spiritus,
In the childhood, they are fire,
mens ignea, ignicula
, and God himself
Lastly, in the youth of thought, they are refined into light; and that light is capable of subsisting in a latent state, the experience of the stricken flint, of lightning from the clouds, and the like, served to prove, or at least, it supplied a popular answer to the objection;—"If the soul be light, why is it not visible?" That the purest light is invisible to our gross sense, and that visible light is a compound of light and shadow, were answers of a later and more refined period. Observe, however, that the Hebrew Legislator precluded all unfit applications of the materializing fancy by forbidding the people to
imagine
at all concerning God. For the ear alone, to the exclusion of all other bodily sense, was he to be designated, that is, by the Name. All else was for the mind—by power, truth, wisdom, holiness, mercy.