immediately cease to think? If you say it is chance, I answer that
you make chance rational to such a degree as to be the source of
reason itself. Strange prejudice and intoxication of some men, not
to acknowledge a most intelligent cause, from which we derive all
intelligence; and rather choose to affirm that the purest reason is
but the effect of the blindest of all causes in such a subject as
matter, which of itself is altogether incapable of knowledge!
Certainly there is nothing a man of sense would not admit rather
than so extravagant and absurd an opinion.


SECT. XXIX. Sentiments of some of the Ancients concerning the Soul
and Knowledge of Beasts.


The philosophy of the ancients, though very lame and imperfect, had
nevertheless a glimpse of this difficulty; and, therefore, in order
to remove it, some of them pretended that the Divine Spirit
interspersed and scattered throughout the universe is a superior
Wisdom that continually operates in all nature, especially in
animals, just as souls act in bodies; and that this continual
impression or impulse of the Divine Spirit, which the vulgar call
instinct, without knowing the true signification of that word, was
the life of all living creatures. They added, "That those sparks of
the Divine Spirit were the principle of all generations; that
animals received them in their conception and at their birth; and
that the moment they died those divine particles disengaged
themselves from all terrestrial matter in order to fly up to heaven,
where they shone and rolled among the stars. It is this philosophy,
at once so magnificent and so fabulous, which Virgil so gracefully