the soul is a local, with others a universal, existence; by some limited to man, by others conceded to the lower animals; with certain thinkers an essence, with others a substance, with a third group a principle; with some an immaterial essence without form or extension, with others immaterial, yet possessed of these attributes of matter; with the majority a simple, with the minority a compound, existence, and with a small fraction of the latter a tripartite body, of which each division is again subdivided into three; with this sect a something contained in the body, with that a something containing it; with Aristotle an equivalent of "all the functions, sentient and nutritive, of living bodies up to the highest attributes of intellect," the "rational soul" being especially seated in the heart;[1] with the Neo-Platonists an "image or product of reason," producing in turn the corporeal; with Descartes the "spiritual substance," or "principle" just referred to, provided with a habitat in the pineal gland, a home exchanged by others for the ventricles, the corpora striata, the white substance of the hemispheres, their cortex, the plexus choroides, the dura mater, the heart, and the blood; with Locke a spiritual essence or a material substance—he could not "fixedly determine" which; with certain philosophers a something pre-existent from all time, with others evolved pari passu with the organism it inhabits; in the opinion of one group of school-men perishing with the associated body, in that of a second wholly immortal, in that of a third mortal in the main, but in one of its parts immortal. Further, philosophers who maintained each soul was formed specially for its own individual organism, varied in all conceivable ways as to the time and place of union of the two, while the parallel difficulty followed in settling the precise moment of somatic death at which separation of the two must occur.[2]
The vast majority of these speculators recoiled from the pre-
- ↑ Prochaska, "Nervous System," quoted by Bastian, "The Brain as an Organ of Mind," p. 511. On the contrary, according to the shrewder insight of one of the most far-seeing of physiologists, Xavier Bichat, the heart, or its vicinity, holds relationship to the passions, the head to intellectual phenomena. "L'acteur," he says, "qui ferait une équivoque à cet égard, qui, en parlant de chagrins rapporterait les gestes à la tête, ou les concentrerait sur le cœur pour annoncer un effort de génie se couvrirait d'un ridicule, que nous sentirions mieux encore que nous le comprendrions" (The actor who should make a mistake in this matter, who, speaking of his griefs, should refer his gestures to his head, and who should concentrate them upon his heart in announcing an intellectual effort, would cover himself with a ridicule that we can feel better than we can comprehend).—"Vie et Mort," p. 42, Paris, 1813.
- ↑ Singularly enough, this speculative difficulty has occasionally proved the source of specific practical inconvenience. Thus "Turkish graves are very shallow, sometimes not more than a foot in depth, the reason for this being that most old-fashioned Turks still retain the superstition that the soul does not leave the body until some time after burial, when it is drawn from the grave by the angel of death, who would find great difficulty in performing his task if the body was too deeply buried. The consequence of this is that in warm weather a horrible stench arises from the cemeteries."—"God's Acre Beautiful," by W. Robinson, F.L.S, p. 117.
