Certainly; for the most abstract thoughts are only the consequences of all the objects that I have perceived. I utter the word "being" in general, only because I have known particular beings; I utter the word "infinity," only because I have seen certain limits, and because I push back those limits in my mind to a greater and still greater distance, as far as I am able. I have ideas in my head only because I have images. And who is the painter of this picture? It is not myself; I cannot draw with sufficient skill; the being that made me, makes my ideas. And how do you know that the ideas are not made by yourself? Because they frequently come to me involuntarily when I am awake, and always without my consent when I dream. You are persuaded, then, that your ideas belong to you only in the same manner as your hairs, which grow and become white, and fall off, without your having anything at all to do with the matter? Nothing can possibly be clearer; all that I can do is to frizzle, cut, and powder them; but I have nothing to do with producing them. You must, then, I imagine, be of Malebranche's opinion, that we see all in God? I am at least certain of this, that if we do not see things in the Great Being, we see them in consequence of His powerful and immediate action. And what was the nature or process of this action? I have already told you repeatedly, in the course of our conversation, that I do not know a single syllable about the subject, and that God has not communicated His secret to any one. I am completely ignorant of that which makes my heart beat, and my blood flow through my veins; I am ignorant of the principle of all my movements, and yet you seem to expect how I should explain how I feel and how I think. Such an expectation is unreasonable. But you at least know whether your faculty of having ideas is joined to extension? Not in the least; It is true that Tatian, in his discourse to the Greeks, says the soul is evidently composed of a body. Irenæus, in the twenty-sixth chapter of his second book, says, "The Lord has taught that our souls preserve the figure of our body in order to retain the memory of it." Tertullian asserts, in his second book on the soul, that it is a body. Arnobius, Lactantius, Hilary, Gregory of Nyssa, and Ambrose, are precisely of the same opinion. It is pretended that other fathers of the Church assert that the soul is without extension, and that in this respect they adopt the opinion of Plato; this, however, may well be doubted. With respect to myself, I dare not venture to form an opinion; I see nothing but obscurity and incomprehensibility in either system; and, after a whole life's meditation on the subject, I am not advanced a single step beyond where I was on the first day. The subject, then, was not worth thinking about?