(_a_) To illustrate this thought further, the Hindoo merely subtilizes his life to the most empty of abstractions, that is in result one that therewith negates every form of concrete content. Such a Brahm-becoming process is not to be found in Egypt; rather we find here that the invisible possesses a fuller significance; the corpse secures the content of the living body itself, which, however, as torn away from immediate existence, in its retirement from actual life[61], still possesses its relation to that which is alive, and in this concrete form is maintained as self-subsistent. It is a well-known fact that the Egyptians embalmed and revered cats, dogs, hawks, ichneumons, bears, and wolves (Herod., II, 67), but most of all the dead human body (Herod., II, 86-90). By them the honour paid to the dead is not that of burial, but its preservation from age to age as a corpse. (_b_) And moreover we may observe that the Egyptians do not merely remain constant to this immediate and still wholly natural permanency of the dead. That which is preserved in its physical or natural aspect is also conceived to endure in a form present to the imagination. Herodotus informs us that the Egyptians were the first who held the doctrine that the human soul is immortal. We consequently find that they are the first who present to us a more exalted mode of this resolution of the natural and spiritual, a mode that is to say, under which it is not merely the natural body which secures an independent self-subsistence. The immortality of the soul is a conception which borders closely upon the freedom of Spirit. The Ego is here apprehended as removed from the purely natural mode of its existence, reposing on its own substance. This knowledge of itself, however, is the principle of freedom. No doubt we are not justified in asserting that the Egyptians grasped the notion of spiritual freedom in its profoundest sense. We must not imagine that their belief in the immortality of the soul is identical with our own form of that belief; but they already possessed the power to retain securely that which was separated from Life under a form of existence visible only to the imagination, no less than one in which it was identical with the bodily material. They have thereby made possible the passage to the full emancipation of Spirit, albeit it was but the threshold of the temple of freedom that they passed over. This fundamental conception of theirs is further expanded to a unified and substantial Kingdom of the Departed set up in contrast to the immediate presence of the real. A Court of Justice of the Dead is held in this invisible state over which Osiris as Amenthes presides. One of similar character is also instituted in the sphere of immediate reality, justice being executed even among men over the dead, and after the decease of a king every one was entitled to submit his grievances to that court.