NEW ESSAYS 381 



given occasion for the apparent triumphs of freethinkers 

 [esprits forts] n2 , all of whose arguments fall at once 

 through this explanation of things, according to which 

 there is no more difficulty in conceiving the preservation 

 of souls (or rather, as I think, of the animal), than there 

 is in the change of the caterpillar into the butterfly, and 

 in the preservation of thought during sleep, to which 

 Jesus Christ has divinely likened death 113 . But then 

 I have already said that no sleep can last for ever ; and 

 it will last for the shortest time or almost not at all in 

 the case of rational souls, which are destined always to 

 preserve the personal character [personnage] which has 

 been given them in the City of God, and consequently 

 to retain memory ; and this is so, in order that they may 

 be more susceptible of punishments and rewards. And 

 I add further that no derangement of its visible organs 

 is capable of reducing things to complete confusion in 

 an animal, or of destroying all its organs and depriving 



112 Cf. Monadology, 14, note 25. See also Considerations sur la 

 Doctrine d'un Esprit Universel Unique (1702) (G-. vi. 532; E. 179 b): 

 ' What has also, in my opinion, contributed greatly towards 

 making men of intellect believe in the doctrine of a single uni- 

 versal spirit is this, that ordinary philosophers have set forth 

 a doctrino about souls separate [from bodies] and about the 

 functions of the soul being independent of the body and its organs, 

 which doctrine they could not sufficiently justify. They were 

 perfectly right in wishing to maintain the immortality of the soul 

 as in conformity with the Divine perfections and with a genuine 

 morality, but seeing that by death those organs in animals which 

 we observe are deranged and ultimately corrupted, they thought 

 it necessary -to have recourse to separated souls, that is to say, to 

 the opinion that the soul continues to exist without anybody and 

 none the less retains its thoughts and functions. And in order to 

 give a better proof of this they tried to show that the soul has 

 already in this life thoughts which are abstract and independent 

 of ideas of matter. Now those who rejected this separated con- 

 dition and independence [of the soul] as contrary to experience 

 and to reason were so much the more led to believe in the 

 extinction of the individual soul and the preservation of the 

 universal spirit alone.' 

 113 St. John xi. ver. n. 



