As this journey has served in part to release my mind from routine business, I have had the satisfaction of conversing with several able men on matters of learning and science, and I have communicated to some of them my own views, which you are acquainted with, in order to profit by the doubts and difficulties which they raised, and there were some of these men who, not satisfied with the current doctrines, found an unusual satisfaction in certain of my positions. This has led me to put them down in writing so that they may be communicated more easily, and some day, perhaps, I will have a few copies printed without my name, merely to circulate them among my friends in order to obtain their criticisms. I should like you to be able to examine them first and therefore I have made the following abstract:

A body is an aggregation of substances, and is not a substance, properly speaking. Consequently, in all bodies must be found indivisible substances which cannot be generated and are not corruptible, having something which corresponds to souls.

All these substances have been always and will always be united to organic bodies diversely transformable.

Each of these substances contains in its nature the law of the continuous progression of its own workings and all that has happened to it and all that will happen to it.

Excepting the dependence upon God, all these activities come from its own nature.

Each substance expresses the whole universe, some substances, however, more distinctly than others, each one especially distinctly with regard to certain things and according to its own point of view.

The union of the soul with the body and even the action of one substance upon another consists only in the perfect mutual accord, expressly established by the ordinance of the first creation, by virtue of which each substance following its own laws falls in with what the others require, and thus the activities of the one follow or accompany the activities or changes of the other.

Intellects, or souls which are capable of reflection and of knowing the eternal truths and God, have many privileges that exempt them from the transformations of bodies.

In regard to them moral laws must be added to physical laws.

It is for them principally that every thing has been made.

They, taken together, constitute the Republic of the Universe, with God as the monarch.

There is perfect justice and order observed in this city of God, and there is no evil action without its chastisement, nor any good action without its proportionate reward.

The better things are understood, the more are they found beautiful and conformable to the desires which a wise man might form.

We must always be content with the ordering of the past because it has absolutely conformed to the will of God, which can be known by the events, but we must try to make the future, in so far as it depends upon us, conform to the presumptive will of God or to his commandments, to beautify our Sparta and to labor in well- doing, without, however, being cast down when unsuccessful, in the firm belief that God will know how to find the most fitting times for changes to the better.

Those who are not content with the ordering of things cannot boast of loving God properly.

Justice is nothing else than love felt by the wise.

Charity is universal benevolence whose fulfillment the wise carry out conformably to the dictates of reason so as to obtain the greatest good.

Wisdom is the science of happiness or of the means of attaining the lasting contentment which consists in the continual achievement of a greater perfection or at least in variations of the same degree of perfection.

In regard to the subject of physics: the nature of force must be understood as wholly different from motion, which is something more relative. Force must be measured by the quantity of effect: there is an absolute force, a directive force and a respective force.

Each of these forces is conserved in the same quantity in the universe, or in each machine which has no communication with others, and the two latter forces taken together compose the former or the absolute force. The same amount of motion, however, is not conserved, for I can show that if it were, perpetual motion would be possible, and that an effect would be greater than its cause.