M THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



Then, under the influence of Hume and Kant, the noumenal 

 mind disappeared, leaving only phenomenal consciousness. 

 Recently, with the advent of Watson, even consciousness it- 

 self has been discarded and psychology has become a science 

 of behavior. And here, for the time being, at any rate, the 

 process has come to a stop, just one step short of complete 

 nihilism. Woodworth quotes the following waggish comment: 

 'Tirst psychology lost its soul, then it lost its mind, then it lost 

 consciousness; it still has behavior of a kind." ("Psychology, 

 the Science of Mental Life," p. 2, footnote.) This gradual 

 degeneration of psychology from animism into behaviorism 

 is one of the greatest ironies in the history of human thought. 

 All of this, however, was latent in the corrosive Cartesian 

 principle of "scientific doubt." Facilis descensus Avernil It 

 is easy to question the validity of this or that kind of human 

 knowledge, but difficult to arrest, or even foresee, the conse- 

 quences which the remorseless logic of scepticism portends. 



Disintegration set in, as has been said, when Descartes 

 substituted his psychophysical dualism of mind and matter 

 for Aristotle's hylomorphic dualism of soul and body. The 

 French philosopher, in an appendix to his "Meditations," 

 which dates from 1670, expressly rejects the Aristotelian term 

 of soul or psyche, and announces his preference for mind or 

 spirit, in the following words: "The substance in which thought 

 immediately resides is here called mind (mens, esprit). I here 

 speak, however, of mens (mind) rather than anima (soul), 

 for the latter is equivocal, being frequently applied to denote 

 what is material" ("Reply to the Second Objections," p. 86). 

 Henceforth psychology ceased to be a science of the soul, and 

 became, instead, a science of the mind. 



Descartes, one must bear in mind, divided the universe into 

 two great realms of being, namely: the conscious and the 

 unconscious, the psychic world of mind and the physical 

 world of matter, unextended substance which thinks and ex- 

 tended substance which moves. In man these two substantial 

 principles were conceived as being united by the tenuous link 



