Page:Swedenborg's Doctrine of Correspondence.djvu/31

Rh other elements but such as are tangible to our senses.

2. Another class believed the soul to consist in the harmony of bodily organization, and consequently to be inseparable from it; an opinion which re-appears in our day in very respectable company, and necessarily concludes against immortality.

3. By others the entire intellectual, rational, sensual, and vital force of the whole body was held to be separable and immortal; but it was believed to carry away from the body a pneumatic or ethereal limbus, from which it could only be disengaged by some process of purification, and when thus liberated ceased to have body.

This, of course is not an exhaustive classification of ancient opinion; but it is practically inclusive, and serves to show, that the ancient mind, apart from that kind of experience which philosophers pride themselves in neglecting—the experience of open seership—was unable to conceive of the soul as enjoying any other sensational organization than that of the material body. In so far as they were compelled to admit the reality of some of its sensations, they accounted for the supposed anomaly on the principle of