o be, according to the several changes of the air and the
different situations of seas and lands; you will acknowledge that God,
notwithstanding his infinite power, cannot communicate such a faculty to a
ship; or rather you will say that the nature of a ship is not capable of
receiving it from God. And yet what M. Leibniz supposes about the machine
of a human body is more admirable and more surprising than all this. Let us
apply his system concerning the union of the soul with the body to the
person of Julius Caesar.

'II. We must say according to this system that the body of Julius Caesar
did so exercise its moving faculty that from its birth to its death it went
through continual changes which did most exactly answer the perpetual
changes of a certain soul which it did not know and which made no
impression on it. We must say that the rule according to which that faculty
of Caesar's body performed such actions was such, that he would have gone
to the Senate upon such a day and at such an hour, that he would have
spoken there such and such words, etc., though God had willed to annihilate
his soul the next day after it was created. We must say that this moving
power did change and modify itself exactly according to the volubility of
the thoughts of that ambitious man, and that it was affected precisely in a
certain manner rather than in another, because the soul of Caesar passed
from a certain thought to another. Can a blind power modify itself so
exactly by virtue of an impression communicated thirty or forty years [40]
before and never renewed since, but left to itself, without ever knowing
what it is to do? Is not this much more incomprehensible than the
navigation I spoke of in the foregoing paragraph?

'III. The difficulty will be greater still, if it be considered that the
human machine contains an almost infinite number of organs, and that it is
continually exposed to the shock of the bodies that surround it,[1] and
which by an innumerable variety of shakings produce in it a thousand sorts
of modifications. How is it possible to conceive that this _pre-established
harmony_ should never be disordered, but go on still during the longest
life of a man, notwithstanding the infinite varieties of the reciprocal
action of so many organs upon one another, which are surrounded on all
sides with infinite corpuscles, sometimes hot and sometimes cold, sometimes
dry and sometimes moist, and always acting, and pricking the nerv