The human soul

“PRIMITIVE men did not philosophize; but, for all that, they had their own way, an instinctive, non-conceptual way, of believing in the soul’s immortality. It was a belief rooted in an obscure experience of the self, and the natural aspirations of the spirit to overcome death.”

 ─Jacques Maritain: The Range of Reason, Part I, Ch. 5.

"THE human soul communicates to bodily matter its own existence. Both make up one thing, so much so that the existence of the whole compound is also the existence of the soul. This is not the case with other substantial forms which are not subsistent. The human soul keeps its existence when the body breaks up."

─St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica, I, q. 76, a. 1. ad 5.
Free download: ST. THOMAS AQUINAS Philosophical Texts, ed. Thomas Gilby.

Paradise, Canto XXX, by Sandro Botticelli. Drawing on parchment, 1490s.