upon which they never reflect. Nature has been too compassionate to make metaphysicians of them; this Nature is always and everywhere the same. She makes the original societies of men feel that there is something superior to man when they experience extraordinary calamities. She also makes them perceive that there is in man something which acts and thinks. They do not distinguish this faculty from that of life; and the word soul always signifies life with the ancients, whether Syrians, Chaldeans, Egyptians, Greeks, or those who came at last to establish themselves in a part of Phoenicia.
"By what degrees could the step be gained of imagining, in our physical being, another being which is metaphysical? Certainly, men solely occupied with their wants could not know enough to fancy themselves philosophers. In course of time societies were formed, a little civilised, in which a small number might have sufficient leisure to reflect. It might happen that a man who deeply felt the death of his father, brother, or wife, would see in a dream the person whom he lamented. Two or three dreams of this kind would disquiet a whole tribe. Here is a dead person appearing to the living, yet the decaying body is still in its place. It is, then, something which was in the departed, and which walks abroad; it is his soul, his shade, an airy figure of himself. Such is the natural reasoning of ignorance which begins to reason. This opinion is that of all the earliest times that we know of, and must therefore have been the opinion of those that we know not of.
"The idea of a purely immaterial being could not present itself to minds which knew only of matter. Smiths, carpenters, masons, and labourers, were necessary before a man could exist who would have leisure to meditate. All the arts of handicraft have doubtless, by many ages, preceded metaphysics.
"Let us remark, in passing, that in the middle age of Greece, in the time of Homer, the soul was nothing but an aerial image of the body. Ulysses sees, in hell, shades, spirits. Could he possibly see pure spirits?
