If I seek to prove that the soul is a real being, I am stopped, and told that it is a faculty. If I affirm that it is a faculty, and that I have that of thinking, I am answered, that I mistake; that God, the eternal master of all nature, does everything in me, directing all my actions, and all my thoughts; that if I produced my thoughts, I should know those which I should have the next minute; that I never know this; that I am but an automaton with sensations and ideas, necessarily dependent, and in the hands of the Supreme Being, infinitely more subject to Him than clay is to the potter. I acknowledge then my ignorance; I acknowledge that four thousand volumes of metaphysics will not teach us what our soul is. An orthodox philosopher said to a heterodox philosopher, "How can you have brought yourself to imagine that the soul is of its nature mortal, and that it is eternal only by the pure will of God?" "By my experience," says the other. "How! have you been dead then?" "Yes, very often: in my youth I had a fit of epilepsy; and I assure you, that I was perfectly dead for several hours: I had no sensation, nor even any recollection from the moment that I was seized. The same thing happens to me now almost every night. I never feel precisely the moment when I fall asleep, and my sleep is absolutely without dreams. I cannot imagine, but by conjectures, how long I have slept. I am dead regularly six hours in twenty-four, which is one-fourth of my life." The orthodox then maintained against him that he always thought while he was asleep, without his knowing of it. The heterodox replied: "I believe, by revelation, that I shall think forever in the next world; but I assure you, that I seldom think in this." The orthodox was not mistaken in affirming the immortality of the soul, since faith demonstrates that truth; but he might be mistaken in affirming that a sleeping man constantly thinks. Locke frankly owned that he did not always think while he was asleep. Another philosopher has said: "Thought is peculiar to man, but it is not his essence." Let us leave every man at liberty to seek into himself and to lose himself in his ideas. However, it is well to know that in 1750, a philosopher underwent a very severe persecution, for having acknowledged, with Locke, that his understanding was not exercised every moment of the day and of the night, no more than his arms or his legs. Not only was he persecuted by the ignorance of the court, but the malicious ignorance of some pretended men of letters assailed the object of persecution. That which in England had produced only some philosophical disputes, produced in France the most disgraceful atrocities: a Frenchman was made the victim of Locke.