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THE THEORY of the Soul is the theory of popular philosophy and of scholasticism,
which is only popular philosophy made systematic. It declares that the principle
of individuality within us must be substantial, for psychic phenomena are
activities, and there can be no activity without a concrete agent. This
substantial agent cannot be the brain but must be something immaterial;
for its activity, thought, is both immaterial, and takes cognizance of
immaterial things, and of material things in general and intelligible, as well
as in particular and sensible ways - all which powers are incompatible with the
nature of matter, of which the brain is composed. Thought moreover is simple,
whilst the activities of the brain are compounded of the elementary activities
of each of its parts. Furthermore, thought is spontaneous or free, whilst all
material activity is determined ab extra; and the will can turn itself
against all corporeal goods and appetites, which would be impossible were it a
corporeal function. For these objective reasons the principle of psychic life
must be both immaterial and simple as well as substantial, must be what is
called a Soul. The same consequence follows from subjective reasons. Our
consciousness of personal identity assures us of our essential simplicity: the
owner of the various constituents of the self, as we have seen them, the
hypothetical Arch-Ego whom we provisionally conceived as possible, is a real
entity of whose existence self-consciousness makes us directly aware. No
material agent could thus turn round and grasp itself - material
activities always grasp something else than the agent. And if a brain could
grasp itself and be self-conscious, it would be conscious of itself as a brain
and not as something of an altogether different kind. The Soul then exists as a
simple spiritual substance in which the various psychic faculties, operations,
and affections inhere.
If we ask what a Substance is, the only answer is that it is a self-existent
being, or one which needs no other subject in which to inhere. At bottom its
only positive determination is Being, and this is something whose meaning we all
realize even though we find it hard to explain. The Soul is moreover an
individual being, and if we ask what that is, we are told to look in upon
our Self, and we shall learn by direct intuition better than through any
abstract reply. Our direct perception of our own inward being is in fact by many
deemed to be the original prototype out of which our notion of simple active
substance in general is fashioned. The consequences of the simplicity and
substantiality of the Soul are its incorruptibility and natural immortality
- nothing but God's direct fiat can annihilate it - and its
responsibility at all times for whatever it may have ever done.
This substantialist view of the soul was essentially the view of Plato and of
Aristotle. It received its completely formal elaboration in the Middle Ages. It
was believed in by Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Leibnitz, Wolf, Berkeley, and is
now defended by the entire modern dualistic or spiritualistic or common-sense
school. Kant held to it while denying its fruitfulness as a premise for deducing
consequences verifiable here below. Kant's successors, the absolute idealists,
profess to have discarded it - how that may be we shall inquire ere long. Let us
make up our minds what to think of it ourselves.
It is at all events needless for expressing the actual subjective phenomena
of consciousness as they appear. We have formulated them all without its
aid, by the supposition of a stream of thoughts, each substantially different
from the rest, but cognitive of the rest and "appropriative" of each other's
content. At least, if I have not already succeeded in making this plausible to
the reader, I am hopeless of convincing him by anything I could add now. The
unity, the identity, the individuality, and the immateriality that appear in the
psychic life are thus accounted for as phenomenal and temporal facts
exclusively, and with no need of reference to any more simple or substantial
agent than the present thought or "section" of the stream. We have seen it to be
single and unique in the sense of having no separable parts - perhaps
that is the only kind of simplicity meant to be predicated of the soul. The
present thought also has being - at least all believers in the Soul believe so - and
if there be no other being in which it "inheres," it ought itself to be a
"substance." If this kind of simplicity and substantiality were all that
is predicated of the Soul, then it might appear that we had been talking of the
Soul all along, without knowing it, when we treated the present thought as an
agent, an owner, and the like. But the thought is a perishing and not an
immortal or incorruptible thing. Its successors may continuously succeed to it,
resemble it, and appropriate it, but they are not it, whereas the Soul-Substance
is supposed to be a fixed unchanging thing. By the Soul is always meant
something behind the present thought, another kind of substance, existing
on a non-phenomenal plane.
