indestructibility with immortality, whereby is understood in the case of man that not only the soul but also the personality subsists.  In saying that the soul of man is immortal one implies the subsistence of what makes the identity of the person, something which retains its moral qualities, conserving the consciousness, or the reflective inward feeling, of what it is:  thus it is rendered susceptible to chastisement or reward.  But this conservation of personality does not occur in the souls of beasts:  that is why I prefer to say that they are imperishable rather than to call them immortal.  Yet this misapprehension appears to have been the cause of a great inconsistency in the doctrine of the Thomists and of other good philosophers:  they recognized the immateriality or indivisibility of all souls, without being willing to admit their indestructibility, greatly to the prejudice of the immortality of the human soul.  John Scot, that is, the Scotsman (which formerly signified Hibernian or Erigena), a famous writer of the time of Louis the Debonair and of his sons, was for the conservation of all souls:  and I see not why there should be less [172] objection to making the atoms of Epicurus or of Gassendi endure, than to affirming the subsistence of all truly simple and indivisible substances, which are the sole and true atoms of Nature.  And Pythagoras was right in saying generally, as Ovid makes him say: 

  Morte carent animae.

90.  Now as I like maxims which hold good and admit of the fewest exceptions possible, here is what has appeared to me most reasonable in every sense on this important question.  I consider that souls and simple substances altogether cannot begin except by creation, or end except by annihilation.  Moreover, as the formation of organic animate bodies appears explicable in the order of nature only when one assumes a preformation already organic, I have thence inferred that what we call generation of an animal is only a transformation and augmentation.  Thus, since the same body was already furnished with organs, it is to be supposed that it was already animate, and that it had the same soul:  so I assume vice versa, from the conservation of the soul when once it is created, that the animal is also conserved, and that apparent death is only an envelopment, there being no likelihood that in the order of nature souls exist entirely separated from all body, or that what does not begin naturally can cease through natural forces.

91.  Considering that so admirable an order and rules so general are established in regard to animals, it does not appear reasonable that man should be completely excluded from that order, and that everything in relation to his soul should come about in him by miracle.  Besides I have pointed out repeatedly that it is of the essence of God’s wisdom that all should be harmonious in his works, and that nature should be parallel with grace.  It is thus my belief