in which this same faculty inhered (which is how I conceive it) - i.e. without joining an immaterial soul to it - the matter would have had to be miraculously exalted in order to receive a power of which it is not naturally capable. Similarly some Scholastics claim that God exalts fire to the point where it is able, without any intermediary, to bum spirits separated from bodies, which would be a sheer miracle. Suffice it to say that we cannot maintain that matter thinks unless we put into it either an imperishable soul or a miracle; and thus that the immortality of our souls follows from what is natural, since we can only maintain their extinction by means of a miracle, whether through the exaltation of matter or through the annihilation of the soul. For we know very well that although our souls are immaterial and, in the ordinary course of nature, immortal, GodÕs omnipotence could make them mortal since he can annihilate them.
  Now, there is no doubt that this truth about the immateriality of the soul is important. For in our day especially, when many people have scant respect for pure revelation and miracles, it is infinitely more useful to religion and morality to show that souls are naturally immortal, and that it would be miraculous if they were not, than to maintain that it is of their nature to die but that, thanks to a miraculous grace resting solely on God's promise, they will not die. It has long been known that those who have sought to destroy natural religion and reduce everything to revelation, as if reason had nothing to teach us in this area, have been under suspicion, and not always without reason. But our author is not one of these; he upholds the demonstration of the existence of God and he accords the immateriality of the soul a 'probability in the highest degreeÕ, which can therefore be regarded as a moral certainty. Therefore, since his sincerity is as great as his insight?I should think he could thoroughly accommodate himself to the doctrine which I have just set forth and which is fundamental in any rational philosophy. Otherwise I do not see how one could keep from relapsing into philosophy which is either fanatical, like 
Philosophy which saves all the phenomena by ascribing them immediately and miraculously to God, or barbarous, like that of certain philosophers and physicians of the past, who still reflected the barbarism of their own times and are today rightly scorned; these saved the appearances by fabricating faculties or occult qualities, just for the purpose, and fancying them to be like little demons or imps which can without ado perform whatever is