When we brought in the Soul at the end of Chapter VI, as an entity which the
various brain-processes were supposed to affect simultaneously, and which
responded to their combined influence by single pulses of its thought, it was to
escape integrated mind-stuff on the one hand, and an improbable cerebral monad
on the other. But when (as now, after all we have been through since that
earlier passage) we take the two formulations, first of a brain to whose
processes pulses of thought simply correspond, and second, of one to
whose processes pulses of thought in a Soul correspond, and compare them
together, we see that at bottom the second formulation is only a more roundabout
way than the first of expressing the same bald fact. That bald fact is that
where the brain acts, a thought occurs. The spiritualistic formulation says
that the brain-processes knock the thought, so to speak, out of a Soul which
stands there to receive their influence. The simpler formulation says that the
thought simply comes. But what positive meaning has the Soul, when
scrutinized, but the ground of possibility of the thought? And what is
the "knocking" but the determining of the possibility to actuality? And
what is this after all but giving a sort of concreted form to one's belief that
the coming of the thought, when the brain-processes occur, has some sort
of ground in the nature of things? If the word Soul be understood merely to
express that claim, it is a good word to use. But if it be held to do more, to
gratify the claim - for instance, to connect rationally the thought which comes
with the processes which occur, and to mediate intelligibly between their two
disparate natures - then it is an illusory term. It is, in fact, with the word
Soul as with the word Substance in general. To say that phenomena inhere in a
Substance is at bottom only to record one's protest against the notion that the
bare existence of the phenomena is the total truth. A phenomenon would not
itself be, we insist, unless there were something more than the
phenomenon. To the more we give the provisional name of Substance. So, in the
present instance, we ought certainly to admit that there is more than the bare
fact of coexistence of a passing thought with a passing brain-state. But we do
not answer the question 'What is that more?" when we say that it is a "Soul"
which the brain-state affects. This kind of more explains nothing; and
when we are once trying metaphysical explanations we are foolish not to go as
far as we can. For my own part I confess that the moment I become metaphysical
and try to define the more, I find the notion of some sort of an anima mundi
thinking in all of us to be a more promising hypothesis, in spite of all its
difficulties, than that of a lot of absolutely individual souls. Meanwhile, as
psychologists, we need not be metaphysical at all. The phenomena are
enough, the passing thought itself is the only verifiable thinker, and
its empirical connection with the brain-process is the ultimate known law.
To the other arguments which would prove the need of a Soul, we may also turn a
deaf ear. The argument from free will can convince only those who believe in
free will; and even they will have to admit that spontaneity is just as
possible, to say the least, in a temporary spiritual agent like our "thought" as
in a permanent one like the supposed Soul. The same is true of the argument from
the kinds of things cognized. Even if the brain could not cognize universals,
immaterials, or its "Self," still the "thought" which we have relied upon in our
account is not the brain, closely as it seems connected with it; and after all,
if the brain could cognize at all, one does not well see why it might not
cognize one sort of thing as well as another. The great difficulty is in seeing
how a thing can cognize anything. This difficulty is not in the least
removed by giving to the thing that cognizes the name of Soul. The Spiritualists
do not deduce any of the properties of the mental life from otherwise known
properties of the Soul. They simply find various characters ready-made in the
mental life, and these they clap into the Soul, saying, "Lo! behold the source
from whence they flow!" The merely verbal character of this "explanation" is
obvious. The Soul invoked, far from making the phenomena more intelligible, can
only be made intelligible itself by borrowing their form - it must be
represented, if at all, as a transcendent stream of consciousness duplicating
the one we know.
Altogether, the Soul is an outbirth of that sort of philosophizing whose great
maxim, according to Dr. Hodgson, is: "Whatever you are totally ignorant
of, assert to be the explanation of everything else."
Locke and Kant, whilst still believing in the soul, began the work of
undermining the notion that we know anything about it. Most modern writers of
the mitigated, spiritualistic, or dualistic philosophy - the Scotch school, as
it is often called among us - are forward to proclaim this ignorance, and to
attend exclusively to the verifiable phenomena of self-consciousness, as we have
laid them down. Dr. Wayland, for example, begins his Elements of Intellectual
Philosophy with the phrase "Of the essence of Mind we know nothing," and
goes on: "All that we are able to affirm of it is that it is something
which perceives, reflects, remembers, imagines, and wills; but what that
something is which exerts these energies we know not. It is only as we are
conscious of the action of these energies that we are conscious of the existence
of the mind. It is only by the exertion of its own powers that the mind becomes
cognizant of their existence. The cognizance of its powers, however, gives us
no knowledge of that essence of which they are predicated. In these respects our
knowledge of mind is precisely analogous to our knowledge of matter." This
analogy of our two ignorances is a favorite remark in the Scotch school. It is
but a step to lump them together into a single ignorance, that of the
"un-knowable" to which anyone fond of superfluities in philosophy may accord the
hospitality of his belief, if it so please him, but which anyone else may as
freely ignore and reject.
The Soul theory is, then, a complete superfluity, so far as accounting for the
actually verified facts of conscious experience goes. So far, no one can be
compelled to subscribe to it for definite scientific reasons. The case would
rest here, and the reader be left free to make his choice, were it not for other
demands of a more practical kind.
