Now to the point. Are not these means the most efficacious that can be imagined in order to materialise religion, and to subjugate it entirely to the senses? Is it not infinitely more easy and shorter, especially for rude and illiterate men, to believe in what they actually see, than in any metaphysical notions, far above the reach of their understanding, like those of a spiritual kind? From very ancient times it has been thought that the impressions which the mind receives through the medium of sight, are more striking and efficacious than those which are communicated to it by all the other organs of the senses. Horace has followed out this idea in his well-known lines:— “Segniús irritant animos demissa per aurem Quam quæ sunt oculis subjecta fidelibus, et quæ Ipsi sibi tradit spectator.” _De Ar. Poe._, 180. Thus it is explained why men imagined for many centuries that the sky was a solid superficies, and that the earth was a superficial plane, bounded by the horizon; that the sun moved round the earth; that the existence of the antipodes was a chimera; that the dew fell in the same way as the rain from the upper regions of the atmosphere; and other popular errors which science has corrected, but which were in a certain way justified by the undeniable testimony of the senses. How difficult then is it, on such evidence, to doubt the existence of a soul in a human representation to which one speaks as to a person alive, and to which are tendered all marks of respect and veneration, and before whom even the priests, those masters of the people and depositaries of all true doctrine, kneel down as would a son before his father, a subject before his sovereign, and a culprit before his judge? Who would forbid this delusion to that simple and ignorant mind, whose relations with the exterior world form the only source of all his knowledge and all his feelings?