It appears that it was not until after the founding of Alexandria that the Jews were divided into three sects--the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes. The historian Josephus, who was a Pharisee, informs us in the thirteenth book of his "Antiquities" that the Pharisees believed in the metempsychosis; the Sadducees believed that the soul perished with the body; the Essenes, says Josephus, held that souls were immortal; according to them souls descended in an aerial form into the body, from the highest region of the air, whither they were carried back again by a violent attraction; and after death, those which had belonged to the good dwelt beyond the ocean in a country where there was neither heat nor cold, nor wind, nor rain. The souls of the wicked went into a climate of an opposite description. Such was the theology of the Jews. He who alone was to instruct all men came and condemned these three sects; but without Him we could never have known anything of our soul; for the philosophers never had any determinate idea of it; and Moses--the only true lawgiver in the world before our own--Moses, who talked with God face to face, left men in the most profound ignorance on this great point. It is, then, only for seventeen hundred years that there has been any certainty of the soul's existence and its immortality. Cicero had only doubts; his grandson and granddaughter might learn the truth from the first Galileans who came to Rome. But before that time, and since then, in all the rest of the earth where the apostles did not penetrate, each one must have said to his soul: What art thou? whence comest thou? what dost thou? whither goest thou? Thou art I know not what, thinking and feeling: and wert thou to feel and think for a hundred thousand millions of years, thou wouldst never know any more by thine own light without the assistance of God. O man! God has given thee understanding for thy own good conduct, and not to penetrate into the essence of the things which He has created. So thought Locke; and before Locke, Gassendi; and before Gassendi, a multitude of sages; but we have bachelors who know all of which those great men were ignorant. Some cruel enemies of reason have dared to rise up against these truths, acknowledged by all the wise. They have carried their dishonesty and impudence so far as to charge the authors of this work with having affirmed that the soul is matter. You well know, persecutors of innocence, that we have said quite the contrary. You must have read these very words against Epicurus, Democritus, and Lucretius: "My friend, how does an atom think? Acknowledge that thou knowest nothing of the matter." It is then evident, ye are calumniators.