Human Nature as

an Embodied Spirit
The union of body and soul

To seek the nature of the soul, we must premise that the soul is defined
as the first principle of life of those things which live: for we call living
things “animate” and those things which have no live “inanimate.”
now life is shown principally by two actions, knowledge and
movement. The philosophers of old, not being able to rise above their
imagination, supposed the principal of this actions was something
corporeal: for they asserted that only bodies were real things; and that
is not corporeal is nothing: hence they maintained that the soul is
something corporeal.

-St Thomas of Aquinas, Summa Theologica

The subsistence of the soul is
undermined by the following objections:
 Existence is attributed to the body and soul and
not soul alone ;
 The body which subsists operate yet the soul
does not;
 Subsistent entities operate apart from the body,
while the soul apparently, does not operate
apart from the body.
It must necessarily be allowed that the principle of intellectual
operation which we call the soul, is a principle both incorporeal and
subsistent. For it is clear that by means of intellectual man can have
knowledge of all corporeal things. Now whatever knows certain things
cannot have any of them in its nature; because that which is in it
naturally would impede that knowledge of anything else. Therefore the
intellectual principle which we call the mind or the intellect has an
operation “per se” apart from the body. Now only that which subsists
can have an operation “per se”. For nothing can operate but what is
actual: for which reason we do not say that heat impart heat, but
what is hot gives heat. We must conclude, therefore, that the human
soul, which called the intellect or the mind, is something incorporeal
and subsistent.
-St Thomas of Aquinas, Summa Theologica