SPIRIT.—The lack of any mutual agreement between writers in the use of this word has resulted in dire confusion. It is commonly made synonymous with _soul_; and the lexicographers countenance the usage. This is the natural result of our ignorance of the other word, and repudiation of the classification adopted by the ancients. Elsewhere we attempt to make clear the distinction between the terms “spirit” and “soul.” There are no more important passages in this work. Meanwhile, we will only add that “spirit” is the νοῦς of Plato, the immortal, immaterial, and purely _divine_ principle in man—the crown of the human _Triad_; whereas, SOUL is the ψυχη, or the _nephesh_ of the _Bible_; the vital principle, or the breath of life, which every animal, down to the infusoria, shares with man. In the translated _Bible_ it stands indifferently for _life_, blood, and soul. “Let us _not kill_ his nephesh,” says the original text: “let us not kill _him_,” translate the Christians (_Genesis_ xxxvii. 21), and so on. THEOSOPHISTS.—In the mediæval ages it was the name by which were known the disciples of Paracelsus of the sixteenth century, the so-called fire-philosophers or _Philosophi per ignem_. As well as the Platonists they regarded the soul (ψυχη) and the divine spirit, _nous_ (νοῦς), as a particle of the great Archos—a fire taken from the eternal ocean of light. The Theosophical Society, to which these volumes are dedicated by the author as a mark of affectionate regard, was organized at New York in 1875. The object of its founders was to experiment practically in the occult powers of Nature, and to collect and disseminate among Christians information about the Oriental religious philosophies. Later, it has determined to spread among the “poor benighted heathen” {xlii} such evidences as to the practical results of Christianity as will at least give both sides of the story to the communities among which missionaries are at work. With this view it has established relations with associations and individuals throughout the East, to whom it furnishes authenticated reports of the ecclesiastical crimes and misdemeanors, schisms and heresies, controversies and litigations, doctrinal differences and biblical criticisms and revisions, with which the press of Christian Europe and America constantly teems. Christendom has been long and minutely informed of the degradation and brutishness into which Buddhism, Brahmanism, and Confucianism have plunged their deluded votaries, and many millions have been lavished upon foreign missions under such false representations. The Theosophical Society, seeing daily exemplifications of this very state of things as the sequence of Christian teaching and example—the latter especially—thought it simple justice to make the facts known in Palestine, India, Ceylon, Cashmere, Tartary, Thibet, China, and Japan, in all which countries it has influential correspondents. It may also