The dispute was warmly carried on even in the fifteenth
century; some proved that Aristotle taught the doctrine of an immortal
soul; others complained of the hardness of men's hearts, who would not
believe that there was a soul at all, till they saw it sitting down on
a chair before them; Filelfo, in his funeral oration on Francesco
Sforza, brings forward a long list of opinions of ancient and even of
Arab philosophers in favour of immortality, and closes the mixture,
which covers a folio page and a half of print, with the words, 'Besides
all this we have the Old and New Testaments, which are above all
truth.' Then came the Florentine Platonists with their master's
doctrine of the soul, supplemented at times, as in the case of Pico, by
Christian teaching. But the opposite opinion prevailed in the
instructed world. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the
stumbling-block which it put in the way of the Church was so serious
that Leo X set forth a Constitution at the Lateran Council in 1513, in
defence of the immortality and individuality of the soul, the latter
against those who asserted that there was but one soul in all men. A
few years later appeared the work of Pomponazzo, in which the
impossibility of a philosophical proof of immortality is maintained;
and the contest was now waged incessantly with replies and 'apologies,'
till it was silenced by the Catholic reaction.
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