the fact that spirit and wind in some languages are the same word; also, that when a man dies, he is said to give up the ghost or spirit; also, that life returns, after suffocation or swooning, when the spirit or breath of the lungs comes back.  Because in these cases nothing but the breath or air is perceived, it is concluded from the eye and bodily sense that the spirit and soul of man after death is not the man.  From this corporeal conclusion about the spirit and soul, various hypotheses have arisen, and these have given birth to a belief that man after death does not become a man until the day of the last judgment, and that meanwhile his spirit remains somewhere or other awaiting reunion with the body, according to what has been shown in the Continuation concerning the Last Judgment (n. 32-38).  Because man’s mind is his spirit, the angels, who also are spirits, are called minds.

387.  Man’s mind is his spirit, and the spirit is the man, because by the mind all things of man’s will and understanding are meant, which things are in first principles in the brains and in derivatives in the body; therefore in respect to their forms they are all things of man.  This being so, the mind (that is, the will and understanding) impels the body and all its belongings at will.  Does not the body do whatever the mind thinks and wills?  Does not the mind incite the ear to hear, and direct the eye to see, move the tongue and the lips to speak, impel the hands and fingers to do whatever it pleases, and the feet to walk whither it will?  Is the body, then, anything but obedience to its mind; and can the body be such unless the mind is in its derivatives in the body?  Is it consistent with reason to think that the body acts from obedience simply because the mind so wills? in which case they should be two, the one above and the other below, one commanding, the other obeying.  As this is in no way consistent with reason, it follows that man’s life is in its first principles in the brains, and in its derivatives in the body (according to what has been said above, n. 365); also that such as life is in first principles, such it is in the whole and in every part (n. 366); and by means of these first principles life is in the whole from every part, and in every part from the whole (n. 367).  That all things of the mind have relation to the will and understanding, and that the will and understanding are the receptacles of love and wisdom from the Lord, and that these two make the life of man, has been shown in the preceding pages.

388.  From what has now been said it can also be seen that man’s mind is the man himself.  For the primary texture of the human form, that is, the human form itself with each and every thing thereof, is from first principles continued from the brain through the nerves, in the manner described above.  It is this form into which man comes after death, who is then called a spirit or an angel, and who is in all completeness a man, but a spiritual man.