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.”
Although the word breath was most frequently used to denote the principle of life, another expression was employed at a much earlier period; in countries the most remote from each other, the words, _the shadow of the dead_, were used, in order to express the idea of something intangible yet closely related to the body. The influence of language on thought is so real and so much more powerful than the testimony of our senses, that those who named the soul a shadow, came at last to believe that corpses threw no shadow because it had left them.
It was then considered that the soul was not a homogeneous whole, but composed of parts of which some are ephemeral, destined to disappear with the body; these parts form what the Greek and Latin writers call the Ego, and the Hindoos _Aham_, what in French would be termed the _moi_--three words for one thing--an object of contingency, since it depends on circumstances--on the body, on age, and on sex.
All men have endeavoured to solve the riddle of human life; but the Hindoos, who especially excelled in researches dealing with the formation of words, that is to say, with the birth or development of ideas, whilst penetrating deeply into the mysteries of their soul, their Atman, arrived at an abstraction of this Atman, entirely freed from all earthly or physical particles, and this “vehicle of an abstraction” they considered to be incapable of perishing, since it had no connection with breath, it was the pure self, “freed from the fetters and conditions of the human Ego,” hidden in the _Aham_; not contingent on circumstances--the self-existent One.
This new conception demanded a new name; the word Atman, which at first signified all the concomitant elements of the soul--those which pass, equally with those that remain--the Hindoos retained in their language, and it was used to define the essence itself, the being with no attributes, identical with the Being who vivified nature, the Infinite that supported man’s own being, the Highest Self. Socrates knew this same Self, but he called it _Daimonion_, the indwelling God, whom the early Christians called the Holy Ghost.