THE SEARCH FOB THE SOUL 461 



only no evidence of its existence, but it is a useless conception, its place 

 being adequately supplied by the passing thought or feeling. " Souls/' 

 he says, " have worn out both themselves and their "welcome." 2 



It would seem, therefore, to the initiate in contemporary psychol- 

 ogy that the soul concept is obsolete or at the best obsolescent. 



To the more careful student, however, this conclusion turns out to 

 be rather hasty. Further study leads him to a series of interesting 

 discoveries which shake his faith in his first impression. His first 

 trouble may come when he opens Professor Eucken's recent book, " The 

 Problem of Human Life," and reads on page 551, " Man's soul is a fact. 

 Who can deny it ? It is indeed the fundamental fact which must take 

 precedence of all others." As he reads further in continental thought, 

 he finds that the evanescence of the word " soul " from contemporary 

 psychology is a phenomenon belonging largely to England and America 

 alone. The Germans freely use the word Seele. His second discovery 

 is that, while radical empiricists are carefully explaining that psychology 

 is a natural science and as such has only to do with facts and the only 

 facts are the passing thoughts, feelings and volitions, this attitude is 

 only a measure of extreme caution on the part of a science which has 

 suffered much in the past from its unhappy entanglements with meta- 

 physics and theology and he finds that philosophers, biologists, sociol- 

 ogists and even these same empirical psychologists in their philosophical 

 moods have very little hesitation in positing some theory of the soul to 

 explain facts thrust upon them in their several fields of investigation. 



His third discovery is that the psychology of the day has not so 

 much dispensed with the soul concept as substituted merely another 

 word for it, that word being " consciousness." He finds indeed that 

 " consciousness " is very much in vogue. The word stares at him from 

 every page of the text-books which studiously avoid the " soul " and 

 the "mind." Current psychological journals abound in articles exam- 

 ining into the nature of consciousness, extolling its psychological, soci- 

 ological and even cosmic significance. We are indeed confronted with 

 the following interesting situation : While on the one hand, the soul has 

 lapsed from psychological science and the psychologist is busily en- 

 gaged in studying processes and behavior, on the other hand there never 

 was a time in the history of science when from every quarter came so 

 many assurances that consciousness is a biologic, psychologic, social and 

 cosmic factor of the most profound importance. 



Our inquiring student, therefore, will naturally ask how the concept 

 of consciousness differs from the old concept of the soul, whether the 

 new one is better than the old, and, if so, whether, after all, the loss of 

 the soul is serious if something better has come to take its place. 



If we turn to the standard text-books of psychology, we find that 



* James, "A Pluralistic Universe," p. 210. 



