t sail around the upper world of
the gods. That ennui or plaintive sadness which in all life's deep
and lonesome hours seems native to our hearts, what is it but the
nostalgia of the soul remembering and pining after its distant
home? Vague and forlorn airs come floating into our consciousness,
as from an infinitely remote clime, freighted with a luxury of
depressing melancholy.

"Ah! not the nectarous poppy lovers use,
Not daily labor's dull Lethean spring,
Oblivion in lost angels can infuse
Of the soil'd glory and the trailing wing."

How attractive all this must be to the thoughts of men, how
fascinating to their retrospective and aspiring reveries, it
should be needless to repeat. How baseless it is as a
philosophical theory demanding sober belief, it should be equally
superfluous to illustrate further.

The third answer to the question concerning the origin of the soul
is that it is directly created by the voluntary power of God. This
is the theory of faith, instinctively shrinking from the
difficulty of the problem on its scientific ground, and evading it
by a wholesale reference to Deity. Some writers have held that all
souls were created by the Divine fiat at the beginning of the
world, and laid up in a secret repository, whence they are drawn
as occasion calls. The Talmudists say, "All souls were made during
the six days of creation; and therefore generation is not by
traduction, but by infusion of a soul into body." Others maintain
that this production of souls was not confined to any past period,
but is continued still, a new soul being freshly created for every
birth. Whenever certain conditions meet,

"Then God smites his hands together,
And strikes out a soul as a spark,
Into the organized glory of things,
From the deeps of the dark."

This is the view asserted by Vincentius Victor in opposition to
the dogmatism of Tertullian on the one hand and to the doubts of
Augustine on the other.2 It is called the theory of Insufflation,
because it affirms that God immediately breathes a soul into each
new being: even as in the case of Adam, of whom we read that "God
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a
living soul." The doctrine drawn from this Mosaic text, that the
soul is a divine substance, a breath of God, miraculously breathed
by Him into every creature at the commencement of its existence,
often reappears, and plays a prominent part in the history of
psychological opinions.