The most satisfactory is the first of these. _We_ call the soul a ghost or spirit, and often a shade. In these words, the _breath_ and the _shadow_ are the sensuous perceptions transferred to represent the immaterial object of our thought. Why the former was chosen, I have already explained; and for the latter, that it is man's intangible image, his constant companion, and is of a nature akin to darkness, earth, and night, are sufficiently obvious reasons.
These same tropes recur in American languages in the same connection. The New England tribes called the soul _chemung_, the shadow, and in Quiché _natub_, in Eskimo _tarnak_, express both these ideas. In Mohawk _atonritz_, the soul, is from _atonrion_, to breathe, and other examples to the same purpose have already been given.[235-1]
Of course no one need demand that a strict immateriality be attached to these words. Such a colorless negative abstraction never existed for them, neither does it for us, though we delude ourselves into believing that it does. The soul was to them the invisible man, material as ever, but lost to the appreciation of the senses.
Nor let any one be astonished if its unity was doubted, and several supposed to reside in one body. This is nothing more than a somewhat gross form of a doctrine upheld by most creeds and most philosophies. It seems the readiest solution of certain psychological enigmas, and may, for aught we know, be an instinct of fact. The Rabbis taught a threefold division--_nephesh_, the animal, _ruah_, the human, and _neshamah_, the divine soul, which corresponds to that of Plato into _thumos_, _epithumia_, and _nous_. And even Saint Paul seems to have recognized such inherent plurality when he distinguishes between the bodily soul, the intellectual soul, and the spiritual gift, in his Epistle to the Romans. No such refinements of course as these are to be expected among the red men; but it may be looked upon either as the rudiments of these teachings, or as a gradual debasement of them to gross and material expression, that an old and wide-spread notion was found among both Iroquois and Algonkins, that man has two souls, one of a vegetative character, which gives bodily life, and remains with the corpse after death, until it is called to enter another body; another of more ethereal texture, which in life can depart from the body in sleep or trance, and wander over the world, and at death goes directly to the land of Spirits.[236-1]