  Perhaps the most striking aspect of William's teaching about the soul is his identification of the human soul with the human being and his denial that the human body constitutes in whole or part the human being. Instead, William describes the body variously as a house, the soul its inhabitant; as a prison, the soul its captive; as a cloak, the soul its wearer, and so on. Nevertheless, the definition of a human being—he perhaps has in mind the Platonic conception of the human being as “a soul using a body”—involves a reference to the body, and it this, William thinks, that has led people to believe that the body is a part of a human being. But this is an error akin to thinking that because a horseman is defined by reference to a horse, the horse must therefore be a part of the horseman. William is aware, of course, that at times we do seem to ascribe to ourselves, and thus to the human being, the acts of the body or things that happen to the body, but he holds that these are non-literal modes of speaking, akin to a rich man's complaint that he has been struck by hail, when in fact it was his vineyard that was struck.