A cognate question is that of the _community of soul and body_. This community (interdependence) was assumed as a _fact_, and the only problem was how to _comprehend_ it. The usual answer, perhaps, was to call it an _incomprehensible_ mystery; and, indeed, if we take them to be absolutely antithetical and absolutely independent, they are as impenetrable to each other as one piece of matter to another, each being supposed to be found only in the pores of the other, i.e. where the other is not: whence Epicurus, when attributing to the gods a residence in the pores, was consistent in not imposing on them any connexion with the world. A somewhat different answer has been given by all philosophers since this relation came to be expressly discussed. Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibnitz have all indicated God as this _nexus_. They meant that the finitude of soul and matter were only ideal and unreal distinctions; and, so holding, these philosophers took God, not, as so often is done, merely as another word for the incomprehensible, but rather as the sole true identity of finite mind and matter. But either this identity, as in the case of Spinoza, is too abstract, or, as in the case of Leibnitz, though his Monad of monads brings things into being, it does so only by an act of judgment or choice. Hence, with Leibnitz, the result is a distinction between soul and the corporeal (or material), and the identity is only like the _copula_ of a judgment, and does not rise or develop into system, into the absolute syllogism. § 390. The Soul is at first— (_a_) In its immediate natural mode—the natural soul, which only _is_. (_b_) Secondly, it is a soul which _feels_, as individualised, enters into correlation with its immediate being, and, in the modes of that being, retains an abstract independence. (_c_) Thirdly, its immediate being—or corporeity—is moulded into it, and with that corporeity it exists as _actual_ soul. (a) The Physical Soul(119). § 391. The soul universal, described, it may be, as an _anima mundi_, a world-soul, must not be fixed on that account as a single subject; it is rather the universal _substance_ which has its actual truth only in individuals and single subjects. Thus, when it presents itself as a single soul, it is a single soul which _is_ merely: its only modes are modes of natural life. These have, so to speak, behind its ideality a free existence: i.e. they are natural objects for consciousness, but objects to which the soul as such does not behave as to something external. These features rather are _physical qualities_ of which it finds itself possessed. (α) Physical Qualities(120). § 392. While still a “substance” (i.e. a physical soul) the mind (1) takes part in the general planetary life, feels the difference of climates, the changes of the seasons and the periods of the day, &c. This life of nature for the main shows itself only in occasional strain or disturbance of mental tone.