only by the pure wish of God?"
"By my own experience," said the other.
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