, but will be unable to have a sound natural science which explains the nature of things in general, still less a sound #pneumatology, comprising knowledge of God, souls and simple substances in general.
This knowledge of insensible perceptions also explains why and how two souls of the same species, human or otherwise, never leave the hands of the Creator perfectly alike, each of them having its own inherent relationship to the point of view which it will have in the universe. But that follows from what I have already said about two individuals, namely that the difference between them is always more than numerical. There is another significant point on which I must differ, not only from our author, but from most of the moderns: I agree with most of the ancients that every ¥Spirit, every soul, every created simple substance is always united with a body and that no soul is ever entirely without one. I have a priori reasons for this doctrine, but it will be found to have the further merit of solving all the philosophical difficulties about the state of souls, their perpetual preservation, their immortality, and their mode of operation. Their changes of state never are and never were anything but changes from more to less sensible, from more perfect to less perfect, or the reverse, so that their past and future states are just as explicable as their present one. Even the slightest reflection shows that this is reasonable, and that a leap from one state to an infinitely different one cannot be natural. I am surprised that the Schoolmen - unreasonably abandoning nature - deliberately plunged into the greatest difficulties and provided free-thinkers with apparent cause for triumph. The latterÕs arguments are pulled down all at once by my account of things, in which there is no more difficulty in conceiving the preservation of the soul (or rather, on my view, of the animal) than in conceiving the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly, or the preservation of thought during sleep-to which Jesus Christ has sublimely compared death. I have also said already that no sleep could last for ever; and in the case of rational souls it will be of even briefer duration or almost none at all. These souls are destined always to preserve the persona1 which they have been given in the city of God, and hence to retain their memories, so that they may be more susceptible of punishments and rewards. I further add that in general no disruption of its visible organs can reduce an animal to total confusion, or destroy all the organs and deprive the soul of its entire organic body and of the ineradicable vestiges of its previous