Adam, says the Bible, was made to the image of God, and the Church adds that so are all men; and that this image-hood is chiefly in man’s soul. What then is ‘soul’? In our philosophy the term, or its equivalents, denotes life; anything alive has a soul. But ordinarily, of course, it means the life- principle in man; and human life is very different from that of other terrestrial beings. Whether or not any animals reason, it seems absurd to compare the cleverest dogs or monkeys with the enormous range of human achievement. On this planet at least we stand out pretty clearly. Now this, Catholics say, is due to a radical difference in the human life-principle—that it differs from the rest of the world we know not only as dogs differ from roses or horses from dogs, but as something that is not strictly part of the physical world differs from the entire physical world. The human soul is partly outside the physical and even the animal world. To use a question-begging term, it transcends all bodies animate and inanimate. What does this mean?

The ‘transcendence’ of man, his ‘spirituality’ as distinct from mere vitality, is commonly approached negatively. It is said that precisely as a human agent I have certain activities which are not activities of my body or of any part of my body, in which something other than any organ of the body is operating. The body may concur with or condition such activity, it is not precisely the agent acting. The reference is to intellectual activities. Reflecting, then, on these, I think I can make two affirmation about them which, on analysis, yield some understanding of that boasted ‘transcendence’: that I am aware of things (a) as real, and (b) as significant.