it is they which proportion them to the measure of our ideas; I shall believe that the oyster in its shell has fewer sensations and senses, because its soul being attached to its shell, five senses would not at all be useful to it. There are many animals with only two senses; we have five--which are very few. It is to be believed that in other worlds there are other animals enjoying twenty or thirty senses, and that other species, yet more perfect, have senses to infinity. Such, it appears to me, is the most natural way of reasoning on the matter--that is, of guessing and inspecting with certainty. A long time elapsed before men were ingenious enough to imagine an unknown being, which is ourselves, which does all in us, which is not altogether ourselves, and which lives after us. Nor was so bold an idea adopted all at once. At first this word "soul" signifies life, and was common to us and the other animals; then our pride made us a soul apart, and caused us to imagine a substantial form for other creatures. This human pride asks: What then is that power of perceiving and feeling, which in man is called soul, and in the brute instinct? I will satisfy this demand when the natural philosophers shall have informed me what is sound, light, space, body, time. I will say, in the spirit of the wise Locke: Philosophy consists in stopping when the torch of physical science fails us. I observe the effects of nature; but I freely own that of first principles I have no more conception than you have. All I do know is that I ought not to attribute to several causes--especially to unknown causes--that which I can attribute to a known cause; now I can attribute to my body the faculty of thinking and feeling; therefore I ought not to seek this faculty of thinking and feeling in another substance, called soul or spirit, of which I cannot have the smallest idea. You exclaim against this proposition. Do you then think it irreligious to dare to say that the body can think? But what would you say, Locke would answer, if you yourselves were found guilty of irreligion in thus daring to set bounds to the power of God? What man upon earth can affirm, without absurd impiety, that it is impossible for God to give to matter sensation and thought? Weak and presumptuous that you are! you boldly advance that matter does not think, because you do not conceive how matter of any kind should think. Ye great philosophers, who decide on the power of God, and say that God can of a stone make an angel--do you not see that, according to yourselves, God would in that case only give to a stone the power of thinking? for if the matter of the stone did not remain, there would no longer be a stone; there would be a stone annihilated and an angel created. Whichever way you turn you are forced to acknowledge two things--your ignorance and the boundless power of the Creator; your ignorance, to which thinking matter is repugnant; and the Creator's power, to which certes it is not impossible.