Neither will you find any of this sophistry in the speeches of Cicero. It was a jargon of the schools, invented to amuse idleness--the quackery of mind. SOUL. SECTION I. This is a vague and indeterminate term, expressing an unknown principle of known effects, which we feel in ourselves. This word "soul" answers to the "anima" of the Latins--to the "pneuma" of the Greeks--to the term which each and every nation has used to express what they understood no better than we do. In the proper and literal sense of the Latin and the languages derived from it, it signifies that which animates. Thus people say, the soul of men, of animals, and sometimes of plants, to denote their principle of vegetation and life. This word has never been uttered with any but a confused idea, as when it is said in Genesis: "God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living soul"; and: "The soul of animals is in the blood"; and: "Stay not my soul." Thus the soul was taken for the origin and the cause of life, and for life itself. Hence all known nations long imagined that everything died with the body. If anything can be discerned with clearness in the chaos of ancient histories, it seems that the Egyptians were at least the first who made a distinction between the intelligence and the soul; and the Greeks learned from them to distinguish their "_nous_" and their "_pneuma_." The Latins, after the example of the Greeks, distinguished "_animus_" and "_anima_"; and we have, too, our soul and our understanding. But are that which is the principle of our life, and that which is the principle of our thoughts, two different things? Does that which causes us to digest, and which gives us sensation and memory, resemble that which is the cause of digestion in animals, and of their sensations and memory? Here is an eternal object for disputation: I say an eternal object, for having no primitive notion from which to deduce in this investigation, we must ever continue in a labyrinth of doubts and feeble conjectures. We have not the smallest step on which to set our foot, to reach the slightest knowledge of what makes us live and what makes us think. How should we? For we must then have seen life and thought enter a body. Does a father know how he produced his son? Does a mother know how she conceived him? Has anyone ever been able to divine how he acts, how he wakes, or how he sleeps? Does anyone know how his limbs obey his will? Has anyone discovered by what art his ideas are traced in his brain, and issue from it at his command? Feeble automata, moved by the invisible hand which directs us on the stage of this world, which of us has ever perceived the thread which guides us?