For this inquiry into sacred kinship, the author has taken for his text the verse from Genesis 2: ＂And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.＂ The rest of the book addresses the question, ＂What does it mean to be a living soul?＂

The argument of the book dedicates itself to the proposition that our consciousness of the world is fundamentally whole. Specific texts from a wide range of sources support this hypothesis. They point to ＂the soul as the seat of the individual waking consciousness and of the moral and intellectual character,＂ which is how Richard Tarnas describes the discovery that crowns the life and work of Socrates.

If the soul is sacred, as traditional Western thought has claimed, if the happiness of our country and our own happiness securely rest on this foundation, as these readings argue they do, then we do well to inquire into the matter, no matter the time and effort the inquiry requires.