It must be confessed that modern Spiritualism falls very short of the
ideas formerly suggested by the sublime designation which it has
assumed. Chiefly intent upon recognizing and putting forward the
phenomenal proofs of a future existence, it concerns itself little with
speculations on the distinction between matter and spirit, and rather
prides itself on having demolished Materialism without the aid of
metaphysics. Perhaps a Platonist might say that the recognition of a
future existence is consistent with a very practical and even dogmatic
materialism, but it is rather to be feared that such a materialism as
this would not greatly disturb the spiritual or intellectual repose of
our modern phenomenalists.* Given the consciousness with its
sensibilities safely housed in the psychic body which demonstrably
survives the physical carcase, and we are like men saved from shipwreck,
who are for the moment thankful and content, not giving thought whether
they are landed on a hospitable shore, or on a barren rock, or on an
island of cannibals. It is not of course intended that this "hand to
mouth" immortality is sufficient for the many thoughtful minds whose
activity gives life and progress to the movement, but that it affords
the relief which most people feel when in an age of doubt they make the
discovery that they are undoubtedly to live again. To the question "how
are the dead raised up, and with what body do they come?" modern
Spiritualism, with its empirical methods, is not adequate to reply. Yet
long before Paul suggested it, it had the attention of the most
celebrated schools of philosophy, whose speculations on the subject,
however little they may seem to be verified, ought not to be without
interest to us, who, after all, are still in the infancy of a
spiritualist revival.
---------
* "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."
-----------
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 three degrees of bodily existence, or to the three
"vehicles," the terrestrial, the aerial, and the ethereal. The latter
is the augoeides--the luciform vehicle of the purified soul whose
irrational part has been brought under complete subjection to the
rational. The aerial is that in which the great majority of mankind
find themselves at the dissolution of the terrestrial body, and in which
the incomplete process of purification has to be undergone during long
ages of preparation for the soul's return to its primitive, ethereal
state. For it must be remembered that the preexistence of souls is a
distinguishing tenet of this philosophy as of the Kabala. The soul has
"sunk into matter." From its highest original state the revolt of its
irrational nature has awakened and developed successively its "vital
congruities" with the regions below, passing, by means of its "Plastic,"
first into the aerial and afterwards into the terrestrial condition.
Each of these regions teems also with an appropriate population which
never passes, like the human soul, from one to the other--"gods,"
"demons," and animals.* As to duration, "the shortest of all is that of
the terrestrial vehicle. In the aerial, the soul may inhabit, as they
define, many ages, and in the ethereal, for ever."
---------
* The allusion here is to those beings of the several kingdoms of the
elements which we Theosophists, following after the Kabalists, have
called the "Elementals." They never become men.
--Ed. Theos.
---------
Speaking of the second body, Henry More says "the soul's astral vehicle
is of that tenuity that itself can as easily pass the smallest pores of
the body as the light does glass, or the lightning the scabbard of a
sword without tearing or scorching of it." And again, "I shall make
bold to assert that the soul may live in an aerial vehicle as well as in
the ethereal, and that there are very few that arrive to that high
happiness as to acquire a celestial vehicle immediately upon their
quitting the terrestrial one; that heavenly chariot necessarily
carrying us in triumph to the greatest happiness the soul of man is
capable of, which would arrive to all men indifferently, good or bad, if
the parting with this earthly body would suddenly mount us into the
heavenly. When by a just Nemesis the souls of men that are not
heroically virtuous will find themselves restrained within the compass
of this caliginous air, as both Reason itself suggests, and the
Platonists have unanimously determined." Thus also the most
thorough-going, and probably the most deeply versed in the doctrines of
the master among modern Platonists, Thomas Taylor (Introduction.
Phaedo):--"After this our divine philosopher informs that the pure soul
will after death return to pure and eternal natures; but that the
impure soul, in consequence of being imbued with terrene affections,
will be drawn down to a kindred nature, and be invested with a gross
vehicle capable of being seen by the corporeal eye.* For while a
propensity to body remains in the soul, it causes her to attract a
certain vehicle to herself; either of an aerial nature, or composed
from the spirit and vapours of her terrestrial body, or which is
recently collected from surrounding air; for according to the arcana of
the Platonic philosophy, between an ethereal body, which is simple and
immaterial and is the eternal connate vehicle of the soul, and a terrene
body, which is material and composite, and of short duration, there is
an aerial body, which is material indeed, but simple and of a more
extended duration; and in this body the unpurified soul dwells for a
long time after its exit from hence, till this pneumatic vehicle being
dissolved, it is again invested with a composite body; while on the
contrary the purified soul immediately ascends into the celestial
regions with its ethereal vehicle alone."
