In proportion as the human being develops himself, as he extends the circle of his observations upon the world and upon himself, special facts confirm the general truth of which I have just given a summary, and prove the essential distinction of the soul and the body by the essential diversity of the properties of each. Thus the body, in its organization and in its life, is subject to fixed and pre-established laws, over which man's will has no control or power; whereas the soul is essentially free, and capable of determining itself and of acting from motives foreign to the laws which govern the body. Fatality is the condition of the human being in corporeal existence; liberty is his privilege in his moral life. I say in his moral life, and the expression reveals between the soul and the body another essential and ineffaceable difference. The body is strange to every idea of morality, abandoned to the exigencies of its necessities and its appetites; it has no aspiration, no tendency but to satisfy them. {342} The soul has needs and desires of quite a different kind, and they are often contrary to those of the body; and however often the soul may yield to the tendencies of the body, not seldom also does it withstand and surmount them; and this both in persons of obscure condition, and in those who stand in the public gaze of men. When the body is dominant in man, man tends toward Materialism; when he listens to the aspirations of soul it is, on the contrary, to Spiritualism that his nature rises. The complexity of his nature manifests itself in the development of his life as in the first instinct of his consciousness; at whatever epoch he is the subject either of his own or of our observation he cannot be called exclusively body, matter, without facts giving his assertion at each step the flattest contradiction. Whence comes this essential and primordial fact--the fact of the complexity and yet unity of the human being? How is this union of soul and body accomplished? their mutual influences exercised, how? Here, according to religion, is the mystery; here, for philosophy, lies the problem. {343} Materialism is but an hypothesis adopted for the explanation of this great fact, and the hypothesis consists not in the solution of the problem, but in its suppression by the denial of the fact itself. What need, they say, to seek to explain how the union of soul and body is accomplished? Neither this complexity of the human being nor his unity in that complexity is a reality. Man is only a product and an ephemeral form of matter!