Aristotle, who has been explained a thousand ways, because he is unintelligible, was of opinion, according to some of his disciples, that the understanding in all men is one and the same substance.

The divine Plato, master of the divine Aristotle,—­and the divine Socrates, master of the divine Plato—­used to say that the soul was corporeal and eternal.  No doubt but the demon of Socrates had instructed him in the nature of it.  Some people, indeed, pretend that a man who boasted his being attended by a familiar genius must infallibly be either a knave or a madman, but this kind of people are seldom satisfied with anything but reason.

With regard to the Fathers of the Church, several in the primitive ages believed that the soul was human, and the angels and God corporeal.  Men naturally improve upon every system.  St. Bernard, as Father Mabillon confesses, taught that the soul after death does not see God in the celestial regions, but converses with Christ’s human nature only.  However, he was not believed this time on his bare word; the adventure of the crusade having a little sunk the credit of his oracles.  Afterwards a thousand schoolmen arose, such as the Irrefragable Doctor, the Subtile Doctor, the Angelic Doctor, the Seraphic Doctor, and the Cherubic Doctor, who were all sure that they had a very clear and distinct idea of the soul, and yet wrote in such a manner, that one would conclude they were resolved no one should understand a word in their writings.  Our Descartes, born to discover the errors of antiquity, and at the same time to substitute his own, and hurried away by that systematic spirit which throws a cloud over the minds of the greatest men, thought he had demonstrated that the soul is the same thing as thought, in the same manner as matter, in his opinion, is the same as extension.  He asserted, that man thinks eternally, and that the soul, at its coming into the body, is informed with the whole series of metaphysical notions:  knowing God, infinite space, possessing all abstract ideas—­in a word, completely endued with the most sublime lights, which it unhappily forgets at its issuing from the womb.

Father Malebranche, in his sublime illusions, not only admitted innate ideas, but did not doubt of our living wholly in God, and that God is, as it were, our soul.

Such a multitude of reasoners having written the romance of the soul, a sage at last arose, who gave, with an air of the greatest modesty, the history of it.  Mr. Locke has displayed the human soul in the same manner as an excellent anatomist explains the springs of the human body.  He everywhere takes the light of physics for his guide.  He sometimes presumes to speak affirmatively, but then he presumes also to doubt.  Instead of concluding at once what we know not, he examines gradually what we would know.  He takes an infant at the instant of his birth; he traces, step by step, the progress of his understanding; examines what things he has in common with beasts, and what he possesses above them.  Above all, he consults himself:  the being conscious that he himself thinks.