Reviewing passages in which Epictetus had mentioned the “soul,” I was more perplexed than ever. For in those he distinctly recognised the “_soul_” as “_better than the flesh_,” or “_better than the body_,” and as using the body as its instrument. When, therefore, he spoke of God as saying to man, “Come!” he ought to have supposed God to be addressing _the whole man, soul as well as body, or perhaps the soul alone_, (using the body, or the flesh, as its instrument). But if God said to the human soul “Come!” how could He go on to say “Such part as was fire in you” and so on, just as though we knew, without proof, that the _soul_ was composed of nothing but fire, earth, air and water? We knew no such thing. On the contrary, Epictetus continually assumed that we have within ourselves “mind” and “logos.” He also said that “The being of God” is “mind, knowledge, right logos.” Now he could hardly suppose that “mind” and “logos” were composed of fire, earth, air, and water. For my part, I did not feel that I knew anything certain about the distinctions between “mind,” “soul,” “logos” and “I.” But those who made distinctions appeared to me under an obligation to say what they meant by them. It appeared to me that our Master had been inconsistent. As a rule, he dealt with each of us as having a soul that was our real self, and a body that was the tool of the soul. “Tyrants,” he would say, “can hurt your _body_ but they cannot hurt _you_.” Might not a pupil of his go on consistently to say, “Death can kill your _body_ but it cannot kill _you_”? This, at all events, was what Socrates meant, when he said, “As for me, Meletus could not hurt me.… He might kill, or banish, or degrade,” for he certainly meant “kill” the _body_, not “kill” the _soul_. Subsequently, when I came to read the Christian gospels, I found two of them making this distinction in the words, “Be not afraid of them that kill the body.” One of them added, “but cannot kill the soul,” the other added “but cannot do anything more.” Then I understood more clearly why Epictetus said nothing about what became of the soul after death. For these two Christian writers spoke of a possibility that the soul might be “destroyed in hell” or “cast into hell.” Now this was just what Epictetus did not himself believe, and wished to make others disbelieve. He preferred to give up the belief of Socrates that the good “go to the islands of the blessed” after death, rather than believe also that the bad go to a place of the accursed. Hence he dropped all thought of the essential part, or parts, of man, namely, the soul, mind, and logos, as soon as he came to speak of man’s death.