ABSTRACT
The history of the concepts of mind and soul is a complex and twisted network of many paths, each path strewn with obstacles, dead ends, false or hidden beginnings, relapses into old ways of thinking and forward leaps of imaginative projection. This chapter begins the task of tracing the ancestry of the many ideas that composed the earliest understanding of those aspects of human 'nature' which escaped description in terms of outward appearance and physical attributes. In Ancient Hebrew, nuances that depend on whether the word is the subject or object of an action, whether it is predicated of an animal or a human or God, and with which verbs of action it is linked. The notion of the heart as the seat or focus of human emotions emerged gradually from that of the heart as the chest or bosom, the container or enclosure of breath and vitality. This is closely paralleled in the Homeric usage of phrenes and kardia.
