We dare to put in question, whether the intelligent soul is spirit or matter; whether it is created before us, or proceeds from nothing at our birth; whether, after animating us for a day on this earth, it lives after us in eternity. These questions appear sublime; what are they? Questions of blind men asking one another: What is light? When we wish to have a rude knowledge of a piece of metal, we put it on the fire in a crucible; but have we any crucible wherein to put the soul? It is spirit, says one; but what is spirit? Assuredly, no one knows. This is a word so void of meaning, that to tell what spirit is, you are obliged to say what it is not. The soul is matter, says another; but what is matter? We know nothing of it but a few appearances and properties; and not one of these properties, not one of these appearances, can bear the least affinity to thought. It is something distinct from matter, you say; but what proof have you of this? Is it because matter is divisible and figurable, and thought is not? But how do you know that the first principles of matter are divisible and figurable? It is very likely that they are not; whole sects of philosophers assert that the elements of matter have neither figure nor extent. You triumphantly exclaim: Thought is neither wood, nor stone, nor sand, nor metal; therefore, thought belongs not to matter. Weak and presumptuous reasoners! Gravitation is neither wood, nor sand, nor metal, nor stone; nor is motion, or vegetation, or life, any of all these; yet life, vegetation, motion, gravitation, are given to matter. To say that God cannot give thought to matter, is to say the most insolently absurd thing that has ever been advanced in the privileged schools of madness and folly. We are not assured that God has done this; we are only assured that He can do it. But of what avail is all that has been said, or all that will be said, about the soul? What avails it that it has been called "_entelechia_," quintessence, flame, ether--that it has been believed to be universal, uncreated, transmigrant? Of what avail, in these questions inaccessible to reason, are the romances of our uncertain imaginations? What avails it, that the fathers in the four primitive ages believed the soul to be corporeal? What avails it that Tertullian, with a contradictoriness that was familiar to him, decided that it is at once corporeal, figured, and simple? We have a thousand testimonies of ignorance, but not one which affords us a ray of probability. How, then, shall we be bold enough to affirm what the soul is? We know certainly that we exist, that we feel, that we think. Seek we to advance one step further--we fall into an abyss of darkness; and in this abyss, we have still the foolish temerity to dispute whether this soul, of which we have not the least idea, is made before us or with us, and whether it is perishable or immortal?