The glaring question at the end of the first chapter, especially for people living in our current world is what's this about non-Jews not having souls? They don't have souls???
Believe it or not there is a really good answer to this question and its our responsibility to puzzle it out.
Alongside this question we can ask a nice parallel question: What does it mean in general when HaShem calls us, the Jewish people, a light unto the nations?
It turns out these two questions are very directly related, so by way of answering the second question we'll arrive at what I believe is an excellent answer to the initial question.
In the Kabbalistic phrasing of how the world works, on a very basic level, there are always two levels of reality, the outer reality and the inner reality. In the case of a person you have the body, the outer expression of a person, and the soul, the inner expression. Often, in the mystical Jewish teachings, these two realities are called the vessel, (the outer context which contains the inner context) and the light. (the inner context contained within the outer context)
Life is infinitely more complex than simply two levels or experiences of reality, and there are countless levels of subtlety in God's creation. Most of life happens in the transitions between these levels of reality, going from one outer context to an inner context, only to discover a still deeper context within.
A great example of all this, in that it is the primary commandment of the Torah, is having and raising children. We learn later on in the Tanya (and in many other sources including the Talmud) that a child is born into the world with a body animated by a simple animal soul, sometimes referred to as the Evil Inclination, the Yetzer Hara.
This body, along with the 'animal soul,' is a vessel, an outer context, but they initially lack an inner context. The function of the animal soul is mainly to animate and unite the body to function as a collective whole. Only upon the maturation of the body, at the age of mitzwoth, (12 for a girl, 13 for a boy) is the body imbued with a genuine light of its own, an inner context.
So where does a child (a body with no light of its own) receive its light? From its parents. The parents are the very soul of the child until the child matures and can grow spiritually on its own, when it receives its own light, its own inner context, its own soul.That is a radical concept, but it is the accepted reality of the mystical traditions of Judaism as brought down by the Zohar (Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohai) and the Arizal. (Rabbi Yitzhak Luria)
Now it is all a lot more complicated than that, and to start with, while the child's body has no soul of its own until it reaches spiritual maturation it does have the imprint or residue of a soul, called a roshem (in hebrew) or reshimu. (in aramaic)
This imprint is what enables the child's vessel to eventually contain the light (soul) imbued within it, upon maturation.
So, coming back to our second question. What does it mean that the Jewish people are meant to be a light unto the nations? It means that the nations receive their life force through the Jewish people, as a child receives its life force through their parents. We are litterally a light for the vessel that is the nations of the world, until such time as the nations of the world reach spiritual maturation and receive their own light.
Which answers our first question. The nations of the world don't have a soul, yet, until such time, we act as their soul, and our responsible for giving life to the whole world.
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