they make the discovery that they are undoubtedly to live again.  To the question “how are the dead raised up, and with what body do they come?” modern Spiritualism, with its empirical methods, is not adequate to reply.  Yet long before Paul suggested it, it had the attention of the most celebrated schools of philosophy, whose speculations on the subject, however little they may seem to be verified, ought not to be without interest to us, who, after all, are still in the infancy of a spiritualist revival.

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* “I am afraid,” says Thomas Taylor in his Introduction to the Phaedo,
“there are scarcely any at the present day who know that it is one thing
for the soul to be separated from the body, and another for the body to
be separated from the soul, and that the former is by no means a
necessary consequence of the latter.”
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It would not be necessary to premise, but for the frequency with which the phrase occurs, that the “spiritual body” is a contradiction in terms.  The office of body is to relate spirit to an objective world.  By Platonic writers it is usually termed okhema—­“vehicle.”  It is the medium of action, and also of sensibility.  In this philosophy the conception of Soul was not simply, as with us, the immaterial subject of consciousness.  How warily the interpreter has to tread here, every one knows who has dipped, even superficially, into the controversies among Platonists themselves.  All admit the distinction between the rational and the irrational part or principle, the latter including, first, the sensibility, and secondly, the Plastic, or that lower which in obedience to its sympathies enables the soul to attach itself to, and to organize into a suitable body those substances of the universe to which it is most congruous.  It is more difficult to determine whether Plato or his principal followers, recognized in the rational soul or nous a distinct and separable entity, that which is sometimes discriminated as “the Spirit.”  Dr. Henry More, no mean authority, repudiates this interpretation.  “There can be nothing more monstrous,” he says, “than to make two souls in man, the one sensitive, the other rational, really distinct from one another, and to give the name of Astral spirit to the former, when there is in man no Astral spirit beside the Plastic of the soul itself, which is always inseparable from that which is rational.  Nor upon any other account can it be called Astral, but as it is liable to that corporeal temperament which proceeds from the stars, or rather from any material causes in general, as not being yet sufficiently united with the divine body—­that vehicle of divine virtue or power.”  So he maintains that the Kabalistic three souls—­Nephesh, Ruach, Neschamah—­originate in a misunderstanding of the true Platonic doctrine, which is that of a threefold “vital congruity.”  These correspond to the three degrees of bodily existence, or to the three “vehicles,” the terrestrial,