We need not deny that dreams and delirium may have given palpable shape to the conception of a ghost, and may also have helped forward the notion of a spirit by furnishing something intermediary between the grossness of our waking sense-experiences, and the altogether elusive and difficult thought of unembodied will and intelligence independent of space and time.

In the main then it seems more plausible to maintain that the idea of unembodied or disembodied spirits was shaped by that instinctive law of our mind which makes us argue from the nature of effects to the nature of the agency.

All the cruel, tormenting, defined devils in Dantetearing, mangling, choking, stifling, scorching demonsare they one half so fearful to the spirit of a man, as the simple idea of a spirit unembodied following him Like one that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turn'd round, walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.

It is not more strange that there should be evil spirits, than evil men: evil unembodied spirits, than evil embodied spirits.

Much less a science of unembodied Spirits.

That I shall not discuss, and perhaps cannot account for; but certainly they are a proof of the converse of spirits, and a secret communication between those embodied and those unembodied, and such a proof as can never be withstood; of which I shall have occasion to give some very remarkable instances in the remainder of my solitary residence in this dismal place.

There was something in this fragment which he seems to have felt, as if of a kindred nature to the unembodied creatures in his own mind; and he pondered over it until he mastered the spell of its author.

The 'truth embodied in a tale' has more emotional power than the unembodied truth, and the visual realisation of the central figure of the tale more power than the tale itself.

ASTRAL BODY, an ethereal body believed by the theosophists to invest the animal, to correspond to it, and to be capable of BILOCATION (q. v.) ASTRAL SPIRITS, spirits believed to animate or to people the heavenly bodies, to whom worship was paid, and to hover unembodied through space exercising demonic influence on embodied spirits.