THE WONDERS OF LIFE 



As is well known, the views of experts and laymen 

 alike are very much divided as to the place of psychol- 

 ogy in the scheme of the sciences. The great majority 

 of the professional psychologists, and of educated people 

 generally, adhere still to the antiquated dogma, with its 

 religious foundation, that man's soul is immortal and an 

 independent immaterial entity. This dualistic view has 

 been supported in the schools especially by the author- 

 ity of Plato, Descartes, and Kant; in religion by the 

 authority of Christ, Paul, and Mohammed ; in education 

 and the state by the authority of most governments; 

 and in physiology by most of the older, and even some 

 recent, physiologists. On this view, psychology is a 

 special mental science, having only an external and 

 limited connection with natural science. But modern 

 comparative and genetic psychology, the anatomy and 

 physiology of the brain, have, in the course of the last 

 forty years, established the monistic view that psychol- 

 ogy is a special branch of cerebral physiology, and that 

 therefore all its parts and their application belong to 

 this section of biology. The soul of man is a physio- 

 logical function of the phronema. As I have fully ex- 

 plained the monistic conception of psychology in chap- 

 ters vi.-xi. of the Riddle, and supported it with all the 

 arguments of anatomy, physiology, ontogeny, and 

 phylogeny in my Anihropogeny, I need not go further 

 into the subject. 



The science of language shares the fate of its sister, 

 psychology; by one section of its representatives it is 

 taken monistically as a natural science, and by another 

 section it is dualistically conceived as a branch of mental 

 science. On the old metaphysical view, speech was 

 regarded as an exclusive property of man, either a gift 

 of the gods or an invention of social man. But in the 

 course of the nineteenth century the monistic and 

 physiological position that speech is a function of the 



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