THE NATURE OF THE SOUL. 101 



unattainable in most cases. Much more profitable 

 are the comparative and genetic methods. 



The striking resemblance of man's psychic activity 

 to that of the higher animals — especially our nearest 

 relatives among the mammals — is a familiar fact. 

 Most uncivilised races still make no material distinc- 

 tion between the two sets of mental processes, as is 

 proved by the well-known animal fables, the old 

 legends, and the idea of the transmigration of souls. 

 Even most of the philosophers of classical antiquity 

 shared the same conviction, and discovered no essential 

 qualitative difference, but merely a quantitative one, 

 between the soul of man and that of the brute. 

 Plato himself, who was the first to draw a funda- 

 mental distinction between soul and body, made one 

 and the same soul (or " idea ") pass through a 

 number of animal and human bodies in his theory 

 of metempsychosis. It was Christianity, intimately 

 connecting faith in immortality with faith in God, 

 that emphasized the essential difference of the 

 immortal soul of man from the mortal soul of the 

 brute. In the dualistic philosophy the idea prevailed 

 principally through the influence of Descartes (1643) ; 

 he contended that man alone had a true " soul," and, 

 consequently, sensation and free will, and that the 

 animals were mere automata, or machines, without 

 will or sensibility. Ever since the majority of 

 psychologists — including even Kant — have entirely 

 neglected the mental life of the brute, and restricted 

 psychological research to man : human psychology, 

 mainly introspective, dispensed with the fruitful 

 comparative method, and so remained at that 

 lower point of view which human morphology took 

 before Cuvier raised it to the position of a 



