Many people have thought you could have the immortality of the soul without the resurrection through not seeing that the body and soul belong to one another by nature. Now, however, we are getting the opposite view: the resurrection without the immortality of the soul. Although it may be vain to hope for immortality without the resurrection, it is not apparent that the same person is raised up without something of us continuing in existence after death. But there is no immortality of the soul anyway unless we have souls.

To More, however, writing in 1515, and perhaps giving his own answer to those who, like Pomponazzo, denied the immortality of the soul, as well as showing an awareness of the view of those who, like Cajetan, did not think it could be demonstrated by reason, it seemed that a people practising a natural religion would hold that the soul is immortal. In the Second Book of Utopia, he tells us that whenever the Utopians discuss felicity or blessedness they add to the reasons of philosophy certain principles taken from religion, for the inquiry of which they think reason of itself weak and imperfect, and one of these principles is: That the soul is immortal. The Utopians themselves seem to have regarded not believing in the immortality of the soul as something inimical to society, for further on we read that, though their founder, king Utopus, wanted there to be liberty of religion among them, on this one point he laid it down that ‘no one should conceive so vile and base an opinion of the dignity of man’s nature as to think that the souls do die and perish with the body’. We find a similar connection between human dignity and the soul being made a little later, in 1512, by the Dominican, Fr Antonio de Montesinos, who, in his famous sermon pointing out to the Spanish conquerors of the New World that the native Indians possessed human dignity, appealed to the argument that they too had souls. ‘Are they not men?’, he asked, ‘Do they not have rational souls?’