I am not going to enter on that subject beyond stating my conviction that it is a mistake in poems, such as the Iliad and Odyssey, to look for a consistent use of words. Much has been written by Greek scholars about the exact meaning of psyche in every passage where that word occurs in Homer. But we can clearly see that what passed through the ἕρκος ὀδόντων was originally meant for the actual breath. Even in this passage we might translate it by life, or by soul, without destroying the sense. This word ψυχή, as you know, assumed afterwards every possible kind of meaning. When a man dies, his psyche, his very breath, is said to have passed through the bar of his teeth, the ἕρκος ὀδόντων. The most common word for soul in Greek is psyche ( ψυχή). What we are now concerned with is what the language which Homer had inherited had to say to him on this subject. We shall have to speak of that hereafter. At present, I do not mean to speak of what the poet himself may have thought about the soul, about its work during life, and its fate after death. Let us look at Greek, as we find it in the Homeric poems. These three consecutive steps are not mere theory they have left their foot-prints in language, and even in our own language these foot-prints are not yet altogether effaced. If the breath, with all that belonged to it, had departed, then it must exist somewhere after its departure, and that somewhere, though utterly unknown and unknowable, was soon painted in all the colours that love, fear, and hope could supply. The third step was equally natural, though it soon led into a wilderness of imaginations. It certainly was seen to have departed at the same time as the breath. The next step was to use that word breath, not only for the breath which had left the body, but likewise for all that formerly existed in the breathing body, the feelings, the perceptions, the conceptions, and that wonderful network of intellectual threads which constituted the man such as he was in life. This was the first step in human psychology. If we only bear in mind, what is now a fact doubted by no one, that every word in every language had originally a material meaning, we shall easily understand why that which at the dissolution of the body seemed to have departed and which we consider the most immaterial of all things, should have been called at first by the name of something material, viz. In fact, whenever we examine that autobiography which man has left us in his language, we shall always find some good sense, something reasonable, even in what seems at first sight most unreasonable or foolish. We saw that there was nothing altogether unreasonable in such a name. W E saw in our last Lecture how man came first to speak about a soul, or, more correctly, about a breath. Discovery of the Soul in Man and in Nature.
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