The first of these is Immortality, for which the simplicity and
substantiality of the Soul seem to offer a solid guarantee. A "stream" of
thought, for aught that we see to be contained in its essence, may come to a
full stop at any moment; but a simple substance is incorruptible and will, by
its own inertia, persist in being so long as the Creator does not by a direct
miracle snuff it out. Unquestionably this is the stronghold of the
spiritualistic belief-as indeed the popular touchstone for all philosophies is
the question, "What is their bearing on a future life?"
The Soul, however, when closely scrutinized, guarantees no immortality of a sort
we care for. The enjoyment of the atom-like simplicity of their substance
in saecula saeculorum would not to most people seem a consummation
devoutly to be wished. The substance must give rise to a stream of consciousness
continuous with the present stream, in order to arouse our hope, but of this the
mere persistence of the substance per se offers no guarantee. Moreover,
in the general advance of our moral ideas, there has come to be something
ridiculous in the way our forefathers had of grounding their hopes of
immortality on the simplicity of their substance. The demand for immortality is
nowadays essentially teleological. We believe ourselves immortal because we
believe ourselves fit for immortality. A "Substance" ought surely to
perish, we think, if not worthy to survive, and an insubstantial "stream" to
prolong itself, provided it be worthy, if the nature of things is organized in
the rational way in which we trust it is. Substance or no Substance, Soul or
"stream," what Lotze says of immortality is about all that human wisdom can say:
We have no other principle for deciding it than this general idealistic belief:
that every created thing will continue whose continuance belongs to the meaning
of the world, and so long as it does so belong; whilst every one will pass away
whose reality is justified only in a transitory phase of the world's course.
That this principle admits of no further application in human hands need hardly
be said. We surely know not the merits which may give to one being a claim on
eternity, nor the defects which would cut others off(1).
(1) Metaphysik, pp. 245 fin. This
writer, who in his early work, the Medizinische Psychologie, was (to my
reading) a strong defender of the Soul-Substance theory, has written in pp.
243-45 of his Metaphysik the most beautiful criticism of this theory
which exists.
A second alleged necessity for a Soul-Substance is our forensic responsibility
before God. Locke caused an uproar when he said that the unity of
consciousness made a man the same person, whether supported by the
same Substance or no, and that God would not, in the great day, make a
person answer for what he remembered nothing of. It was supposed scandalous that
our forgetfulness might thus deprive God of the chance of certain retributions,
which otherwise would have enhanced his "glory." This is certainly a good
speculative ground for retaining the Soul - at least for those who demand a
plenitude of retribution. The mere stream of consciousness, with its lapses of
memory, cannot possibly be as "responsible" as a Soul which is at the judgment
day all that it ever was. To modern readers, however, who are less insatiate for
retribution than their grandfathers, this argument will hardly be as convincing
as it seems once to have been.
One great use of the Soul has always been to account for, and at the same time
to guarantee, the closed individuality of each personal consciousness. The
thoughts of one Soul must unite into one self, it was supposed, and must be
eternally insulated from those of every other Soul. But we have already begun to
see that, although unity is the rule of each man's consciousness, yet in some
individuals, at least, thoughts may split away from the others and form separate
selves. As for insulation, it would be rash, in view of the phenomena of
thought-transference, mesmeric influence, and spirit control, which are being
alleged nowadays on better authority than ever before, to be too sure about that
point either. The definitively closed nature of our personal consciousness is
probably an average statistical resultant of many conditions, but not an
elementary force or fact; so that, if one wishes to preserve the Soul, the less
he draws his arguments from that quarter the better. So long as our self,
on the whole, makes itself good and practically maintains itself as a closed
individual, why, as Lotze says, is not that enough? And why is the being-an-individual
in some inaccessible metaphysical way so much prouder an achievement?
My final conclusion, then, about the substantial Soul is that it explains
nothing and guarantees nothing. Its successive thoughts are the only
intelligible and verifiable things about it, and definitely to ascertain the
correlations of these with brain-processes is as much as psychology can
empirically do. From the metaphysical point of view, it is true that one may
claim that the correlations have a rational ground; and if the word Soul could
be taken to mean merely some such vague problematic ground, it would be
unobjectionable. But the trouble is that it professes to give the ground in
positive terms of a very dubiously credible sort. I therefore feel entirely free
to discard the word Soul from the rest of this book. If I ever use it, it will
be in the vaguest and most popular way. The reader who finds any comfort in the
idea of the Soul is, however, perfectly free to continue to believe in it; for
our reasonings have not established the non-existence of the Soul; they have
only proved its superfluity for scientific purposes.
Source: Principles of Psychology,
New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1890, vol. I, pp. 343 ff.
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