for their masters would speak words and
make signs which would really shake and move the organs of the servants.

'V. Now let us consider the soul of Julius Caesar, and we shall find the
thing more impossible still. That soul was in the world without being
exposed to the influence of any spirit. The power it received from God was
the only principle of the actions it produced at every moment: and if those
actions were different one from another, it was not because some of them
were produced by the united influence of some springs which did not
contribute to the production of others, for the soul of man is simple,
indivisible and immaterial. M. Leibniz owns it; and if he did not
acknowledge it, but if, on the contrary, he should suppose with most
philosophers and some of the most excellent metaphysicians of our age (Mr.
Locke, for instance) that a compound of several material parts placed and
disposed in a certain manner, is capable of thinking, his hypothesis would
appear to be on that very ground absolutely impossible, and I could refute
it several other ways; which I need not mention since he acknowledges the
immateriality of our soul and builds upon it.

'Let us return to the soul of Julius Caesar, and call it an immaterial
automaton (M. Leibniz's own phrase), and compare it with an atom of
Epicurus; I mean an atom surrounded with a vacuum on all sides, and which
will never meet any other atom. This is a very just comparison: for this
atom, on the one hand, has a natural power of moving itself and exerts it
without any assistance, and without being retarded or hindered by anything:
and, on the other hand, the soul of Caesar is a spirit which has received
the faculty of producing thoughts, and exerts it without the influence [42]
of any other spirit or of any body. It is neither assisted nor thwarted by
anything whatsoever. If you consult the common notions and the ideas of
order, you will find that this atom can never stop, and that having been in
motion in the foregoing moment, it will continue in it at the present
moment and in all the moments that shall follow, and that it will always
move in the same manner. This is the consequence of an axiom approved by M.
Leibniz: _since a thing does always remain in the same state wherein it
happens to be, unless it receives some alteration from some other thing ...
we conclude_, says he, _not only that a body which is at rest will always
be at rest, but that a body in motion