Note 60 — NOTES.1

“The soul is therefore but an empty word.” Contrast this with Descartes’s statement: “And certainly the idea I have of the human mind ... is incomparably more distinct than the idea of any corporeal object.”73 Compare this doctrine, also, with Holbach’s assertion: “Those who have distinguished the soul from the body seem to have only distinguished their brains from themselves. Truly the brain is the common center, where all the nerves spread in all parts of the human body, terminate and join together.... The more experience we have, the more we are convinced that the word ‘spirit’ has no meaning even to those who have invented it, and can be of no use either in the physical or in the moral world.”74