y what
strange logic do they decide that a thing can not fail to happen because
they ardently desire it to happen? Man's childish desires of the
imagination, are they the measure of reality? Impious people, you say,
deprived of the flattering hopes of another life, desire to be
annihilated. Well, have they not just as much right to conclude by this
desire that they will be annihilated, as you to conclude that you will
exist forever because you desire it?

CII.--IT IS EVIDENT THAT THE WHOLE OF MAN DIES.

Man dies entirely. Nothing is more evident to him who is not delirious.
The human body, after death, is but a mass, incapable of producing any
movements the union of which constitutes life. We no longer see
circulation, respiration, digestion, speech, or reflection. It is
claimed then that the soul has separated itself from the body. But to
say that this soul, which is unknown, is the principle of life, is
saying nothing, unless that an unknown force is the invisible principle
of imperceptible movements. Nothing is more natural and more simple than
to believe that the dead man lives no more, nothing more absurd than to
believe that the dead man is still living.

We ridicule the simplicity of some nations whose fashion is to bury
provisions with the dead--under the idea that this food might be useful
and necessary to them in another life. Is it more ridiculous or more
absurd to believe that men will eat after death than to imagine that
they will think; that they will have agreeable or disagreeable ideas;
that they will enjoy; that they will suffer; that they will be conscious
of sorrow or joy when the organs which produce sensations or ideas are
dissolved and reduced to dust? To claim that the souls of men will be
happy or unhappy after the death of the body, is to pretend that man
will be able to see without eyes, to hear without ears, to taste without
a palate, to smell without a nose, and to feel without hands and without
skin. Nations who believe themselves very rational, adopt, nevertheless,
such ideas.

CIII.--INCONTESTABLE PROOFS AGAINST THE SPIRITUALITY OF THE SOUL.

The dogma of the immortality of the soul assumes that the soul is a
simple substance, a spirit; but I will always ask, what is a spirit? It
is, you say, a substance deprived of expansion, incorruptible, and which
has nothing in common with matter. But if this is true, how came your
soul into existence? how did it grow? how did it stre