8.  Nothing could have been weaker than this would-be proof.  It is not true that Aristotle refuted metempsychosis, or that he proved the eternity of the human kind; and after all, it is quite untrue that an actual infinity is impossible.  Yet this proof passed as irresistible amongst Aristotelians, and induced in them the belief that there was a certain sublunary intelligence and that our active intellect was produced by participation in it.  But others who adhered less to Aristotle went so far as to advocate a universal soul forming the ocean of all individual souls, and believed this universal soul alone capable of subsisting, whilst individual souls are born and die.  According to this opinion the souls of animals are born by being separated like drops from their ocean, when they find a body which they can animate; and they die by being reunited to the ocean of souls when the body is destroyed, as streams are lost in the sea.  Many even went so far as to believe that God is that universal soul, although others thought that this soul was subordinate and created.  This bad doctrine is very ancient and apt to dazzle the common herd.  It is expressed in these beautiful lines of Vergil (Aen., VI, v. 724): 

Principio coelum ac terram camposque liquentes, Lucentemque globum Lunae Titaniaque astra, Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet. Inde hominum pecudumque genus vitaeque volantum.

[79] And again elsewhere (Georg., IV, v. 221): 

    Deum namque ire per omnes

Terrasque tractusque maris caelumque profundum:
Hinc pecudes, armenta, viros, genus omne ferarum,
Quemque sibi tenues nascentem arcessere vitas.
Scilicet huc reddi deinde ac resoluta referri.

9.  Plato’s Soul of the World has been taken in this sense by some, but there is more indication that the Stoics succumbed to that universal soul which swallows all the rest.  Those who are of this opinion might be called ‘Monopsychites’, since according to them there is in reality only one soul that subsists.  M. Bernier observes that this is an opinion almost universally accepted amongst scholars in Persia and in the States of the Grand Mogul; it appears even that it has gained a footing with the Cabalists and with the mystics.  A certain German of Swabian birth, converted to Judaism some years ago, who taught under the name Moses Germanus, having adopted the dogmas of Spinoza, believed that Spinoza revived the ancient Cabala of the Hebrews.  And a learned man who confuted this proselyte Jew appears to be of the same opinion.  It is known that Spinoza recognizes only substance in the world, whereof individual souls are but transient modifications.  Valentin Weigel, Pastor of Zschopau in Saxony, a man of wit, even of excessive wit, although people would have it