----------
* This is the Hindu theory of nearly every one of the Aryan
philosophies.--Ed. Theos.
----------
Always it is the disposition of the soul that determines the quality of
its body. "However the soul be in itself affected," says Porphyry
(translated by Cudworth), "so does it always find a body suitable and
agreeable to its present disposition, and therefore to the purged soul
does naturally accrue a body that comes next to immateriality, that is,
an ethereal one." And the same author, "The soul is never quite naked
of all body, but hath always some body or other joined with it, suitable
and agreeable to its present disposition (either a purer or impurer
one). But that at its first quitting this gross earthly body, the
spirituous body which accompanieth it (as its vehicle) must needs go
away fouled and incrassated with the vapours and steams thereof, till
the soul afterwards by degrees purging itself, this becometh at length a
dry splendour, which hath no misty obscurity nor casteth any shadow."
Here it will be seen, we lose sight of the specific difference of the
two future vehicles--the ethereal is regarded as a sublimation of the
aerial. This, however, is opposed to the general consensus of Plato's
commentators. Sometimes the ethereal body, or augoeides, is appropriated
to the rational soul, or spirit, which must then be considered as a
distinct entity, separable from the lower soul. Philoponus, a Christian
writer, says, "that the Rational Soul, as to its energie, is separable
from all body, but the irrational part or life thereof is separable only
from this gross body, and not from all body whatsoever, but hath after
death a spirituous or airy body, in which it acteth--this I say is a
true opinion which shall afterwards be proved by us.... The irrational
life of the soul hath not all its being in this gross earthly body, but
remaineth after the soul's departure out of it, having for its vehicle
and subject the spirituous body, which itself is also compounded out of
the four elements, but receiveth its denomination from the predominant
part, to wit, Air, as this gross body of ours is called earthy from what
is most predominant therein."--Cudworth, "Intell. Syst." From the same
source we extract the following: "Wherefore these ancients say that
impure souls after their departure out of this body wander here up and
down for a certain space in their spirituous vaporous and airy body,
appearing about sepulchres and haunting their former habitation. For
which cause there is great reason that we should take care of living
well, as also of abstaining from a fouler and grosser diet; these
Ancients telling us likewise that this spirituous body of ours being
fouled and incrassated by evil diet, is apt to render the soul in this
life also more obnoxious to the disturbances of passions. They further
add that there is something of the Plantal or Plastic life, also
exercised by the soul, in those spirituous or airy bodies after death;
they being nourished too, though not after the same manner, as those
gross earthy bodies of ours are here, but by vapours, and that not by
parts or organs, but throughout the whole of them (as sponges), they
imbibing everywhere those vapours. For which cause they who are wise
will in this life also take care of using a thinner and dryer diet, that
so that spirituous body (which we have also at this present time within
our proper body) may not be clogged and incrassed, but attenuated. Over
and above which, those Ancients made use of catharms, or purgations to
the same end and purpose also. For as this earthy body is washed by
water so is that spirituous body cleansed by cathartic vapours--some of
these vapours being nutritive, others purgative. Moreover, these
Ancients further declared concerning this spirituous body that it was
not organized, but did the whole of it in every part throughout exercise
all functions of sense, the soul hearing, seeing and perceiving all
sensibles by it everywhere. For which cause Aristotle himself affirmeth
in his Metaphysics that there is properly but one sense and one Sensory.
