Even as a difficulty against human superiority and immortality, the “recognition” is by no means recent. We find it squarely faced in a book of the Old Testament, the entire book being devoted to the solution of the difficulty in question. “I said in my heart concerning the estate of the sons of men ... that they might see they are themselves beasts. For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them; as the one dieth so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that man hath no preeminence above a beast; for all is vanity. All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all return to dust. Who knoweth the spirit of man whether it goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast whether it goeth downward to the earth?” (_Ecclesiastes_, III: 18-21.) The sacred writer insists that, so far as the body is concerned, man and the brute stand on the same level; but what of the human soul? Is it, he asks, resolvable into matter like the soul of a beast, or is it a supermaterial principle destined, not for time, but for eternity? At the close of the book, the conclusion is reached that the latter alternative is the true solution of the riddle of human nature—“the dust returneth to the earth whence it was, and the spirit returneth to God who gave it.” (Ch. XII, v. 7.) Centuries, therefore, before the Christian era, this problem was formulated by Ecclesiastes, the Jew, and also, as we shall presently see, by Aristotle, the coryphæus of Greek philosophy. Nay, from time immemorial man, contrasting his aspirations after immortality with the spectacle of corporal death, has appreciated to the full the significance of his own animality. Never was there question of whether man is, or is not, just as thoroughly an animal as any beast, but rather of whether, his animal nature being unhesitatingly conceded, we are not, none the less, forced to recognize in him, over and above this, the existence of a spiritual mind or soul, differentiating him from the brute and constituting him a being unique, despite the unmistakable homologies discernible between bestial organisms and the human body. Everywhere and always mankind as a whole have manifested, by the universal and uniquely human practice of burying the dead, their unswerving and indomitable conviction that man is spirit as well as flesh, an animal, indeed, yet animated by something not present in the animal, namely, a spiritual soul, deathless and indestructible, capable of surviving the decay of the organism and of persisting throughout eternity.