PHYSIOLOGY VERSUS METAPHYSICS. 253 



sumptuous task of attempting to define the actual composition of the 

 soul, a few only of the most wildly transcendental satisfying them- 

 selves that it consisted of " a drop of ether," of a " globule or spark of 

 heat or light," of an " animated vapor," etc. 



Not more widely divergent than the metaphysical notions of the 

 nature of soul were the doctrines held as to the manner of intercourse 

 between the soul and the body, the school of Aristotle holding that all 

 objects, enter into the soul by influx through the senses ; the Carte- 

 sians, per contra, maintaining that it is the soul that sees and hears, 

 that perception is a primary faculty, not of an organ, but of the soul ; 

 while Leibnitz and his followers, denying alike the imagined influx 

 from the body into the soul, and from the soul into the body, maintain 

 the existence of a joint consent and coeval operation of both under 

 the influence of a so-called pre-established harmony. 



Passing from the earlier metaphysical speculators to Kant (1724-' 

 1804), we find once more in the history of human struggles after truth 

 how much easier it is to destroy than to construct. In the firm ana- 

 lytical grasp of that extraordinary thinker ("the most tremendous 

 disintegrating force of modern times ") the past fallacies concerning 

 the nature of the soul had scant chance of mercy — the past short-com- 

 ings as little of escaping exposure. Ancient philosophic creeds crum- 

 bled to dust before him. But did he raise any edifice of practical 

 significance on their ruins ? Did he identify the soul ? Where are 

 they who can fancy that they are the wiser — that they have made a 

 nearer approach to such identification — by accepting his quasi-mystic 

 reveries on the " ego which exists beneath or rather outside conscious- 

 ness, ... a noumenon,* an indescribable something, safely located 

 out of space and time, as such not subject to the mutabilities of these 

 phenomenal spheres, . . . and of whos eontologic existence we are made 

 aware by its phenomenal projections or effects in consciousness."! 

 The first clauses of this definition seem pure assumption, soaring aloft 

 beyond the comprehension of ordinary mortals ; the latter (granting 

 the premises of the so-called " noumenon ") seems a mystified version 

 of a necessary inference. Even Kant himself admits the total con- 

 cept to be incapable of scientific proof ; and of any other form of 

 alleged proof — the so-called transcendental — what is the practical 



* The " noumenon" is an " infelligihle object — ^that is, one which, if it is to be cog- 

 nized at all, must be so in and through the undei'standing without any setimous medium " 

 (Kant's " Prolegomena," translated by Bax, p. Ixxxvii). This " Ding an sich," " thing in 

 itself," or " noumenon," is held to be the antithesis of the sensuous phenomenon, but 

 the actual relationship of the two was to Kant himself, has been to his disciples, and will 

 presumably prove to the end of time to his successors, the great stumbling-block in the 

 way of thinking out Kant's whole system. 



f Quoted by Graham, "Creed of Science," pp. 153, 154. Kant, again, sometimes 

 uses the phrase " the thinking self," as synonymous with soul ; and speaks of the " doc- 

 trine of body and the doctrine of soul — the first dealing with extended^ and the second 

 with thinking^ Nature." 



