Abstract

Granting that the `soul' was only an attractive and mysterious thought, from which philosophers rightly, but reluctantly, separated themselves - that which they have since learnt to put in its place is perhaps even more attractive and even more mysterious. The human body, in which the whole of the most distant and most recent past of all organic life once more becomes living and corporal, seems to flow through this past and right over it like a huge and inaudible torrent: the body is a more wonderful thought than the old `soul'. (Nietzsche, 1973: 132-3) Man is but breath and a shadow. (Sophocles)