“About what am I employing my own soul? On every occasion I must ask myself this question, and inquire, what have I now in this part of me which they call the ‘ruling principle’? And who’s soul have I now? That of a child or of a young man, or of a feeble woman, or of a tyrant, or of a domestic animal, or of a wild beast?”— Marcus Aurelius (167AD), Meditations (§5.11)
“Thus, in consequence of man’s reasoning upon false principles, the soul, OR moving principle within him, as well as the concealed moving principle of nature, have been made mere chimeras, mere beings of imagination.”— Baron d’Holbach (1770), The System of Nature (§7, pg. 51) [1]
“When it is said, that man is not a free agent, it is not pretended to compare him to a body moved by a simple impulsive cause: he contains within himself causes inherent to his existence; he is moved by an interior organ, which has its own peculiar laws, and is itself necessarily determined in consequence of ideas formed from perceptions resulting from sensations which it receives from exterior objects. As the mechanism of these sensations, of these perceptions, and the manner they engrave ideas on the brain of man, are not known to him; because he is unable to unravel all these motions; because he cannot perceive the chain of operations in his soul, OR the motive principle that acts within him, he supposes himself a free agent; which, literally translated, signifies, that he moves himself by himself; that he determines himself without cause: when he rather ought to say, that he is ignorant how or for why he acts in the manner he does..”— Baron d’Holbach (1770), The System of Nature (pg. 97)
“There are very good reasons indeed to believe that materialism is true and that Julien La Mettrie was a visionary. If there is no positive evidence supporting dualism, if modern science renders the doctrine untenable, if it is explanatorily impotent, and if all the evidence points toward materialism instead, then it is time to acknowledge what reason is trying to tell us—there is most likely no soul.”— Julien Musolino (2015), The Soul Fallacy [2]