The idea of the necessity of a contact, to effect a movement, would never have occurred, if we had bounded our observations to the influence of our ideas on our determinations, and the influence of those determinations on our physical being. In short, the laws of attraction and repulsion are subject to great exceptions; which exceptions may serve to support the system of the spirituality of the soul. We may be allowed to say, that there exists a vacuum in the universe, since, without this vacuum, there could not have been any motion? It is known that this motion depends on the laws of attraction but how can attraction act through a vacuum, unless it is by a spiritual force, which acts without contact, and notwithstanding the absolute interruption of matter? It is then this force, or its equivalent, that I may adopt to define the cause of the impressions of which our souls are susceptible. Let others explain, in their turn, by what material communication, the sight of a few immoveable characters, traced on insensible marble, disturbs my soul. It is very easy to comprehend by what mechanism the eye distinguishes these characters; but there ends the physical action, for we cannot attribute to that action, the general power of producing sensations in the mind, since, perhaps, many other men may consider the same characters, without receiving any impression. It is very possible, that our intellectual preceptions have not any connection with motion, such as we conceive it. Our interior nature, which we distinguish by the name of immaterial, is probably subject to laws very different from those which govern nature in general; but as we are obliged to apply to the mysteries of our souls, those expressions which serve to delineate or to interpret the phœnomena submitted to our inspection; these expressions, and their continual use, have insensibly habituated us to certain opinions, about the causes and developement of our intellectual faculties. It is thus that, after having used the words motion, rest, agitation, and action, to discriminate different affections of our souls, of which we know very little, we have afterwards assimilated them, foolishly, to our moral nature, to all the ideas which were represented by these denominations; and even death itself, of which we have not any clear knowledge, but by the dissolution of our physical being; death, an image borrowed from things which are under the inspection of our senses, has not, perhaps, either relation or analogy with the nature and essence of our spirit; all these are incomprehensible secrets, not mixt with any thing we are acquainted with. We act, in this respect, like men born deaf, who apply to sounds those terms which they were accustomed to use, to express the sensations the other senses produced.