traces. But peopleÕs readiness to abandon the ancient doctrine of the rarefied bodies annexed to angels (which was confused with the corporeality of the angels themselves), the inclusion among created things of alleged separate intelligences (and notably the ones which in AristotleÕs doctrine make the heavens revolve), and lastly the misconception to which some have been subject, that preservation of the souls of beasts would lead one to metempsychosis and to their transmigration from body to body - the perplexity that people have been in through not knowing what they should do about all this has resulted, in my opinion, in their overlooking the natural way to explain the preservation of the soul. This has done great harm to natural religion, and has led some to believe that our immortality is just a miraculous gift from God; even our distinguished author displays some doubt about this, as I shall point out shortly- But I wish that all who are of this opinion would discuss it as wisely and candidly as he does; for I am afraid that some who speak of immortality through grace do so only for the sake of appearances, and are fundamentally not far from those ¥Averroists and certain wicked ¥Quietists who imagine that the soul is absorbed into and reunited with the sea of divinity; my system is perhaps the only one which properly shows the impossibility of this notion. We also seem to disagree about matter: our author thinks that motion requires a vacuum, because he believes that the tiny parts of matter are 1 'personage'\ a standard word for a character in a play, one of the dramatis personae. rigid. I admit that if matter were composed of such parts, motion in a plenum would be impossible - imagine a container full of little pebbles without the least empty space. But this assumption is not granted; and there appears to be no reason for it either, although this gifted author goes so far as to believe that rigidity or the cohesion of its tiny parts constitutes the essence of body. Rather, we should think of space as full of matter which is initially fluid, capable of every sort of division and indeed actually divided and subdivided to infinity; but with this difference, that how it is divisible and divided varies from place to place, because of variations in the extent to which the movements in it are more or less harmonious. That is what brings it about that matter has everywhere some degree of rigidity as well as of fluidity, and that no body is either hard or fluid in the ultimate degree Ñ we find in it no invincibly hard atoms and no mass which can be divided as easily in any manner as