For us the word "soul" signifies generally that which animates. Our ancestors the Celts gave to their soul the name of seel, from which the English soul, and the German seel; and probably the ancient Teutons and the ancient Britons had no quarrels in their universities over this expression.
The Greeks distinguished three sorts of souls—ψυχὴ, which signified the sensitive soul, the soul of the senses; and that is why Love, child of Aphrodite, had so much passion for Psyche, and why Psyche loved him so tenderly: πνεῦμα, the breath which gives life and movement to the whole machine, and which we have translated by spiritus, spirit; vague word to which have been given a thousand different meanings: and finally νοῦς, the intelligence.
We possessed therefore three souls, without having the least notion of any of them. St. Thomas Aquinas (Summation of St. Thomas. Lyons edition, 1738) admits these three souls as a peripatetic, and distinguishes each of these three souls in three parts. ψυχὴ was in the breast, πνεῦμα was distributed throughout the body, and νοῦς was in the head. There has been no other philosophy in our schools up to our day, and woe betide any man who took one of these souls for the other.
In this chaos of ideas there was, nevertheless, a foundation. Men had noticed that in their passions of love, hate, anger, fear, their internal organs were stimulated to movement. The liver and the heart were the seat of the passions. If one thought deeply, one felt a strife in the organs of the head; therefore the intellectual soul was in the head. Without respiration no vegetation, no life; therefore the vegetative soul was in the breast which receives the breath of air.
When men saw in dreams their dead relatives or friends, they had to seek what had appeared to them. It was not the body which had been consumed on a funeral pyre, or swallowed up in the sea and eaten by the fishes. It was, however, something, so they maintained; for they had seen it; the dead man had spoken; the dreamer had questioned him. Was it ψυχὴ, was it πνεῦμα, was it νοῦς, with whom one had conversed in the dream? One imagined a phantom, an airy figure: it was σκιὰ, it was δαίμων, a ghost from the shades, a little soul of air and fire, very unrestricted, which wandered I know not where.
Eventually, when one wanted to sift the matter, it became a constant that this soul was corporeal; and the whole of antiquity never had any other idea. At last came Plato who so subtilized this soul that it was doubtful if he did not separate it entirely from matter; but that was a problem that was never solved until faith came to enlighten us.
In vain do the materialists quote some of the fathers of the Church who did not express themselves with precision. St. Irenæus says (liv. v. chaps. vi and vii) that the soul is only the breath of life, that it is incorporeal only by comparison with the mortal body, and that it preserves the form of man so that it may be recognized.
In vain does Tertullian express himself like this—"The corporeality of the soul shines bright in the Gospel." (Corporalitas animæ in ipso Evangelio relucescit, De Anima, cap. vii.) For if the soul did not have a body, the image of the soul would not have the image of the body.
In vain does he record the vision of a holy woman who had seen a very shining soul, of the colour of air.
In vain does Tatien say expressly (Oratio ad Græcos, c. xxiii.)—"The soul of man is composed of many parts."