ABSTRACT
The belief in a soul is an element of very primitive animistic religions. It was the result of considering inanimate bodies to be endowed with properties similar to our own. The soul was conceived as a “life principle” even in medical schools up to seventy years ago. The chemistry of the carbon compounds was called “organic chemistry” and the substances considered “organic” were supposed to be the result of this “life principle” and that they could be formed in no other way. Every thing that lived, plants and animals as well as man, had in it something of what was conceived as soul.
