esented are: What is life?
What is there in man besides matter? When an animate being dies, the
body, the mortal, is left; life departs. I do not see it go; I know not
where it goes. If it is a man who dies, we say the soul has left the
body, because we are men; if it is an animal, we say life has left the
body. What is the difference between life and the soul? All I know is
that I have a body which perishes and that, distinct from the body, I
have the power to think, which power troubles me more than my body, and
which power I may lose when life leaves the body. My power to think is
so limited that its indulgence is like pulling one's self up to the
stars by one's toes. I know I cannot answer the following questions:

"'What is truth?' Though I once heard a child of five answer that truth
is the right.

"'What is life?' Though I am told it is the principle of animate
corporeal existence.

"'What is death?' This I do not know, since I cannot define life, as
death is the cessation of life or the beginning of a higher life.

"Since animals think, some more than some men (the feeble-minded), do
they have souls? If so, where do their souls go?

"Is the source of new life in the soul?

"It seems we believe souls have existed from the beginning, since they
never die but are transmigrated. Is immortality a divine gift or an
inherent property of the soul?

"And of you, Chief Priest of Osiris, head of our order, I would
respectfully ask:

"'Does the soul assume a body akin to its own nature?

"'Should I live to be very old, dwarfed in limb and blind, when my soul
returns to its preserved mummy, which you maintain it does, will I rise
again, old and blind and weak? If not why preserve the body?

"'Will I know the friends of my former life if they return to their
bodies in the same period?

"'Your still-born brother, whose body I embalmed, had he yet a soul, and
when his soul returns to his body, will it have life?

"'There is a mummy in one of the old tombs with two heads and on one
body; has that body one or two souls? And if two souls, will they be
purified and return together to the body, though one be good and the
other bad?'

"I believe not in Osiris; nor that my soul after many transmigrations
shall find and reanimate its rejected tenement. Yet I know no other god
or even if I have a soul. Can I by searching find out truth or the true
God? Will there be a time when the truth shall be made clear? I know
that