I used my strongest vision to penetrate the reeking darkness to my life. He thinks I am the one whom he will presently see as a corpse, and he asks how to bury me. And though I have been saying at great length that after I drink the poison I shall no longer be with you, but shall go away to the joys of the blessed, he seems to think that was idle talk uttered to encourage you and myself.  The essential general theory of motivation is there is a limited number of prime movers by whose conative force every train of though and every bodily activity is initiated and sustained. These prime movers were first described as instincts, and later were redefined and as propensities. The extent to which instinctive dispositions are modified both on the cognitive (receptive) side and on the conative (responsive) side, primary instincts are to be defined by reference to the central or affective components, the primary emotions. They are then organized into more complex motivating dispositions, the sentiments. A sentiment is conceived of as a system of instinctive disposition organized around an idea. Patriotism, for example, is a complex organization of instincts directed to promoting the welfare of a national group.  #RyanPhillippe 1 of 5

The motivating force in man is organized in a three-tiered hierarchy. At the base are the primary instincts of propensities. At the second level are certain regulating and controlling principles, such as benevolence and cool self-love, and at the summit was the ultimate controlling principle, which is identified as conscience. Man born of woman is of few days and full of trouble. He springs up like a flower and withers away; like a fleeting shadow, he does not endure. Do you fix your eyes on such a one? Will you bring him before you for judgment? Who can bring what is pure from the impure? No one! Man’s days are determined; you have decreed the number of his months and have set the limits he cannot exceed. So look away from him and let him alone, till he has put in his time like a hired man. If you only would hide me in the grave and conceal me till your anger has passed! If only you would set a time and then remember me. We shed tears for our brother, and gave him our music and our tears while he was alive. If he was not wept for and given our music and flowers then, well, not there is no need, because he is no longer aware. #RyanPhillippe 2 of 5

If a man dies, will he live again? It is clear that the truth in questions is somehow connected with the imagination rather than with the ordinary cognitive powers of the mind. The first point is that the essence of doctrines of personal survival (or immortality)—and precisely this and this only is what gives them their great human interest—is that they should assert that after our deaths we shall continue to exist (forever). Only in this way can they provide the basis for unique expectations—that we shall, to put it as noncommittally as possible, have experiences after death, that death will not be our terminus but the beginning of a new journey. All the days of my hard service I will wait for my renewal to come. You will call and I will answer you; you will long for the creature your hands have made. The human body is a corporeal element, there is also something else, different in kind—the incorporeal soul. For duration of a life the soul is somehow attached to—incorporated into or imprisoned in—its body. Although the soul is incorporeal, it is nevertheless a substance, something that could significantly be said to exist independently of anything else. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 5

He feels but the pain of his own body and mourns only for himself. The soul is not a harmony, for it would not even make sense to suggest that a harmony might survive or, for that matter, precede the elements of which it is a harmony. This is no more possible than that there could be a grin without a face to grin it. The point is that the soul must be the person or, at any rate, the real, true, or essential person. This, though it is sometimes neglected, is crucial. Unless it is established that I am my soul, the demonstrate my of the survival of my soul will not demonstrate my survival, and the news that my soul will last forever could provide me with no more justification for harboring these logically unique expectations than the rather less elevated assurance that my appendix is to be preserved eternally in a bottle. The second doctrine is, in its purest form, extremely simple and direct. It consists in urging the resurrection of the body or, more accurately, the reconstitution of the person. Whereas the first doctrine insists that I am the sort of thing that could perfectly well escape unharmed and unnoticed at death (if you can catch me and I do not get away); the second recognizes that to be truly a human person, I have to have the corporeal human form. It then relies on an act of sheer omnipotence to produce the immortal me. #RyanPhillippe 4 of 5Does not man have hard service on Earth? Are not his days like those of a hired man? Like a slave longing for the evening shadows, or a hired man waiting eagerly for his wages, so I have been allotted months of futility, and nights of misery have been assigned to me. When I lie down I think how long before I get up? The night drags on, and I toss till dawn. Why have you made me your target? Have I become a burden to you? For I will soon lie down in the dust; you will search for me, but I will be no more. The Shadow-man doctrine is the claim that a person is kind of a shadow man, sufficiently human and corporeal to overcome the problem of identification with the familiar flesh and blood person and at the same time sufficiently ethereal and elusive to have no difficult in escaping unnoticed from the ordinary Earthy body which is destined to be burned or buried. Some modern spiritualists also hold this view of the astral body, which detached itself at death to proceed on its journey to the Summerland. Perhaps the best way of conveying the idea to the modern reader unfamiliar with wither patristic or spiritualist literature is to refer to the many films in which a spirit is shown as a tenuous shadowy replica of a man that detaches itself from him at death and is thereafter visible to the entire audience, but only to favored characters in the film. #RyanPhillippe 5 of 5