Animals have a body and a spirit, but no soul. Angels have a spirit and a soul, but no body. We have all three! The spirit is that which gives life to the body. The soul is that which controls the mind, feeling and will. When you talk about spiritless people, this cannot be correct, because they are alive. I would say, instead, that their souls are dead, for whatever reason, or at least are very troubled.   Their souls are dead. Only through Jesus can they be reborn. The author gets it exactly backwards:  What to call this higher component of consciousness absent in some people? Usually it would be called the soul, but that has caused too much confusion in the past. For example, casual readers unfamiliar with the proper definition of “soulless” thought it meant “completely devoid of consciousness” when in reality it meant “devoid of individualized consciousness.” No, they do have some kind of soul energy by virtue of being alive, but the soul is not imbued with a higher spark of true sentience and self-awareness.  Therefore I will call this higher spark “spirit” and define it as follows: spirit is the core of individualized consciousness, that permanent aspect of one’s being representing the true Self, which accumulates experiences and spiritual wisdom throughout life, survives physical death, and remains intact upon reincarnating to continue growing toward the fulfillment of its potential. It is the divine god-spark, the seat of freewill, the holographic fragment of the Creator residing at the very center of your being, the “I” that is you, the inner conscious observer capable of observing even its own self-observation.