The servant may even rebel against the master, as when our muscles are painfully contracted by cramp.  But pain is the summons for help which is sent by the living organism when it has lost control over the dead matter, which loss we feel as the illness of our vassal.

On the whole we must regard our body as a real part of our being, which is still, in a sense, external to our inmost selves.

Is, then, the soul at least the true ego, a single and indivisible whole?

The intellect advances, by slow development, to greater and greater perfection till old age is reached, if the body does not leave it in the lurch.  The critical faculty grows as experience accumulates, but memory, reason’s handmaid, disappears at an earlier stage, or at least loses the power of receiving new impressions.  Wonderful enough is this faculty which enables us to store up all the valuable lessons and experiences of earliest youth in a thousand drawers, which open in a moment in answer to the requirements of the mind.

It is not to be disputed that the old often appear dull-witted, but I cannot believe in a real darkening of the reason, which is a bright spark of the Divine, and even in madness the negation of reason is only external and apparent.  A deaf man playing on an instrument out of tune may strike the right notes, and be inwardly persuaded that his execution is faultless, while all around him hear nothing but the wildest discords.

The sovereignty of reason is absolute; she recognizes no superior authority.  No power, not even that of our own wills, can compel her to regard as false what she has already recognized as true.

E pur si muove!

Thought ranges through the infinite realms of starry space, and fathoms the inscrutable depths of the minutest life, finding nowhere any limit, but everywhere law, which is the immediate expression of the divine thought.

The stone falls on Sirius by the same law of gravitation as on the earth; the distances of the planets, the combinations of chemical elements are based on arithmetical ratios, and everywhere the same causes produce the same effects.  Nowhere in nature is there anything arbitrary, but everywhere law.  True, reason cannot comprehend the origin of things, but neither is she anywhere in conflict with the laws that govern all things.  Reason and the universe are in harmony; they must therefore have the same origin.

Even when, through the imperfection of all created things, reason enters on paths which lead to error, truth is still the one object of her search.

Reason may thus be brought into conflict with many an honored tradition.  She rejects miracle, “faith’s dearest child,” and refuses to admit that Omnipotence can ever find it necessary for the attainment of its purposes to suspend, in isolated cases, the operation of those laws by which the universe is eternally governed.  But these doubts are not directed against religion, but against the form in which religion is presented to us.