sed to take the shape of
animals, or to take up their abode in animals[33] or in trees (as in
Egypt): such animals (tigers, for example) were commonly dangerous, and
this theory of incarnation is an expression of the widely diffused
belief in the dangerous character of the souls of the dead. In later,
cultivated times the bird became a favorite symbol of the soul--perhaps
from its swift and easy flight through the air.[34]

+26+. Savage science, though it generally identified the soul with the
breath, and regarded it as a separate interior form, seems not to have
attempted to define its precise locus, posture, and extension within the
body--the early man was content to regard it as a vague homunculus. The
whole body was looked on as the seat of life, and was sometimes eaten in
order to acquire its qualities, especially the quality of courage.[35]
Life was supposed to reside in the bones as the solid part of the body,
and these were preserved as the basis of a future life.[36] But even in
early stages of culture we find a tendency to specialize--courage, for
example, was assigned particularly to the head and the heart, which were
accounted the most desirable parts of a dead enemy.[37] These organs
were selected probably on account of their prominence--the heart also
because it was the receptacle of the blood. The soul was located by the
Indians of Guiana in the pupil of the eye.[38]

+27+. Gradually a more precise localization of qualities was made by the
Semites, Greeks, Romans, and other peoples. These, for reasons not
clearly known to us, assigned the principal emotional faculties to the
most prominent organs of the trunk of the body. The Semites placed
thought and courage in the heart and the liver, anger in the liver (the
bile), love and grief in the bowels, voluntary power in the kidneys.[39]
The Greeks and Romans were less definite: to the heart, the diaphragm,
and the liver (the upper half of the trunk); the Greeks assigned
thought, courage, emotion;[40] the Romans placed thought and courage in
the heart, and the affections in the liver. Among these organs special
prominence came to be given to the heart and the liver as seats of
mental faculties.[41]

+28+. It is not clear how early the brain was supposed to be connected
with the mind. Alcmaeon of Crotona (5th cent. B.C.), who, according to
Diogenes Laertius, wrote chiefly on medical subjects, is credited with
the view that the brain was the constructor of tho