Since our senses are the first instruments to our learning, corporeal and sensible bodies are the only bodies we directly apprehend.  The word “spirit” has no meaning for any one who has not philosophised.  To the unlearned and to the child a spirit is merely a body.  Do they not fancy that spirits groan, speak, fight, and make noises?  Now you must own that spirits with arms and voices are very like bodies.  This is why every nation on the face of the earth, not even excepting the Jews, have made to themselves idols.  We, ourselves, with our words, Spirit, Trinity, Persons, are for the most part quite anthropomorphic.  I admit that we are taught that God is everywhere; but we also believe that there is air everywhere, at least in our atmosphere; and the word Spirit meant originally nothing more than breath and wind.  Once you teach people to say what they do not understand, it is easy enough to get them to say anything you like.

The perception of our action upon other bodies must have first induced us to suppose that their action upon us was effected in like manner.  Thus man began by thinking that all things whose action affected him were alive.  He did not recognise the limits of their powers, and he therefore supposed that they were boundless; as soon as he had supplied them with bodies they became his gods.  In the earliest times men went in terror of everything and everything in nature seemed alive.  The idea of matter was developed as slowly as that of spirit, for the former is itself an abstraction.

Thus the universe was peopled with gods like themselves.  The stars, the winds and the mountains, rivers, trees, and towns, their very dwellings, each had its soul, its god, its life.  The teraphim of Laban, the manitos of savages, the fetishes of the negroes, every work of nature and of man, were the first gods of mortals; polytheism was their first religion and idolatry their earliest form of worship.  The idea of one God was beyond their grasp, till little by little they formed general ideas, and they rose to the idea of a first cause and gave meaning to the word “substance,” which is at bottom the greatest of abstractions.  So every child who believes in God is of necessity an idolater or at least he regards the Deity as a man, and when once the imagination has perceived God, it is very seldom that the understanding conceives him.  Locke’s order leads us into this same mistake.

Having arrived, I know not how, at the idea of substance, it is clear that to allow of a single substance it must be assumed that this substance is endowed with incompatible and mutually exclusive properties, such as thought and size, one of which is by its nature divisible and the other wholly incapable of division.  Moreover it is assumed that thought or, if you prefer it, feeling is a primitive quality inseparable from the substance to which it belongs, that its relation to the substance is like the relation between substance and size.  Hence it is inferred that beings who lose one of these attributes lose the substance to which it belongs, and that death is, therefore, but a separation of substances, and that those beings in whom the two attributes are found are composed of the two substances to which those two qualities belong.