that he was a visionary, was perhaps to some extent of that opinion; as was also a man known as Johann Angelus Silesius, author of certain quite pleasing little devotional verses in German, in the form of epigrams, which have just been reprinted.  In general, the mystics’ doctrine of deification was liable to such a sinister interpretation.  Gerson already has written opposing Ruysbroek, a mystical writer, whose intention was evidently good and whose expressions are excusable.  But it would be better to write in a manner that has no need of excuses:  although I confess that oft-times expressions which are extravagant, and as it were poetical, have greater force to move and to persuade than correct forms of statement.

10.  The annihilation of all that belongs to us in our own right, carried to great lengths by the Quietists, might equally well be veiled irreligion in certain minds, as is related, for example, concerning the Quietism of Foe, originator of a great Chinese sect.  After having preached his religion [80] for forty years, when he felt death was approaching, he declared to his disciples that he had hidden the truth from them under the veil of metaphors, and that all reduced itself to Nothingness, which he said was the first source of all things.  That was still worse, so it would seem, than the opinion of the Averroists.  Both of these doctrines are indefensible and even extravagant; nevertheless some moderns have made no difficulty about adopting this one and universal Soul that engulfs the rest.  It has met with only too much applause amongst the so-called freethinkers, and M. de Preissac, a soldier and man of wit, who dabbled in philosophy, at one time aired it publicly in his discourses.  The System of Pre-established Harmony is the one best qualified to cure this evil.  For it shows that there are of necessity substances which are simple and without extension, scattered throughout all Nature; that these substances must subsist independently of every other except God; and that they are never wholly separated from organic body.  Those who believe that souls capable of feeling but incapable of reason are mortal, or who maintain that none but reasoning souls can have feeling, offer a handle to the Monopsychites.  For it will ever be difficult to persuade men that beasts feel nothing; and once the admission has been made that that which is capable of feeling can die, it is difficult to found upon reason a proof of the immortality of our souls.

11.  I have made this short digression because it appeared to me seasonable at a time when there is only too much tendency to overthrow natural religion to its very foundations.  I return then to the Averroists, who were persuaded that their dogma was proved conclusively in accordance with reason.  As a result they declared that man’s soul is, according to philosophy, mortal, while they protested their acquiescence in Christian theology, which declares the soul’s immortality.  But this distinction