No hypothetical soul was needed to account for the thousand
phenomena of thought or of sensation. Pneumatology was no science, but
the mere fancy of an excited imagination.
Not to the literature and the social life of France alone was this
materialistic influence confined. The mind of Germany, of England, and,
more or less, of the rest of Europe, and of America, was pervaded by it.
The tendency, all over the civilized world, was towards unbelief, not
merely in miracles, but in all things spiritual. Science, with her
strict tests and her severe inductions, lent her aid in the same
direction.
It does not seem to have occurred to the philosophers of the
Encyclopaedian school that a doctrine is not necessarily false because an
insufficient argument is brought forward to prove it. It does not appear
to have occurred to skeptical physicists that there may be laws of
Nature regulating ultramundane phenomena, as fixed, as invariable, as
those which decide the succession of geological phenomena and the
products of chemical combinations.
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