A Study in Human Nature Author:Lyman Abbott Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. TRUE AND FALSE MATERIALISM. It is common,even in the pulpit, to hear the phrase,"Man has a soul; " and it is scarcely possible to avoid embodyin... more »g this same thought sometimes in the phrase "man's soul," which is only an abbreviation. This phrase, however, expresses a falsehood. It is not true that man has a soul. Man is a soul. It would be more accurate to say that man has a body. We may say that the body has a soul, or that the soul has a body; as we may say that the ship has a captain, or the captain has a ship; but we ought never to forget that the true man is the mental and spiritual; the body is only the instrument which the mental and the spiritual uses. Still more accurately, however, man, as we see him and have to do with him in this life, is composed, in Paul's language, of body, soul, and spirit. The distinction between these three we must consider hereafter. Here it must be enough to say : i. That the body is purely physical, as much so as a tree; that it is composed of certain well-known physical elements, and subject to physical laws. 2. That the mind or soul (in Latin the anima, in Greek the pseuche) is that which sees, feels, thinks, and that it is analogous to that which controls the body in the animals, though in man possessing powers vastly superior to those observed in any mere animal. 3. That the spirit (in Latin spiritus, in Greek pneuma) is that which deals with the invisible, believes, reverences, distinguishes between right and wrong, and that there is nothing analogous to it in the animal creation. The body links us to the earth, the mind to the animal creation, the spirit to God. To understand human nature we must understand the relation which the mind and spirit, that is, the invisible part of man, has to the body, that is, to the p...« less