He by this one sensory meaneth the spirit, or subtle airy body, in which
the sensitive power doth all of it through the whole immediately
apprehend all variety of sensibles. And if it be demanded to how it
comes to pass that this spirit becomes organized in sepulchres, and most
commonly of human form, but sometimes in the forms of other animals, to
this those Ancients replied that their appearing so frequently in human
form proceeded from their being incrassated with evil diet, and then, as
it were, stamped upon with the form of this exterior ambient body in
which they are, as crystal is formed and coloured like to those things
which it is fastened in, or reflects the image of them. And that their
having sometimes other different forms proceedeth from the phantastic
power of the soul itself, which can at pleasure transform the spirituous
body into any shape. For being airy, when it is condensed and fixed, it
becometh visible, and again invisible and vanishing out of sight when it
is expanded and rarified." Proem in Arist. de Anima. And Cudworth
says, "Though spirits or ghosts had certain supple bodies which they
could so far condense as to make them sometimes visible to men, yet is
it reasonable enough to think that they could not constipate or fix them
into such a firmness, grossness and solidity, as that of flesh and bone
is to continue therein, or at least not without such difficulty and pain
as would hinder them from attempting the same. Notwithstanding which it
is not denied that they may possibly sometimes make use of other solid
bodies, moving and acting them, as in that famous story of Phlegons when
the body vanished not as other ghosts use to do, but was left a dead
carcase behind."
In all these speculations the Anima Mundi plays a conspicuous part. It
is the source and principle of all animal souls, including the
irrational soul of man. But in man, who would otherwise be merely
analogous to other terrestrial animals--this soul participates in a
higher principle, which tends to raise and convert it to itself. To
comprehend the nature of this union or hypostasis it would be necessary
to have mastered the whole of Plato's philosophy as comprised in the
Parmenides and the Timaeus; and he would dogmatize rashly who without
this arduous preparation should claim Plato as the champion of an
unconditional immortality. Certainly in the Phaedo the dialogue
popularly supposed to contain all Plato's teaching on the subject--the
immortality allotted to the impure soul is of a very questionable
character, and we should rather infer from the account there given that
the human personality, at all events, is lost by successive immersions
into "matter." The following passage from Plutarch (quoted by Madame
Blavatsky, "Isis Unveiled," vol. ii. p. 284) will at least demonstrate
the antiquity of notions which have recently been mistaken for fanciful
novelties. "Every soul hath some portion of nous, reason, a man cannot
be a man without it; but as much of each soul as is mixed with flesh
and appetite is changed, and through pain and pleasure becomes
irrational. Every soul doth not mix herself after one sort; some
plunge themselves into the body, and so in this life their whole frame
is corrupted by appetite and passion; others are mixed as to some part,
but the purer part still remains without the body. It is not drawn down
into the body, but it swims above, and touches the extremest part of the
man's head; it is like a cord to hold up and direct the subsiding part
of the soul, as long as it proves obedient and is not overcome by the
appetites of the flesh. The part that is plunged into the body is
called soul. But the incorruptible part is called the nous, and the
vulgar think it is within them, as they likewise imagine the image
reflected from a glass to be in that glass. But the more intelligent,
who know it to be without, call it a Daemon." And in the same learned
work ("Isis Unveiled ") we have two Christian authorities, Irenaeus and
Origen, cited for like distinction between spirit and soul in such a
manner as to show that the former must necessarily be regarded as
separable from the latter. In the distinction itself there is of course
no novelty for the most moderately well-informed. It is insisted upon
in many modern works, among which may be mentioned Heard's "Trichotomy
of Man" and Green's "Spiritual Philosophy"; the latter being an
exposition of Coleridge's opinion on this and cognate subjects. But the
difficulty of regarding the two principles as separable in fact as well
as in logic arises from the senses, if it is not the illusion of
personal identity. That we are particle, and that one part only is
immortal, the non-metaphysical mind rejects with the indignation which
is always encountered by a proposition that is at once distasteful and
unintelligible. Yet perhaps it is not a greater difficulty (if, indeed,
it is not the very same) than that hard saying which troubled Nicodemus,
and which has been the key-note of the mystical religious consciousness
ever since. This, however, is too extensive and deep a question to be
treated in this paper, which has for its object chiefly to call
attention to the distinctions introduced by ancient thought into the
conception of body as the instrument or "vehicle" of soul. That there
is a correspondence between the spiritual condition of man and the
medium of his objective activity every spiritualist will admit to be
probable, and it may well be that some light is thrown on future states
by the possibility or the manner of spirit communication with this one.
--C. C. Massey