We have now discovered that it was an intellectually unjustified presumption on our forefathers' part to assume that man has a soul. It was believed that:
That soul has substance, is of a divine nature and therefore immortal
CW8 ¶ 654That there is a power inherent within it which builds up the body, sustains its life, heals its ills, and enables the soul to live independently of the body
CW8 ¶ 654That there are incorporeal spirits with which the soul associates
CW8 ¶ 654That beyond our empirical present there is a spiritual world from which the soul receives knowledge of spiritual things whose origins cannot be discovered in this visible world
CW8 ¶ 654According to a primitive view the soul is a fire or flame, because warmth is likewise a sign of life
CW8 ¶ 665The ancient view held that the soul was essentially the life of the body, the life-breath, or a kind of life force which assumed spatial and corporeal form at the moment of conception, or during pregnancy, or at birth, and left the dying body again after the final breath
CW8 ¶ 662The soul in itself was a being without extension, and because it existed before taking corporeal form and afterwards as well, it was considered timeless and hence, immortal
CW8 ¶ 662The standpoint of past ages, which, knowing the untold treasures of experience lying hidden beneath the threshold of the ephemeral individual consciousness, always held the individual soul to be dependent on a spiritual world-system. Not only did they make this hypothesis, they assumed without question that this system was a being with a will and consciousnesswas even a personand they called this being God, the quintessence of reality
CW8 ¶ 677He [God] was for them the most real of beings, the first cause, through whom alone the soul could be explained
CW8 ¶ 677