Anaximenes: (Ionic philosopher, 5th c. B. C.) God is air, air is a life-giving principle to man. The soul is air.
Diogenes of Appollonia: (Greek natural philosopher, 5th c. B. C.) The soul of the world and the soul of man is air.
Anaxagoras: (5th c. B. C.) The soul is an immortal, aerial spirit.
Socrates: (4th c. B. C.) The soul is corporeal and eternal.
Epicurus: (4th c. B. C.) The soul is a bodily substance, composed of subtile particles, disseminated through the whole frame, and having a great resemblance to spirit or breath.
Empedocles: (Sicilian philosopher and poet, 5th c. B. C.) Declared himself to have been “a boy, a girl, a bush, a bird, a fish;” that the soul inhabits every form of animal and plant.
Aristotle: (4th c. B. C.) Plants have souls without consciousness. Animals have souls, but inseparable from body. The human body is inseparable from mind, but the human mind is divided into active and passive intellect. The active intellect is pure form, detached from matter, and immortal.
Josephus: (1st c.) There were three sects among the Jews—the Pharisees, Sadducees, and the Essenes. The Pharisees believed in metempsychosis; the Sadducees believed that the soul perished with the body; the Essenes held that the soul was immortal. The soul descended in an aerial form into the body, from the highest region of the air, whither they were carried back again by a violent attraction, and after death those which had belonged to the good dwelled beyond the ocean in a country where there was neither heat nor cold, nor wind nor rain.
Pliny: (2d c.) The body and the soul have, from the moment of death, as little sensation as before birth.
Justin Martyr: (2d c.) It is heresy to say that the soul is taken up into heaven, men rise with the same bodies.