Man turns his gaze from the things that surround him to himself; he feels superior to the physical phenomena, to the rivers, to the mountains. He possesses another nature to that of the sun, of the stars. He has discovered something in himself that is more than his body. What is it? how is he to name it? He saw his father or his mother, who had formerly been in every respect like himself, prostrate, without motion, without speech. What had happened? What was it that had left them? Knowing the root _as_, and its derivative _as-u_, he called it from the first breath, then spirit, which originally meant nothing more than the air absorbed by the lungs, from which it is exhaled as breath. Nothing constrained our ancestors to believe that because they had seen their parents die and their bodies decay, it must follow that what had hitherto animated them was now annihilated. This notion may have entered the brain of a philosopher, but man in his primitive simplicity, though doubtless terrified at the sight of death, would naturally incline to the belief that what he had known and loved, and had called by the names of father and mother, must still exist somewhere, although not in the body. The breath had not been seen to decay. What had become of it? Various answers were given to this question, at divers times and in divers countries. They were all equally probable; no objections could be made to them, but neither was there proof; they are beyond the reach of proof. “The best answer was perhaps that contained in the most ancient Greek language and mythology, that the souls had gone to the house of the Invisible, of _Aides_. No one has ever said anything truer.”