the aerial, and the ethereal.  The latter is the augoeides—­the luciform vehicle of the purified soul whose irrational part has been brought under complete subjection to the rational.  The aerial is that in which the great majority of mankind find themselves at the dissolution of the terrestrial body, and in which the incomplete process of purification has to be undergone during long ages of preparation for the soul’s return to its primitive, ethereal state.  For it must be remembered that the preexistence of souls is a distinguishing tenet of this philosophy as of the Kabala.  The soul has “sunk into matter.”  From its highest original state the revolt of its irrational nature has awakened and developed successively its “vital congruities” with the regions below, passing, by means of its “Plastic,” first into the aerial and afterwards into the terrestrial condition.  Each of these regions teems also with an appropriate population which never passes, like the human soul, from one to the other—­“gods,” “demons,” and animals.* As to duration, “the shortest of all is that of the terrestrial vehicle.  In the aerial, the soul may inhabit, as they define, many ages, and in the ethereal, for ever.”

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* The allusion here is to those beings of the several kingdoms of the
elements which we Theosophists, following after the Kabalists, have
called the “Elementals.”   They never become men. 
—­Ed. Theos.
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Speaking of the second body, Henry More says “the soul’s astral vehicle is of that tenuity that itself can as easily pass the smallest pores of the body as the light does glass, or the lightning the scabbard of a sword without tearing or scorching of it.”  And again, “I shall make bold to assert that the soul may live in an aerial vehicle as well as in the ethereal, and that there are very few that arrive to that high happiness as to acquire a celestial vehicle immediately upon their quitting the terrestrial one; that heavenly chariot necessarily carrying us in triumph to the greatest happiness the soul of man is capable of, which would arrive to all men indifferently, good or bad, if the parting with this earthly body would suddenly mount us into the heavenly.  When by a just Nemesis the souls of men that are not heroically virtuous will find themselves restrained within the compass of this caliginous air, as both Reason itself suggests, and the Platonists have unanimously determined.”  Thus also the most thorough-going, and probably the most deeply versed in the doctrines of the master among modern Platonists, Thomas Taylor (Introduction.  Phaedo):—­“After this our divine philosopher informs that the pure soul will after death return to pure and eternal natures; but that the impure soul, in consequence of being imbued with terrene affections, will be drawn down to a kindred nature, and be invested with a gross vehicle capable of being seen by the corporeal eye.* For while a propensity to body remains in the soul,