us, who, after all, are still in the infancy of a
spiritualist revival.

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* "I am afraid," says Thomas Taylor in his Introduction to the Phaedo,
"there are scarcely any at the present day who know that it is one thing
for the soul to be separated from the body, and another for the body to
be separated from the soul, and that the former is by no means a
necessary consequence of the latter."
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It would not be necessary to premise, but for the frequency with which
the phrase occurs, that the "spiritual body" is a contradiction in
terms. The office of body is to relate spirit to an objective world.
By Platonic writers it is usually termed okhema--"vehicle." It is the
medium of action, and also of sensibility. In this philosophy the
conception of Soul was not simply, as with us, the immaterial subject of
consciousness. How warily the interpreter has to tread here, every one
knows who has dipped, even superficially, into the controversies among
Platonists themselves. All admit the distinction between the rational
and the irrational part or principle, the latter including, first, the
sensibility, and secondly, the Plastic, or that lower which in obedience
to its sympathies enables the soul to attach itself to, and to organize
into a suitable body those substances of the universe to which it is
most congruous. It is more difficult to determine whether Plato or his
principal followers, recognized in the rational soul or nous a distinct
and separable entity, that which is sometimes discriminated as "the
Spirit." Dr. Henry More, no mean authority, repudiates this
interpretation. "There can be nothing more monstrous," he says, "than
to make two souls in man, the one sensitive, the other rational, really
distinct from one another, and to give the name of Astral spirit to the
former, when there is in man no Astral spirit beside the Plastic of the
soul itself, which is always inseparable from that which is rational.
Nor upon any other account can it be called Astral, but as it is liable
to that corporeal temperament which proceeds from the stars, or rather
from any material causes in general, as not being yet sufficiently
united with the divine body--that vehicle of divine virtue or power."
So he maintains that the Kabalistic three souls--Nephesh, Ruach,
Neschamah--originate in a misunderstanding of the true Platonic
doctrine, which is that of a threefold "vital congruity." These
correspond to the thre