birth of each child the priest asks who has returned; the third goes out to hold spiritual intercourse, leaving the body in a languid state, and it is this soul which can pass for a time into a tiger, and transmigrates for punishment after death; the fourth dies on the dissolution of the body.[1] Such classifications resemble those of higher nations, as for instance the three-fold division of shade, manes, and spirit:
'Bis duo sunt homini, manes, caro, spiritus, umbra: Quatuor ista loci bis duo suscipiunt. Terra tegit carnem, tumulum circumvolat umbra, Orcus habet manes, spiritus astra petit.'
Not attempting to follow up the details of such psychical division into the elaborate systems of literary nations, I shall not discuss the distinction which the ancient Egyptians seem to have made in the Ritual of the Dead between the man's ba, akh, ka, khaba, translated by Dr. Birch as his 'soul,' 'mind,' 'image,' 'shade,' or the Rabbinical division into what may be roughly described as the bodily, spiritual, and celestial souls, or the distinction between the emanative and genetic souls in Hindu philosophy, or the distribution of life, apparition, ancestral spirit, among the three souls the Chinese, or the demarcations of the nous, psychē, and pneuma, or of the anima and animus, or the famous classic and mediæval theories of the vegetal, sensitive, and rational souls. Suffice it to point out here that such specu- lation dates back to the barbaric condition of our race, in a state fairly comparing as to scientific value with much that gained esteem within the precincts of higher culture. It would be a difficult task to treat such classification on a consistent logical basis. Terms corresponding with those of life, mind, soul, spirit, ghost, and so forth, are not thought of as describing really separate entities, so much as the several forms and functions of one individual being. Thus
1 Macpherson, pp. 91-2. See also Klemm, 'C. G.' vol. iii. p. 71 (Lapp); St. John, 'Far East,' vol. i. p. 189 (Dayaks).
- ↑ 1
