This I would willingly avoid. But it is quite intelligible, and touches on no dangerous ground, when we assert that there is a distinct ascent--an interval again raising developmental difficulties, directly we pass from the intellectual to the moral. We may wonder at the high degree of intelligence possessed by some animals; but we are unable to conceive any animal possessing a power of abstract reasoning, having ideas of beauty (as such), or of manifesting what we call the poetic feeling. And still more is this so when we look at the further interval that lies between any perception of physical phenomena, any reasoning in the abstract, or investigation of mathematical truth, and the overmastering sense of obligation to the "moral law," or the action of the soul in its instinctive possession of the conception of a Divine Existence external to itself. It is because of this felt difference that we talk of the "spiritual" as something beyond and above the "mental." The distinction is real, though we must not allow ourselves to be led too far in attempting to scan the close union that, from another point of view, exists between the one and the other. In a recent number of "The Edinburgh Review,[1]" the author complains of Bishop Temple thus: "He uses the word spiritual in such a way that he might be taken to imply that we had some other faculty for the perception of moral truths, in addition to, and distinct from, our reason." And the writer goes on to make an "uncompromising assertion of reason as the one supreme faculty of man. To depreciate reason (he says) to the profit of some supposed 'moral' illative sense, would be to open the door to the most desolating of all scepticisms, and to subordinate the basis of our highest intellectual power to some mere figment of the imagination." [Footnote 1: July, 1885, p. 211, in the course of the article to which I have already alluded.] On the other hand, some writers (claiming to derive their argument from the Scriptures) have supposed they could assert three distinct natures in man--a spiritual, a mental (or psychic), and a bodily. Now there is no doubt that, rightly or wrongly (I am not now concerned with that), the Bible does distinctly assert that a "breath of lives" [1] was specially put into the bodily form of man, and adds that thereby "man became a living soul." But it is also stated of the animal creation that the breath of life was given to them,[2] and animals are said to have a "soul" (nephesh).[3] So that neither in the one case nor the other have we more than the two elements: a body, and a life put into it; though of course the man's "life" (as the plural indicates, and other texts explain) was higher in kind than that of the animal. [Footnote 1: The plural of excellence appears to mark something superior in the spirit of man over that of the animals. Also compare Job xxxiii. 4, "The breath of the Almighty hath given me life," with Isa. xlii. 5 and Zech. xii. 1.]