On the Plastic Soul: A Treatise Against the Reality of Gods

With reference to Plutarch’s Life of Brutus

In the quiet after terror, when the ghost of Caesar has vanished from Brutus’s tent, Cassius delivers a reflection not only on the nature of apparitions, but on the machinery of belief itself. His words, recorded by Plutarch, are among the earliest and clearest articulations of what we now understand as cognitive projection, the human tendency to transform perception into divine meaning.

“The perceptions of the senses are not trustworthy, and the soul, whether by nature weak and ready to believe, or confused by the experience of what has actually occurred, or intelligence is quick to transform the experience, is liable to be thrown into quite illusory action, into which we think we see and hear, and the senses actually register is like wax, and the human soul, which includes both the plastic faculty and the material upon which it works, can shape and adorn the objects of the senses at will.

We can see this process at work in our dreams, where the imagination transforms some quite insubstantial experience into all kinds of emotional and active shapes.

It is the nature of the imagination to be eternally active, and to this expressive itself in fancy or in thought.”

In these lines, Cassius dismantles the foundations of religious experience. He suggests that the mind, plastic, malleable, and impressionable, creates its own visions, gods, spirits, and omens. When Brutus sees a phantom claiming to be his “evil spirit,” he is not visited by destiny. He is witnessing the echo of his own troubled soul.

Let us carry this insight forward.

If dreams can produce landscapes, voices, gods and monsters entirely from within, then what claim has any sacred text or religious tradition to objective truth? Every burning bush, every angelic visitation, every voice from the heavens may be nothing more than the same inner wax, shaped under stress or belief.

Throughout history, gods have always fit the fears and fantasies of their cultures. The war god. The fertility goddess. The god of plagues. The saviour who bleeds. All these reflect not divine reality, but psychic need. The hungry mind, starved for meaning in a chaotic world, will sculpt the void into the form of a protector, or a judge.

Cassius, in his Epicurean reasoning, goes even further. He does not merely deny the ghost; he questions the very possibility of external spirits. And here he anticipates the modern rationalist: the one who asks not “What did I see?” but “What must I have been experiencing to believe I saw it?”

This should give us pause.

If the gods emerge from the same mental space as dreams, hallucinations, and nightmares, then religion is not a map to reality. It is a mirror…showing us our fears, our desires, and our need to assign agency to mystery.

The passage from Plutarch becomes, then, not merely a literary moment but a philosophical fulcrum. It offers a quiet, devastating argument: that the soul sees gods because it cannot bear not to. And if that is so, then the altars of the world stand on foundations no more stable than sleep.