comparatively of small consequence to find out what the Greeks thought
or meant, until we have determined what we ourselves think, or mean, when
we translate the Greek word for "breathing" into the Latin-English word
"spirit."

52. But it is of great consequence that you should fix in your minds--
and hold, against the baseness of mere materialism on the one hand, and
against the fallacies of controversial speculation on the other--the
certain and practical sense of this word "spirit;" the sense in which you
all know that its reality exists, as the power which shaped you into your
shape, and by which you love and hate when you have received that shape.
You need not fear, on the one hand, that either the sculpturing or the
loving power can ever be beaten down by the philosophers into a metal, or
evolved by them into a gas; but on the other hand, take care that you
yourself, in trying to elevate your conception of it, do not lose its
truth in a dream, or even in a word. Beware always of contending for
words: you will find them not easy to grasp, if you know them in several
languages. This very word, which is so solemn in your mouths, is one of
the most doubtful. In Latin it means little more than breathing, and may
mean merely accent; in French it is not breath, but wit, and our
neighbors are therefore obliged, even in their most solemn expressions,
to say "wit" when we say "ghost." In Greek, "pneuma," the word we
translate "ghost," means either wind or breath, and the relative word
"psyche" has, perhaps, a more subtle power; yet St. Paul's words
"pneumatic body" and "psychic body" involve a difference in his mind
which no words will explain. But in Greek and in English, and in Saxon
and in Hebrew, and in every articulate tongue of humanity the "spirit of
man" truly means his passion and virtue, and is stately according to the
height of his conception, and stable according to the measure of his
endurance.