is extinguished. Vitality is produced by the pulsations of the blood;
when these cease, vitality is extinguished, the body decays, and becomes
dust. How can it become a spirit? . . . When a man dies, his soul
ascends to heaven, and his bones return (_kuei_) to earth; therefore he
is spoken of as a disembodied spirit (_kuei_), the latter word really
meaning that which has returned. . . . Vitality becomes humanity, just
as water becomes ice. The ice melts and is water again; man dies
and reverts to spirituality. . . . The spirits which people see are
invariably in the form of human beings, and that very fact is enough of
itself to prove that these apparitions cannot be the souls of dead men.
If a sack is filled with grain, it will stand up, and is obviously a
sack of grain; but if the sack is burst and the grain falls out, then it
collapses and disappears from view. Now, man's soul is enfolded in his
body as grain in a sack. When he dies his body decays and his vitality
is dissipated; and if when the grain is taken away the sack loses its
form, why, when the vitality is gone, should the body obtain a new shape
in which to appear again in the world? . . . The number of persons who
have died since the world began, old, middle-aged, and young, must run
into thousands of millions, far exceeding the number of persons alive at
the present day. If every one of these has become a disembodied spirit,
there must be at least one to every yard as we walk along the road; and
those who die must now suddenly find themselves face to face with vast
crowds of spirits, filling every house and street. . . . People say that
spirits are the souls of dead men. That being the case, spirits should
always appear naked, for surely it is not contended that clothes have
souls as well as men. . . . It can further be shown not only that dead
men never become spirits, but also that they are without consciousness,
by the fact that before birth they are without consciousness. Before
birth man rests in the First Cause; when he dies he goes back to the
First Cause. The First Cause is vague and without form, and man's soul