mistakes them sometimes.  But the soul that governs the machine of man’s body moves all its springs in time, without seeing or discerning them, without being acquainted with their figure, situation, or strength, and yet it never mistakes.  What prodigy is here!  My mind commands what it knows not, and cannot see; what neither has, nor is capable of any knowledge.  And yet it is infallibly obeyed.  How much blindness and how much power at once is here!  The blindness is man’s; but the power, whose is it?  To whom shall we ascribe it, unless it be to Him who sees what man does not see, and performs in him what passes his understanding?  It is to no purpose my mind is willing to move the bodies that surround it, and which it knows very distinctly; for none of them stirs, and it has not power to move the least atom by its will.  There is but one single body, which some superior Power must have made its property.  With respect to this body, my mind is but willing, and all the springs of that machine, which are unknown to it, move in time and in concert to obey him.  St. Augustin, who made these reflections, has expressed them excellently well.  “The inward parts of our bodies,” says he, “cannot be living but by our souls; but our souls animate them far more easily than they can know them. . . .  The soul knows not the body which is subject to it. . . .  It does not know why it does not move the nerves but when it pleases; and why, on the contrary, the pulsation of veins goes on without interruption, whether the mind will or no.  It knows not which is the first part of the body it moves immediately, in order thereby to move all the rest. . . .  It does not know why it feels in spite of itself, and moves the members only when it pleases.  It is the mind does these things in the body.  But how comes it to pass it neither knows what she does, nor in what manner it performs it?  Those who learn, anatomy,” continues that father, “are taught by others what passes within, and is performed by themselves.  Why,” says he, “do I know, without being taught, that there is in the sky, at a prodigious distance from me, a sun and stars; and why have I occasion for a master to learn where motion begins? . . .  When I move my finger, I know not how what I perform within myself is performed.  We are too far above, and cannot comprehend ourselves.”

Sect.  XLVIII.  The Sovereignty of the Soul over the Body principally appears in the Images imprinted in the Brain.

It is certain we cannot sufficiently admire either the absolute power of the soul over corporeal organs which she knows not, or the continual use it makes of them without discerning them.  That sovereignty principally appears with respect to the images imprinted in our brain.  I know all the bodies of the universe that have made any impression on my senses for a great many years past.  I have distinct images of them that represent them to me, insomuch that I believe