The Greeks expressed the same idea by saying that the ψυχή had left the body,(27) had fled through the mouth, or even through a bleeding wound,(28) and had gone into Hades, which meant literally no more than the place of the Invisible (Ἁίδης). That the breath had become invisible was matter of fact; that it had gone to the house of Hades, was mythology springing spontaneously from the fertile soil of language. The primitive mythology was by no means necessarily religious. In the very case which we have chosen, philosophical mythology sprang up by the side of religious mythology. The religious mythology consisted in speaking of the spirits of the departed as ghosts, as mere breath and air, as fluttering about the gates of Hades, or ferried across the Styx in the boat of Charon.(29) The philosophical mythology, however, that sprang from this name was much more important. We saw that _Psyche_, meaning originally the breathing of the body, was gradually used in the sense of vital breath, and as something independent of the body; and that at last, when it had assumed the meaning of the immortal part of man, it retained that character of something independent of the body, thus giving rise to the conception of a soul, not only as a being without a body, but in its very nature opposed to body. As soon as that opposition had been established in language and thought, philosophy began its work in order to explain how two such heterogeneous powers could act on each other—how the soul could influence the body, and how the body could determine the soul. Spiritualistic and materialistic systems of philosophy arose, and all this in order to remove a self-created difficulty, in order to join together again what language had severed, the living body and the living soul. The question whether there is a soul or spirit, whether there is in man something different from the mere body, is not at all affected by this mythological phraseology. We certainly can distinguish between body and soul, but as long as we keep within the limits of human knowledge, we have no right to speak of the living soul as a breath, or of spirits and ghosts as fluttering about like birds or fairies. The poet of the nineteenth century says:— “The spirit does but mean the breath, I know no more.” And the same thought was expressed by Cicero two thousand years ago: “Whether the soul is air or fire, I do not know.” As men, we only know of embodied spirits, however ethereal their bodies may be conceived to be, but of spirits, separate from body, without form or frame, we know as little as we know of thought without language, or of the Dawn as a goddess, or of the Night as the mother of the Day.