nor sinew.[1] The Caribs did not think the soul so immaterial as to be invisible, but said it was subtle and thin like a purified body.[2] Turning to higher races, we may take the Siamese as an example of a people who conceive of souls as consisting of subtle matter escaping sight and touch, or as united to a swiftly moving aerial body.[3] In the classic world, it is recorded as an opinion of Epicurus that 'they who say the soul is incorporeal talk folly, for it could neither do nor suffer anything were it such.'[4] Among the Fathers, Irenæus describes souls as incorporeal in comparison with mortal bodies,[5] and Tertullian relates a vision or revelation of a certain Montanist prophetess, of the soul seen by her corporeally, thin and lucid, aerial in colour and human in form.[6] For an example of mediæval doctrine, may be cited a 14th-century English poem, the 'Ayenbite of Inwyt' (i.e. 'Remorse of Conscience') which points out how the soul, by reason of the thinness of its substance, suffers all the more in purgatory:
'The soul is more tendre and nesche Than the bodi that hath bones and fleysche; Thanne the soul that is so tendere of kinde, Mote nedis hure penaunce hardere y-finde, Than eni bodi that evere on live was.'[7]
The doctrine of the ethereal soul passed on into more modern philosophy, and the European peasant holds fast to it still; as Wuttke says, the ghosts of the dead have to him a misty and evanescent materiality, for they have bodies as we have, though of other kind: they can eat and drink, they can be wounded and killed.[8] Nor was the ancient
- ↑ Cranz, 'Grönland,' p. 257.
- ↑ Rochefort, 'Iles Antilles,' p. 429.
- ↑ Loubere, 'Siam,' vol. i. p. 458; Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien,' vol. iii. p. 259; see p. 278.
- ↑ Diog. Laert. x. 67-8; see Serv. ad. Æn. iv. 654.
- ↑ Irenæus contra Hæres, v. 7, 1; see Origen, De Princep. ii. 3, 2.
- ↑ Tertull. De Anima, 9.
- ↑ Hampole, 'Ayenbite of Inwyt.'
- ↑ Wuttke, 'Volksaberglaube,' pp. 216, 226.
