Though the medium through which the soul acts be, as we have said, elusive to the senses,--in so far as to be irreducible to any distinct form,--it is not therefore the less real, as every one may verify by his own experience; and, though seemingly invisible, it must nevertheless, constituted as we are, act through the physical, and a physical medium expressly constructed for its peculiar action; nay, it does this continually, without our confounding for a moment the soul with its instrument. Who can look into the human eye, and doubt of an influence not of the body? The form and color leave but a momentary impression, or, if we remember them, it is only as we remember the glass through which we have read the dark problems of the sky. But in this mysterious organ we see not even the signs of its mystery. We see, in truth, nothing; for what is there has neither form, nor symbol, nor any thing reducible to a sensuous distinctness; and yet who can look into it, and not be conscious of a real though invisible presence? In the eye of a brute, we see only a part of the animal; it gives us little beyond the palpable outward; at most, it is but the focal point of its fierce, or gentle, affectionate, or timorous character,--the character of the species, But in man, neither gentleness nor fierceness can be more than as relative conditions,--the outward moods of his unseen spirit; while the spirit itself, that daily and hourly sends forth its good and evil, to take shape from the body, still sits in darkness. Yet have we that which can surely reach it; even our own spirit. By this it is that we can enter into another's soul, sound its very depths, and bring up his dark thoughts, nay, place them before him till he starts at himself; and more,--it is by this we _know_ that even the tangible, audible, visible world is not more real than a spiritual intercourse. And yet without the physical organ who can hold it? We can never indeed understand, but we may not doubt, that which has its power of proof in a single act of consciousness. Nay, we may add that we cannot even conceive of a soul without a correlative form,--though it be in the abstract; and _vice versâ_.
For, among the many impossibilities, it is not the least to look upon a living human form as a thing; in its pictured copies, as already shown in a former discourse, it may be a thing, and a beautiful thing; but the moment we conceive of it as living, if it show not a soul, we give it one by a moral necessity; and according to the outward will be the spirit with which we endow it. No poetic being, supposed of our species, ever lived to the imagination without some indication of the moral; it is the breath of its life: and this is also true in the converse; if there be but a hint of it, it will instantly clothe itself in a human shape; for the mind cannot separate them. In the whole range of the poetic creations of the great master of truth,--we need hardly say Shakspeare,--not an instance can be found where this condition of life is ever wanting; his men and women all have souls. So, too, when he peoples the air, though he describe no form, he never leaves these creatures of the brain without a shape, for he will sometimes, by a single touch of the moral, enable us to supply one. Of this we have a striking instance in one of his most unsubstantial creations, the "delicate Ariel." Not an allusion to its shape or figure is made throughout the play; yet we assign it a form on its very first entrance, as soon as Prospero speaks of its refusing to comply with the" abhorred commands" of the witch, Sycorax. And again, in the fifth act, when Ariel, after recounting the sufferings of the wretched usurper and his followers, gently adds,--