Faith & Spirit Quote by Voltaire

Voltaire comes at the soul sideways: not denying it outright, but interrogating the smug certainty with which people claim to possess it. The opening questions are less philosophical than prosecutorial. "What then do you call your soul?" forces the believer to notice how quickly a label becomes an argument. "What idea have you of it?" is the Enlightenment demand for definitions, the kind that makes metaphysical talk sweat under the lights.

The sting lands in the next move: without revelation, you "cannot... admit the existence" of anything in yourself beyond an unknown power to feel and think. Voltaire is not praising revelation; he's shrinking the soul down to a gap in knowledge, then asking why that gap deserves a grand, comforting noun. The subtext is a demolition of intellectual vanity: if your evidence for the soul is basically "something is going on in there", your certainty is borrowed from theology, tradition, and social pressure, not from observation.

Context matters. Voltaire is writing in a Europe where church authority still polices the boundaries of thought, yet the new prestige belongs to empiricism, mechanism, and the sciences of the mind-in-miniature. His tactic is classic: sound reasonable, even pious-adjacent, while hollowing out the concept from the inside. He grants the inner life ("feeling and thinking") but treats the metaphysical add-on as rhetorical overreach.

It works because it's an argument about epistemology disguised as an insult to complacency. He doesn't just question the soul; he questions the confidence of the person who says "my soul" as if naming were knowing.