The superstitions and credulities of the Middle Ages eventuated, during
the course of the eighteenth century, in the Encyclopaedism of French
philosophy. The grounds upon which the Church based her doctrine of the
supernatural were fiercely attacked. The proofs brought forward to prove
the insufficiency of such grounds were assumed to prove more than lack
of logic in the Church; they were taken as proofs, that, in the nature
of things, there is no evidence for the supernatural, in any sense of
the term; in other words, that there is no knowledge within the reach of
mortals, except that which relates to the physical,--to this earth, as
the only phase of existence,--to the vital body, as the all of the human
being. Emotional and intellectual phenomena were but results of material
organization, as heat is the result of combustion: they exhibited
themselves so long as vitality continued; they disappeared when death
supervened, as the warmth from a fire dies out with the cessation of
combustion.
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