Cicero brings forward the testimony of past ages to prove that death is not a mere annihilation. Man cannot perish utterly. Heroes are deified; and the spirits of the dead return to us in visions of the night. Somehow or other (he says) there clings to our minds a certain presage of future ages; and so we plant, that our children may reap; we toil, that others may enter into our labours; and it is this life after death, the desire to live in men's mouths for ever, which inspires the patriot and the martyr. Fame to the Roman, even more than to us, was "the last infirmity of noble minds". It was so in a special degree to Cicero. The instinctive sense of immortality, he argues, is strong within us; and as, in the words of the English poet, "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting", so also in death, the Roman said, though in other words: "Our souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither". Believe not then, says Cicero, those old wives' tales, those poetic legends, the terrors of a material hell, of the joys of a sensual paradise. Rather hold with Plato that the soul is an eternal principle of life, which has neither beginning nor end of existence; for if it were not so, heaven and earth would be overset, and all nature would stand at gaze. "Men say they cannot conceive or comprehend what the soul can be, distinct from the body. As if, forsooth, they could comprehend what it is, when it is _in_ the body,--its conformation, its magnitude, or its position there.... To me, when I consider the nature of the soul, there is far more difficulty and obscurity in forming a conception of what the soul is while in the body,--in a dwelling where it seems so little at home,--than of what it will be when it has escaped into the free atmosphere of heaven, which seems its natural abode".[1] And as the poet seems to us inspired, as the gifts of memory and eloquence seem divine, so is the soul itself, in its simple essence, a god dwelling in the breast of each of us. What else can be this power which enables us to recollect the past, to foresee the future, to understand the present? [Footnote 1: I. c. 22.] There follows a passage on the argument from design which anticipates that fine saying of Voltaire--"Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer; mais toute la nature crie qu'il existe". "The heavens", says even the heathen philosopher, "declare the glory of God". Look on the sun and the stars; look on the alternation of the seasons, and the changes of day and night; look again at the earth bringing forth her fruits for the use of men; the multitude of cattle; and man himself, made as it were to contemplate and adore the heavens and the gods. Look on all these things, and doubt not that there is some Being, though you see him not, who has created and presides over the world.