But reason is not yet satisfied; reason wonders why these veritable
beings give the soul which experiences them the property of exciting
love, from which proceeds this halo of light which, so to speak,
crowns all virtues. Consider the things contrary to these beautiful
objects, and with them compare what may be ugly in the soul. If we
can discover of what ugliness consists, and what is its cause, we
shall have achieved an important element of the solution we are
seeking. Let us picture to ourselves an ugly soul; she will be given
up to intemperance; and be unjust, abandoned to a host of passions,
troubled, full of fears caused by her cowardliness, and of envy by her
degradation; she will be longing only for vile and perishable things;
she will be entirely depraved, will love nothing but impure wishes,
will have no life but the sensual, and will take pleasure in her
turpitude. Would we not explain such a state by saying that under the
very mask of beauty turpitude had invaded this soul, brutalized her,
soiled her with all kinds of vices, rendering her incapable of a pure
life, and pure sentiments, and had reduced her to an existence obscure,
infected with evil, poisoned by lethal germs; that it had hindered her
from contemplating anything she should, forcing her to remain solitary,
because it misled her out from herself towards inferior and gloomy
regions? The soul fallen into this state of impurity, seized with an
irresistible inclination towards the things of sense, absorbed by her
intercourse with the body, sunk into matter, and having even received
it within herself, has changed form by her admixture with an inferior
nature. Not otherwise would be a man fallen into slimy mud, who no
longer would present to view his primitive beauty, and would exhibit
only the appearance of the mud that had defiled him; his ugliness
would be derived from something foreign; and to recover his pristine
beauty he would have to wash off his defilement, and by purification be
restored to what he once was.