The Anatomy of Melancholy

After many years, through a thousand forms, It is brought back to the beginnings of human life.

Others deny its immortality, a question Pomponazzi of Padua settled from Aristotle not long ago: Pliny the Elder, book 2, chapter 7, and book 7, chapter 55; Seneca, book 7 of the Letters to Lucilius, letter 55; Dicaearchus in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations; Epicurus, Aratus, Hippocrates, Galen and Lucretius, book 1—

Moreover, we perceive that the mind is born with the body, Grows with it, and grows old along with it—

Averroes, and I do not know how many modern writers. This question of the soul’s immortality has been attacked and debated in many extraordinary ways, especially among the Italians of late, says Jacob Colerus in chapter 1 of On the Immortality of the Soul. The popes themselves have doubted it. Leo X, that Epicurean pope, according to some accounts, had the question debated before him on both sides and finally concluded, like an irreligious and atheistical presiding judge, with that line of Cornelius Gallus:

And what was nothing before returns to nothing.

It began from nothing and ends in nothing. Zeno and his Stoics, as Augustine cites him, supposed the soul to last until the body had completely decayed and been dissolved into prime matter. After that it vanished into smoke, extinguished and gone. Meanwhile, as the body wasted away, it wandered far and wide, reporting many things from a distance, and, as Hermotimus of Clazomenae claimed, saw curious visions and underwent I know not what.

Bloodless shades wander, without bodies or bones.

Others grant its immortality, but invent many fabulous stories about it after it leaves the body, such as Plato’s Elysian fields and that Turkish paradise. They deified the souls of good people; the souls of the wicked, says Augustine, supposedly became devils. He has refuted these and many similarly absurd doctrines.

Jerome, Augustine and other Church Fathers hold that the soul is immortal, created from nothing and then infused into the child or embryo in its mother’s womb six months after conception. It differs from the souls of beasts, which are propagated from their parents and vanish into nothing when they die. To those holy treatises and to Scripture itself I refer all such atheistical spirits, just as Cicero referred Atticus, who doubted this point, to Plato’s Phaedo.

Or, if they want philosophical proofs and demonstrations, I refer them to the treatises on this subject by Niphus and Nic. Faventinus; to Francis and John Pico, in the digressions on book 3 of On the Soul; to Tholosanus, Eugubinus, To. Soto, Canas, Thomas, Peresius, Dandinus and Colerus; to that elaborate treatise in Zanchius; and to Toletus’s sixty reasons and Lessius’s twenty-two arguments proving the soul’s immortality.