But we must examine how soul comes to inhabit the body- the manner and the process- a question certainly of no minor interest. The entry of soul into body takes place under two forms. Firstly, there is the entry- metensomatosis- of a soul present in body by change from one frame to another or the entry- not known as metensomatosis, since the nature of the earlier habitacle is not certainly definable- of a soul leaving an aerial or fiery body for one of earth. Secondly, there is the entry from the wholly bodiless into any kind of body; this is the earliest form of any dealing between body and soul, and this entry especially demands investigation. What then can be thought to have happened when soul, utterly clean from body, first comes into commerce with the bodily nature? It is reasonable, necessary even, to begin with the Soul of the All. Notice that if we are to explain and to be clear, we are obliged to use such words as "entry" and "ensoulment," though never was this All unensouled, never did body subsist with soul away, never was there Matter unelaborate; we separate, the better to understand; there is nothing illegitimate in the verbal and mental sundering of things which must in fact be co-existent. The true doctrine may be stated as follows: In the absence of body, soul could not have gone forth, since there is no other place to which its nature would allow it to descend. Since go forth it must, it will generate a place for itself; at once body, also, exists. While the Soul is at rest- in rest firmly based on Repose, the Absolute- yet, as we may put it, that huge illumination of the Supreme pouring outwards comes at last to the extreme bourne of its light and dwindles to darkness; this darkness, now lying there beneath, the soul sees and by seeing brings to shape; for in the law of things this ultimate depth, neighbouring with soul, may not go void of whatsoever degree of that Reason-Principle it can absorb, the dimmed reason of reality at its faintest. Imagine that a stately and varied mansion has been built; it has never been abandoned by its Architect, who, yet, is not tied down to it; he has judged it worthy in all its length and breadth of all the care that can serve to its Being- as far as it can share in Being- or to its beauty, but a care without burden to its director, who never descends, but presides over it from above: this gives the degree in which the kosmos is ensouled, not by a soul belonging to it, but by one present to it; it is mastered not master; not possessor but possessed. The soul bears it up, and it lies within, no fragment of it unsharing. The kosmos is like a net which takes all its life, as far as ever it stretches, from being wet in the water, and has no act of its own; the sea rolls away and the net with it, precisely to the full of its scope, for no mesh of it can strain beyond its set place: the soul is of so far-reaching a nature- a thing unbounded- as to embrace the entire body of the All in the one extension; so far as the universe extends, there soul is; and if the universe had no existence, the extent of soul would be the same; it is eternally what it is. The universe spreads as broad as the presence of soul; the bound of its expansion is the point at which, in its downward egression from the Supreme, it still has soul to bind it in one: it is a shadow as broad as the Reason-Principle proceeding from soul; and that Reason-Principle is of scope to generate a kosmic bulk as vast as lay in the purposes of the Idea which it conveys.

But the Soul was breathed into Man, merely out of the original Birth of the Father by the moving Spirit, (understand, the Holy Ghost which goes forth ...

The soul in man, however - not every soul, but one that pious is - is a daimonic something and divine. And such a soul when from the body freed, if...

For the Soul which is out of the first Principle (out of the Band of the Eternity) was breathed into the Element of the Body, to [be] the Image of God...

Now then the principles of man are this-wise vehicled: mind in the reason (logos), the reason in the soul, soul in the spirit Spirit pervading [body]...

Indeed the soul had its life before the body, but it stood in the Heart of God, hidden in the mass in heaven, and was a kind of holy seed,...

Timaeus: which was one day to be existent, whereby He made it smooth and even and equal on all sides from the center, a whole and perfect body...

The philosophers whom we have mentioned, from whom the Marcionites blasphemously derived their doctrine that birth is evil, on which they then plumed ...

But because the Soul stood with its most inward Root in the Abyss of Hell, and according to the Kingdom of this World in the hard [frozen] Death, so t...

God created the soul after the image of His highest perfection. He issued forth from the treasure-house of the everlasting Fatherhood in which He had...

Now if the Spirit of the Soul remains unregenerated in its first Principle, which it has inherited out of the Eternity, with the Beginning of its...

After the Paternal Conception I the Soul reside, a heat animating all things. . . . . For he placed The Intelligible in the Soul, and the Soul in dull...

Now that this is demonstratively and certainly thus, [appears] in that it is written; And God breathed into him the a living Breath, whereby Man...

Know yourself, that is, from what substance you are, or from what race, or from what species. Understand that you have come into being from three race...

The Soul of Man is generated out of the Gates of the Breaking-through out of the Outward into the Inward, and is gone forth out of the Inward (in the...

Thus also we know, that the Soul is a Spirit, generated out of God the Father, in the Throne and Entrance out of the recomprehended [or reconceived]...

It is the same for them who go out from the body. For when the soul withdraws into itself, the spirit doth contract itself within the blood, and the...

Behold, thou reasonable Soul, to thee I speak, and not to the Body, thou only apprehendest it:- When the Birth is thus continually generated, then...

We know that the Body without the Spirit is a Thing that lies still; for though the Body of Christ (which the holy Element generated in the P Mercy)...

And now when the Body of the Soul, in the fourth Form, was come to be a Mass out of the Water, with a Mixture of the other Forms, then stuck all Essen...

But when he set his Imagination in the Kingdom of this World, then the bright and clear Will of his Soul drew the swelled Kingdom of the Out-Birth to ...