46o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



THE SEARCH FOR THE SOUL IN CONTEMPORARY 



THOUGHT 



Bx Pbofbssoe G. T. W. PATRICK 



STATE UNIVBBSITY OF IOWA 



THE history of the soul appears to be the history of a vanishing 

 quantity. It has indeed come now to have hardly more than an 

 anthropological interest.^ In recent text-books of psychology the word 

 " soul " does not occur and the word " mind " seldom or not at all. 

 " Psychology without a soul " is no longer a reproach but a truism. 

 " The soul," as a prominent psychologist recently said, " is as dead as 

 the dodo." 



Kant represents the turning point in the history of the soul concept. 

 From Plato to the pre-Kantian dogmatists, the current of philosophic 

 thought through Plotinus, Augustine and Descartes brought the soul 

 into clearer and more definite outline. It was a pure spiritual being, 

 an entity, a real thing, constituting human personality. It was fur- 

 thermore, an active being, a synthetic creative power, unifying and 

 harmonizing the elements of knowledge. Finally it became a substance, 

 a thinking substance, so picturesquely concrete and definite that it 

 could even be located in a certain corner of the brain. 



It is Kant who is supposed to have begun the serious unsettling of 

 these very rigid foundations, but the net results of the Critiques is to 

 establish the doctrine of the soul more firmly than ever. To be sure, 

 the scholastic substantial reality of the soul, its simplicity and immor- 

 tality, are beyond the ken of theoretical reason, but despite this mild 

 skeptical innovation Kant enlarges the original, creative, sjnithesizing 

 power of the mind beyond all suspicion. Human personality, indeed, 

 belongs to the realm of " things in themselves," possessing both freedom 

 and immortality. 



While this lofty theory of the soul has been perpetuated in German 

 and English idealism, nevertheless it is Kanf s skeptical attitude as 

 regards this subject that under the influence of modem empiricism has 

 finally prevailed. Psychology, being a natural science, has nothing to 

 do with Kantian noumena. Experience gives us a stream of thoughts, 

 feelings and memory images, but no souls. German materialism, Eng- 

 lish associationism and American empiricism have all united in sup- 

 pressing the soul. The late Professor James taught that there is not 



» Compare Crawley, " The Idea of the Soul." 



