impulse of matter by means of material organs, which announce to it the
presence of other beings? Is it possible to conceive the union of the
soul with the body; to comprehend how this material body can bind,
enclose, constrain, determine a fugitive being which escapes all our
senses? Is it honest, is it plain dealing, to solve these difficulties,
by saying there is a mystery in them; that they are the effects of a
power, more inconceivable than the human soul; than its mode of acting,
however concealed from our view? When to resolve these problems, man is
obliged to have recourse to miracles or to make the Divinity interfere,
does he not avow his own ignorance? When, notwithstanding the ignorance
he is thus obliged to avow by availing himself of the divine agency, he
tells us, this immaterial substance, this soul, shall experience the
action of the element of fire, which he allows to be material; when he
confidently says this soul shall be burnt; shall suffer in purgatory;
have we not a right to believe, that either he has a design to deceive
us, or else that he does not himself understand that which he is so
anxious we should take upon his word?

Let us not then be surprised at those subtile hypotheses, as ingenious
as they are unsatisfactory, to which theological prejudice has obliged
the most profound modern speculators to recur; when they have undertaken
to reconcile the spirituality of the soul, with the physical action of
material beings, on this incorporeal substance; its re-action upon these
beings; its union with the body. When the human mind permits itself to
be guided by authority without proof, to be led forward by enthusiasm;
when it renounces the evidence of its senses; what can it do more than
sink into error? Let those who doubt this, read the metaphysical
romances of LEIBNITZ, DESCARTES, MALEBRANCHE, CUDWORTH, and many others:
let them coolly examine the ingenious, but fanciful systems entitled
_the pre-established harmony of occasional causes; physical pre-motion,