man which corresponds to and perceives the Eternal Spirit is part of its essence, and immortal as it is immortal. The Calvinists called the eye within us the Inspiration of the Almighty. Aristotle could see that it was not of earth, or any creature of space and time:
ὁ γὰρ νοῦς (he says) οὐσία τις οὖσα ἔοικεν
ἐγγίγνεσθαι καὶ οὐ φθείρεσθαι.
What the thing is which we call ourselves we know not. It may be true—I for one care not if it be—that the descent of our mortal bodies may be traced through an ascending series to some glutinous jelly formed on the rocks of the primeval ocean. It is nothing to me how the Maker of me has been pleased to construct the organised substance which I call my body. It is mine but it is not me. The νοῦς, the intellectual spirit, being an οὐσία—an essence—we believe to be an imperishable something which has been engendered in us from another source. As Wordsworth says:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises in us, our life's star,
Hath elsewhere had its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
Not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come,
From heaven, which is our home.
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