Whilst the _Theorists_ take the predicate of God, when applied even to a fetish, as requiring no explanation, the _Historical School_ sees in it the result of a long continued evolution of thought. It was evident that the human soul was so constituted that it must tend naturally and inevitably towards the Unknown; it was also necessary that man should learn that he possessed a soul. We recognise that we have one; but are we equally clear as to what it is? We answer perhaps: “Yes, it is that part of us which is not the body which perishes--the soul is immortal.” It is well to be able to make such a reply, since it is true; our catechisms have sown the seed of which this is the result. But since all human knowledge, whether abstract or practical, has the same beginning, through the senses, and that neither eye, ear, nor hand has to do with the soul, what can we know of it? Above all, what can we learn of its existence after death, the time when immortality has passed beyond the sphere of the experience of the senses? As man we recognise the spirit inhabiting the body, but with no form, such as it might receive after death; we can hardly clothe these ideas in words. This belief in a soul, exactly like the belief in gods, and at last in One God, can only be understood as the outcome of constantly renewed observations and long meditations; the annals of language furnish material for this study, those ancient words, which, meaning originally something quite tangible and visible, came in time to mean that which is invisible and infinite. The last breath of a dying person gave the first conception of the presence in man of a non-corporeal principle; it was recognised that this perceptible breath, at the moment of death, was an accident and transient. Language marks clearly the difference between the act of breathing or breath, and that which breathed, the invisible agent of this act--the living soul, the spirit. This agent received different names, in the different languages; the Greeks named it Psyche, saying that it was the breath which, at the hour of death, passed out through the bars of the teeth; amongst the Hindoos it was called _Atman_, and _Anima_ amongst the Latins, two words which originally were understood by those using them as meaning something breathing. Cicero spoke of _Anima_, but he refrained from defining it, and frankly avowed that he did not know whether to call it breath or fire. The word breath has been used figuratively to express the Power governing the world.[111] A poet in the Veda when speaking of the Supreme Being says, “It breathed without air.”