"There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body." This phrase had haunted his mind from the earliest days. And he had always had a sort of hatred of the thing his Aunts, and the parson, and the poets, called The Spirit, with a capital S. It had always, with him, been connected with his Sunday clothes, and best behaviour, and a certain exalted falseness. Part of his natural naughtiness had arisen from his vindictive dislike and contempt of The Spirit, and things of The Spirit.
Now it began to seem different to him. He knew, he always had known, that the Bible really meant something absolutely different from what the Aunts, and the parson, and even the poets meant by the Spirit, or the spiritual body.
Since he had seen the Great God in the roaring of the yellow sun, and the frightening vast smile in the gleaming full-moon following him, the new moon like a delicate weapon-thrust in the western sky, and the stars in disarray, like a scattered flock of sheep bunching and communing together in a strange bush, in the vast heavens, he had gradually come to know the difference between the natural body and the spiritual body. The natural body was like in England, where the sun rises naturally to make day, and passes naturally at sunset, owing to the earth's revolving; where the moon "raises her lamp above," on a dear night, and the stars are "candles" in heaven. That is the natural body: all the cosmos just a natural fact. And a man loves a woman so that they can propagate their species. The natural body.
And the spiritual body is supposed to be something thin and immaterial, that can float through a brick wall and subsist on mere thought. Jack had always hated this thin, wafting object. He preferred his body solid. He loved the beautiful weight and transfigured solidity of living limbs. He had no use whatsoever for the gossamer stuff of the supposed "ethereal," or "pure," spirit: like evaporated alcohol. He had a natural dislike of Shelley, and vegetarians, and socialists, and all advocates of "spirit." He hated Blake's pictures, with people waving like the wrong kind of sea-weed, in the sky, instead of under water.
Hated it all. Till hating it had almost made him wicked.