Are there not words often pronounced of which we have but a very confused idea, or perhaps no idea at all? Is not the word "soul" one of these? When the tongue of a pair of bellows is out of order, and the air, escaping through the valve, is not driven with violence towards the fire, the maid-servant says: "The soul of the bellows is burst." She knows no better, and the question does not at all disturb her quiet.
The gardener uses the expression, "Soul of the plants"; and cultivates them very well without knowing what the term means.
The musical-instrument maker places, and shifts forward or backward, the soul of a violin, under the bridge, in the interior of the instrument: a sorry bit of wood more or less gives it or takes from it a harmonious soul.
We have several manufactures in which the workmen give the appellation of "soul" to their machines; but they are never heard to dispute about the word: it is otherwise with philosophers.
The word "soul," with us, signifies in general that which animates. Our predecessors, the Celts, gave their soul the name of "seel," of which the English have made soul, while the Germans retain "seel"; and it is probable that the ancient Teutons and the ancient Britons had no university quarrels about this expression.
The Greeks distinguished three sorts of souls: "Psyche," signifying the sensitive soul—the soul of the senses; and hence it was that Love, the son of Aphrodite, had so much passion for Psyche, and that she loved him so tenderly; "Pneuma," the breath which gave life and motion to the whole machine, and which we have rendered by "spiritus"—spirit—a vague term, which has received a thousand different acceptations: and lastly, "nous," intelligence.
Thus we possess three souls, without having the slightest notion of any one of them. St. Thomas Aquinas admits these three souls in his quality of peripatetic, and distinguishes each of the three into three parts.
"Psyche" was in the breast; "Pneuma" was spread throughout the body; and "Nous" was in the head. There was no other philosophy in our schools until the present day; and woe to the man who took one of these souls for another!
In this chaos of ideas, there was however a foundation. Men had clearly perceived that in their passions of love, anger, fear, etc., motions were excited within them; the heart and the liver were the seat of the passions. When thinking deeply, one feels a laboring in the organs of the head; "therefore, the intellectual soul is in the brain. Without respiration there is no vegetation, no life; therefore, the vegetative soul is in the breast, which receives the breath of the air."
When men had seen in their sleep their dead relatives or friends, they necessarily sought to discover what had appeared to them. It was not the body, which had been consumed on a pile or swallowed up in the sea and eaten by the fishes. However, they would declare it was something, for they had seen it; the dead man had spoken; the dreamer had questioned him. Was it "Psyche"; was it "Pneuma"; was it "Nous" with whom he had conversed in his sleep? Then a phantom was imagined—a slight figure; it was "skia"—it was "daimonos"—a shade of the manes; a small soul of air and fire, extremely slender, wandering none knew where.