Rudolf Steiner a Swiss Philosopher said in his 1910 Theosophy about our Souls:

"... So that even as one had to distinguish three members in the body, one has also to distinguish three in the soul; SENTIENT-SOUL, INTELLECTUAL- SOUL, CONSCIOUSNESS-SOUL.
   What the soul carries within itself as truth and goodness is immortal. We will call this eternal element that lights up within the soul the consciousness soul. We can speak of consciousness even in connection with the soul’s lower stirrings; even the most mundane sensation is already the object of consciousness, and to this extent animals must also be credited with having consciousness. But the very core of human consciousness, the “soul within the soul,” so to speak, is what “consciousness soul” means here.
   The consciousness soul is different from the intellectual soul, which is still entangled in sensations, drives, emotions and so forth. We all know how we accept our personal preferences as true, at first. But truth is lasting only when it has freed itself from any flavor of such sympathies and antipathies. The truth is true, even if all our personal feelings revolt against it. We will apply the term “consciousness soul” to that part of the soul in which truth lives.
   Thus the soul, like the body, consists of three distinct members—the sentient soul, the intellectual soul, and the consciousness soul. Just as our bodily nature works from below upwards to set limits on the soul, spirituality works from above downwards to expand it. The more our soul is filled with what is true and good, the broader and more inclusive its eternal aspect becomes. For anyone who can “see” the soul, the glow that proceeds from a human being whose eternal aspect is expanding is as real as a flame’s radiant light is to the physical eye. To the seer, the visible bodily person is only a part of the whole human being, the coarsest structure in the midst of others that interpenetrate it and each other.
   The ether body as a life form fills out the physical body, and beyond the ether body we can distinguish the soul body or astral form projecting outward on all sides. Extending beyond this is the sentient soul, and then the intellectual soul that grows ever larger as it takes in ever more of the true and the good. If people lived solely out of their own inclinations, likes and dislikes, the boundaries of their intellectual souls would coincide with those of their sentient souls.
   And what about the interaction between soul and spirit? During life, the spirit is bound to the soul in the way described earlier. From the spirit, the soul receives the gift of living in the true and the good, and this enables it to bring the spirit itself to expression in its own life, in its inclinations, drives and passions. The spirit self brings the eternal laws of the true and the good to the “I” from the world of the spirit. By means of our consciousness soul, these laws are linked to the soul’s own individual life experiences. These experiences are transitory, but their fruits are lasting; the fact that they have been linked to the spirit self makes a lasting impression on it.
   If the human spirit then approaches such an experience and finds it similar to another that it has already been linked to in the past, it recognizes something familiar in it and knows that it must behave differently toward this than if it were encountering it for the first time. This is the basis of all learning. The fruits of learning are the abilities we acquire, and in this way, the fruits of our transitory life are imprinted on our immortal spirit ... "

Reposted under: U.S. Fair Use and Canadian Fair Dealing 29.1 and 29.2