om 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--+psyche+, 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: +pneuma+, 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 +nous+, 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. +psyche+ was in the breast,
+pneuma+ was distributed throughout the body, and +nous+ 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
+psyche+, was it +pneuma+, was it +nous+, with whom one had conversed in
the dream? One imagined a phantom, an airy figure: it was +skia+, it was
+daimon+, 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 en