89. But traduction and eduction are equally inexplicable when it is a question of finding the origin of the soul. It is not the same with accidental forms, since they are only modifications of the substance, and their origin may be explained by eduction, that is, by variation of limitations, in the same way as the origin of shapes. But it is quite another matter when we are concerned with the origin of a substance, whose beginning and destruction are equally difficult to explain. Sennert and Sperling did not venture to admit the subsistence and the indestructibility of the souls of beasts or of other primitive forms, although they allowed that they were indivisible and immaterial. But the fact is that they confused indestructibility with immortality, whereby is understood in the case of man that not only the soul but also the personality subsists. In saying that the soul of man is immortal one implies the subsistence of what makes the identity of the person, something which retains its moral qualities, conserving the _consciousness_, or the reflective inward feeling, of what it is: thus it is rendered susceptible to chastisement or reward. But this conservation of personality does not occur in the souls of beasts: that is why I prefer to say that they are imperishable rather than to call them immortal. Yet this misapprehension appears to have been the cause of a great inconsistency in the doctrine of the Thomists and of other good philosophers: they recognized the immateriality or indivisibility of all souls, without being willing to admit their indestructibility, greatly to the prejudice of the immortality of the human soul. John Scot, that is, the Scotsman (which formerly signified Hibernian or Erigena), a famous writer of the time of Louis the Debonair and of his sons, was for the conservation of all souls: and I see not why there should be less [172] objection to making the atoms of Epicurus or of Gassendi endure, than to affirming the subsistence of all truly simple and indivisible substances, which are the sole and true atoms of Nature. And Pythagoras was right in saying generally, as Ovid makes him say: _Morte carent animae_.