Page:Toleration and other essays.djvu/245

Rh Here the Jansenist interrupts me and says: "You are a plagiarist; you have taken your doctrine from the famous book, The Action of God on Created Things, or Physical Premotion, by our great patriarch Boursier." I have said somewhere of Boursier that he had dipped his pen in the inkpot of the Deity. No, my friend; I have never received anything from the Jansenists or the Molinists except a strong aversion for sects, and some indifference to their opinions. Boursier, taking God as his model, knows precisely what was the nature of Adam's dream when God took a rib from his side wherewith to make woman; he knows the nature of his concupiscence, habitual grace, and actual grace. He knows, with St. Augustine, that men and women would have engendered children dispassionately in the earthly paradise, just as one sows a field, without any feeling of carnal pleasure. He is convinced that Adam sinned only by distraction in the earthly paradise. I know nothing about these things, and am content to admire those who have so splendid and profound a knowledge.

But, some centuries later in the history of man, it came to be imagined that we have a soul which acts of itself; and the idea has become so familiar that we take it for a reality.

We talk incessantly of "the soul," though we have not the least idea of the meaning of it.