The Egyptians were the first to advance the idea that the soul is immortal and that when the body dies it enters into another animal which is then being born; when it has gone round all the creatures of the land, the sea, and the air, it enters into the body of a man which is then being born; and this cycle takes it three thousand years. Some of the Greeks – some earlier, some later – put forward this idea as though it were their own: I know their names but I do not transcribe them.

That, however, which is neither itself a body, nor a force within a body, is not existent according to man's first notions, and is above all excluded from the range of imagination.

The ideas we have belonging, and peculiar to Spirit, are Thinking, and Will.

The spirit-monad – the monad that has consciousness of itself.