Page:Swedenborg's Doctrine of Correspondence.djvu/30

24 the soul is; and this not alone as regards a future life, but our present existence. Hitherto, perhaps no term in the language has been so indeterminate as this word soul. In the old faiths it is a name with no answering reality; and now in this day, of positive ideas and strict definitions, we need to define the soul, to exhibit it to thought, or cease to use a name for which we have nothing as a relative.

The history of opinion is not a development in this case, but a round of affirmations carrying us back to the point in which it started on its speculative career. If we attempt to reduce the ancient opinions to a general summary we shall find that between the remotest period of history and the dawn of Christianity, speculative philosophy had covered substantially the same ground as that to-day occupied by the metaphysicians and materialists.

1. There were those who believed the soul to be elemental in its nature and therefore attributed body to it; among these, such as believed in a divine, universally pervading element, allowed the soul immortality, which was denied by those who believed in no