THE ORIGIN OF THE HUMAN SOUL 199 



of mere contact, the spirit or mind remaining separate from, 

 and unmingled with, its material partner, the body. The main 

 trouble with this dualism is that it draws the line of de- 

 marcation at the wrong place. Reason and sense-conscious- 

 ness are bracketed together above the line as being equally 

 spiritual; physiological processes and processes purely physico- 

 chemical are coupled below the line as being equally mechani- 

 cal. Now, when a brain-function such as sense-perception 

 is introduced, like another Trojan Horse, into the citadel of 

 spiritualism, it is a comparatively easy task for materialism 

 to storm and sack that citadel by demonstrating with a thou- 

 sand neuro-physiological facts that all sensory functions are 

 rigidly correlated with neurological processes, that they are, 

 in short, functions of the nervous system, and therefore 

 purely material in nature. On the other hand, once we re- 

 treat from the trench of distinction between the processes of 

 unconscious or vegetative life and the physicochemical proc- 

 esses of the inorganic world, that moment we have lost the 

 strategic position in the conflict with mechanism, and nothing 

 avails to stay its triumphant onrush. Hence, from first to 

 last, it is perfectly clear that the treacherous psychophysical 

 dualism of Descartes has done far more harm to the cause 

 of spiritualism than all the assaults of materialism. There is 

 a Latin maxim which says: Extrema sese tangunt — "Extremes 

 come in contact with each other." The ultraspiritualism of 

 Descartes by confounding spiritual, with organic conscious- 

 ness, leads by the most direct route to the opposite extreme 

 of crass materialism. 



Aristotle's dualism of matter and form, which is but a phys- 

 ical application of his transcendental dualism of potency 

 (dynamis) and act (entelechy), is very different from the 

 Cartesian dualism of the physical and the psychic. According 

 to the Aristotelian view, as we have seen in the last chapter, 

 all the physical entities or substantial units of nature (both 

 living and inorganic) are fundamentally dual in their essence, 

 each consisting of a definitive principle called entelechy and 



