448 



Putrefaction, considered in a philosophical point of view, is but a 

 means employed by nature, to restore our organs, deprived of life, to a 

 more simple composition, in order that their elements may be applied to 

 new creations (circulus xterni motus*. Nothing, therefore, is better proved, 

 than the metempsychosis of matterf ; which warrants the belief that this 

 religious dogma, like most of the fabulous worships and imaginations of 

 antiquity, is but a veil ingeniously thrown by philosophy, between nature 

 and the ignorant. 



* Beecher, physica subterranea. 



f Matter is eternal, in this sense, that the molecules of bodies merely pass from the 

 one into the other; they survive the destruction, or rather the dissolution of organic 

 and inorganic beings, when the former, ceasing to live, restore to the inexhaustible 

 fund of Nature, those elements which she lends without ever parting with them. 



Manciple nulli datur, omnibus usu. Lucret lib. III. Author's Note, 





