But as we aim at the education of the spirit, we may or we may not take care of the body; or again we may take care of it in this or that way. It all depends on what conception we have of the spirit. The ancients made a great deal of physical culture, and the Greek philosophers of antiquity considered gymnastics to be the essential complement of music, including in music all forms of spiritual cultivation. The ancients never divided the spirit from the physical reality of man: man as a whole (body and psychic activity) was conceived by them as a natural being subject to the mechanism which regulates and controls nature. When Greek psychology fell under the influence of that mystic outlook which is peculiar to religious belief, the soul, which was opposed to the body, and which was looked upon as chained and emprisoned in the body, was sharply distinguished from another soul. That other soul was kept in contact with the materiality of all natural things, and together with them was governed by the law of mechanical becoming, that is, of the transformations caused by motion by which all the parts of matter are bestirred. This natural soul, susceptible of development, and capable of gradually rising to the height of the other, of the pure bodiless mind whose act is the contemplation of truth; this soul imbedded in the body, which does not therefore give to man a supernatural being, but like all things of nature comes into the world, grows and dies, incessantly passing from one mode of being to another, this soul is the one that can and ought to be educated. The soul which results from the organic process of the physical body, and which in its development proceeds side by side with the transformations of the latter, could not be educated except in connection with the development and improvement of the body. Human thought, which then had not yet secured the consciousness of its own irreducible opposition to nature,--the consciousness, in other words, of its own essential freedom,--seeing itself immersed even as spiritual substance in the indistinctness of nature, could not look upon education as upon a problem of freedom which can not admit of nature as limiting spiritual activity. It was accordingly reduced to conceive this activity, displayed in dealing with man, as being on the same plane with the other forms of activity which propose to deal with things of nature. In a pedagogical naturalism of this sort, the mind could not be the mind without also being body, and therefore had to include physical development in its own process.