something like a breath of air, and not a "nothing", any more than the wind its relative, {31} but a body with a definite form (though it may not be visible to waking eyes)--this is the psyche, whose shape, the image of the man himself, is well known from dream-vision. One, however, who has become accustomed to the idea of bodiless powers working inside man will, on this last occasion when the powers within man show themselves, be likely to suppose that what brings about the death of a man is not a physical thing that goes out of him, but a power--a quality--which ceases to act; nothing else, in fact, than his "life". And he would not, of course, think of ascribing an independent continuous existence after the disruption of the body to a mere abstract idea like "life". Homer, however, never got quite as far as this; for the most part the psyche is for him and always remains a real "thing"--the man's second self. But that he had already begun to tread the slippery path in the course of which the psyche is transformed into an abstract "concept of life", is shown by the fact that he several times quite unmistakably uses the word "psyche" when we should say "life".[59\1] It is essentially the same mode of thought that leads him to say "midriff" (~phre/nes~) when he no longer means the physical diaphragm, but the abstract concept of will or intellect. To say "psyche" instead of "life" is not the same thing as saying "life" instead of "psyche" (and Homer never did the latter); but it is clear that for him in the process of dematerializing such concepts, even the psyche, a figure once so full of significance, is beginning to fade and vanish away.