It was not the unembodied cry of the pain and helplessness but the undying hope of the world that she had heard.
"The Shepherd of the North"
Richard Aumerle Maher
We need not deny that dreams and delirium may have given palpable shape to the conception of a ghost, and may also have helped forward the notion of a spirit by furnishing something intermediary between the grossness of our waking sense-experiences, and the altogether elusive and difficult thought of unembodied will and intelligence independent of space and time.
"The Faith of the Millions (2nd series)"
George Tyrrell
In the main then it seems more plausible to maintain that the idea of unembodied or disembodied spirits was shaped by that instinctive law of our mind which makes us argue from the nature of effects to the nature of the agency.
"The Faith of the Millions (2nd series)"
George Tyrrell