252 THE POPULAR SQIENCE MONTHLY. 



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 Aris- 

 totle 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 ; * 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, j)rovided 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 phi- 

 losophers 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 so- 

 matic death at which separation of the two must occur. f 



The vast majority of these speculators recoiled from the pre- 



* Prpchaska, " Xervous System," quoted fey Bastian, " The Brain as an Organ of 

 Mind," p. 511. On tlie 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 f erait 

 une equivoque h. cet egard, qui, en parlant de chagrins rapporterait les gestes k la 

 tete, ou les concentrerait sur le ca?ur pour annoncer un effort de genie 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. 



f 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 Beau- 

 tiful," by W. Robinson, F. L. S , p. 117. 



