Elsdon Best Spiritual and Mental Concepts, of the Maori

Annotation

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. Ghost. This denotes the soul after the death of its physical basis. These definitions are pleasingly brief, but' that of spirit calls for a mental revolution by no means easy to bring about. It would assuredly require prolonged training to disassociate the term spirit from man, and confine its use to what we term inanimate objects. The word spirit is certainly connected with an animal function - with words meaning breath, breathing, and to breathe - and it seems inadvisable to restrict its application to objects with which that function is not connected. The above evidence seems to show that, however much those of advanced thought may talk about the tripartite nature of man, as illustrated by spirit, soul, and body, yet to the average person among us spirit and soul are one and the same thing.