on, 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 excel