The aim of the doctrine of Metempsychosis was to accustom man to detach himself from the gross matter, to which he is tied here below, and to excite in him the desire of promptly returning there, wherefrom he had formerly descended. The rulers of the people frightened them with the pictures of humiliating transformations of their souls, as the Catholic priests and the Partialist preachers do among us, with their teaching of an endless hell. The people, amazed and terrified, for the masses were ignorant, believed all those politico-religious fables. They firmly believed that the souls of the wicked passed into vile bodies; that they were punished with cruel and loathesome diseases; that those who did not reform after a certain number of transmigrations were delivered up to the Furies and to the evil spirits (or devils) to be tortured; and that, after that, they were sent again to the earth, as in a new school, and were obliged to run a new race. Thus we see that the whole system of Metempsychosis rested on the false supposition, that it was necessary, in order to govern the people here below, to frighten them with absurd and visionary tales of atrocious tortures beyond the grave, which were the more terrifying for the very reason of their absurdity and atrociousness. Timee of Locre, one of the disciples of Socrates, wrote, that among the various means of governing those who are not able to reach the truth of the principles, on which nature has established justice and morals, Metempsychosis is an efficacious one. He said: "Let them be taught those dogmas which inform us that the souls of effeminate and pusillanimous men transmigrate into female bodies; those of murderers into bodies of wild beasts; those of licentious men into bodies of wild boars and hogs; those of fickle and inconstant men into bodies of birds; those of idle, ignorant and silly men into bodies of fishes. The just Nemesis regulates those pains in the future life conjointly with the gods of the earth, avengers of the crimes they have witnessed. The supreme God has entrusted them with the government of this inferior world. Let them be frightened, even, by the religious terrors conveyed to the soul by those discourses which describe the vengeance of the celestial gods, and the unavoidable torments reserved to the criminals in the Tartarus; and also by the other fictions which Homer has found in the ancient sacred opinions. Sometimes the body is cured by poisonous substances; so the souls can be ruled by fables when they cannot be governed by truth."