From this cumulative evidence it is manifest that the _ruach_ is all-pervading. It is in heaven, in sheol, or in the dust of the deepest hollow; in the uttermost depths of the sea; in the darkness as well as in the light; in all things animate and inanimate. In the broadest, or I may say, in an illimitable sense, it is an _universal_ principle. It is the substratum of all motion, whether manifested in the revolutions of the planets, in the ebb and flow of the sea, in winds and storms and tempests, or in the organisms of plants and animals. The atmospheric expanse is charged with it; but it is not the air. Animals and plants breathe it, but it is not their breath; yet without it, though filled with air, they would die. _Neshemet el_, or atmospheric air, is the breath of God, as Job puts it, or the mighty expanse, as affirmed by Moses. What the _ruach_, or spirit, is, none with certainty can say. Extending from the centre of the earth, and thence in all directions through the immensity of space, is the _Ruach Elohim_, whose existence is demonstrable from the phenomena of the natural order of things. It penetrates where _neshemet el_ cannot penetrate, but when speaking of the motivity and sustentation of organized dust, or souls, they co-exist with them, the _Ruach Elohim_ becoming the _ruach chayim_, or spirit of lives; the _neshemet el_, the _neshemet chayim_, or breath of lives, and both together in the elaboration and support of life, the _neshemet ruach chayim_, or breath of the spirit of lives. Living creatures, or souls, are not animated, as is erroneously supposed, by a vital principle which is capable of disembodied existence. On the contrary, souls are made living by the coetaneous operation of the _ruach chayim_ and the _neshemet chayim_ upon their organized tissues according to certain fixed laws, called natural laws. When the as yet occult laws of the all-pervading _ruach_, or spirit, shall be made known, men will be astonished at their ignorance respecting living souls, as we are at the notion of the ancients that their immortal gods resided in the stocks and the stones they so ignorantly worshipped. Though lent to the creatures of the natural world for the allotted period of their living existence, yet the _ruach chayim_ and _neshemet chayim_ are still God’s breath and God’s spirit, and to distinguish them from the expanse of air and spirit in their totality, they are sometimes specifically styled “the spirit of man” and “the spirit of the beast,” or collectively “the spirits of all flesh,” and “their breath.” Thus it is written in Ecclesiastes, “they have all _one ruach_, or spirit, so that man hath no preëminence over a beast; for all is vanity or vapor.” “All go to one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.” And in the sense of supplying to every living creature, or soul, spirit and breath, Jehovah is styled by Moses in the book of Numbers,--“God of the _spirits_ of _all flesh_.”