386. (6) A person's mind is his spirit, and the spirit is the person, the body being the outward instrument by which the mind or spirit senses and acts in the physical world. The fact that a person's mind is his spirit, and that the spirit is the person, is something that can hardly be accepted and believed by people who have thought of the spirit as a gust of wind, or of the soul as something ethereal, like a puff of breath exhaled from the lungs. For they ask how the spirit can be a person when it is a spirit, and how the soul can be a person when it is a soul, thinking in the same way as they do of God because He is called a spirit.* They have acquired this idea of the spirit and soul from the fact that the word for spirit and wind in some languages is the same; and also from the fact that when a person dies he is said to breathe his last and yield up the spirit or soul, while life is said to return to people suffocated or fallen into a faint when they recover their breath or the respiration of their lungs. Consequently, because people apprehend by this then nothing but wind and air, they have judged on the evidence of the eye and bodily senses that a person's spirit or soul after death is not a person. From this physical judgment regarding the spirit and soul various theories have arisen, and out of these has grown the belief that a person does not become a person again until the day of the Last Judgment, and that in the meantime he tarries somewhere, awaiting reunion with his body, in accordance with what we said in A Continuation Concerning the Last Judgment, nos. 32-38. Since a person's mind is his spirit, therefore angels, who likewise are spirits, are called intelligences. * John 4:24. Cf. 2 Corinthians 3:17.