"U^V /f/'f. / THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESENTED BY PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID BODY AND MIND BY THE SAME AUTHOR AN INTRODUCTION TO SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY A PRIMER OF PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY PSYCHOLOGY, THE STUDY OF BEHAVIOUR (HOMK UNIVERSITY LIBRARY) THE PAGAN TRIBES OF BORNEO (IN CONJUNCTION WITH DR CHARLES HOSF.) BODY AND MIND A HISTORY AND A DEFENSE OF ANIMISM BY WILLIAM McDOUGALL, M.B., F.R.S. FELLOW OF CORPUS CHR1STI COLLEGE, AND READER IN MENTAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, FORMERLY FELLOW OF ST John's college, Cambridge WITH THIRTEEN DIAGRAMS SECOND EDITION METHUEN & CO. LTD. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON First Published . . September 7th igu Second Edition . . February 1913 I - I 14 •'Philosophy may assure us that the account of body and mind given by materialism is neither consistent nor intelligible. Yet body remains the most fundamental and all-pervading fact with which mind has got to deal, the one from which it can least easily shake itself free, the one that most complacently lends itself to every theory destructive of high endeavour." A. J. Balfour " Even the contrast between corporeal and mental existence may not be final and irreconcilable— but our present life is passed in a world where it has not yet been resolved, but yawning underlies all the relations of our thinking and acting. And, even as it will always be indispensable to life, it is, at present at least, indispensable to science. Things that appear to us incompatible, we must first establish separately each on its own foundation. If we have made ourselves acquainted with the natural growth and the ramification of each one of the groups of phenomena which we have thus discriminated, we may afterwards find it possible to speak of their common root. To try prematurely to unite them would only mean to obscure the survey of them, and to lower the value which every distinction possesses even when it may be done away with." R. H. Lotze " Quant a l'idee que le corps vivant pourrait etre soumis par quelque calculateur surhumain au meme traitement mathe- matique que notre systeme solaire, elle est sortie peu a peu d'une certaine metaphysique qui a pris une forme plus precise depuis les decouvertes physiques de Galilee, mais qui fut toujours la metaphysique naturelle de l'esprit humain. Sa clarte appar- ente, notre impatient desir de la trouver vraie, l'empressement avec laquelle tant d'excellents esprits l'acceptent sans preuve, toutes les seductions enfin qu'elle exerce sur notre pensee devraient nous mettre en garde contre elle." H. Bf.rgson M35C181 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2008 with funding from Microsoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/bodymindhistoryaOOmcdorich PREFACE IN writing this volume my primary aim has been to provide for students of psychology and philosophy, within a moderate compass, a critical survey of modern opinion and discussion upon the psycho-physical problem, the problem of the relation between body and mind. But I have tried to present my material in a manner not too dry and technical for the general reader who is prepared to grapple with a difficult subject. For I hold that men of science ought to make intelligible to the general public the course and issue of scientific discussions upon the wider questions to which their re- searches are directed, and that this obligation is especially strong in respect of the subject dealt with in these pages. Among the great questions debated by philosophers in every age the psycho- physical problem occupies a special position, in that it is one in which no thoughtful person can fail to be interested ; for any answer to this question must have some bearing upon the funda- mental doctrines of religion and upon our estimate of man's position and destiny in the world. And that interest in this question is widespread among the English-reading public, is shown by the dense stream of popular books upon it which continues to issue from the press both of this country and of the United States. The greater part of this book is, then, occupied with a survey of modern discussions and modern theories of the psycho-physical relation ; but without some knowledge of the course of develop- ment of speculation upon this topic it is impossible to understand the present state of opinion. I have written, therefore, in the earlier chapters a very brief history of the thought of preceding ages. This historical sketch makes no pretence of being a work of original research ; in putting it together I have relied largely upon the standard histories of philosophy and science, especially viii BODY AND MIND the histories of philosophy of Ueberweg, Lewes, and Hoffding, F. A. Lange's " History of Materialism," Erwin Rhode's " Psyche," Sir Michael Foster's " History of Physiology," the " History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century " of Dr T. Merz, and the " Vitalismus als Geschichte und Lehre " of Dr Hans Driesch. The history of thought upon the psycho-physical problem is in the main the history of the way in which Animism, the oldest and, in all previous ages, the most generally accepted answer to it, has been attacked and put more and more upon the defensive in succeeding centuries, until towards the end of the nineteenth century it was generally regarded in academic circles as finally driven from the field. I have therefore given to the historical chapters the form of a history of Animism. The sub-title describes this book as a defense, as well as a history, of Animism. I hasten to offer some explanation of this description, lest the mere title of the book should repel a con- siderable number of possible readers. The word Animism is frequently used by contemporary writers to denote what is more properly called primitive Animism, or primitive Anthropomorphism, namely, the belief that all natural objects which seem to exert any power or influence are moved or animated by " spirits," or intelligent purposive beings. It is perhaps hardly necessary to say that the Animism I defend is not of this primitive type. Rut this is only one variety of Animism, one which seems to have been reached by extending the essential animistic notion far beyond its original and proper sphere of application. The modern currency and usage of the word derives chiefly from Prof. Tylor's " Primitive Culture," and I use it with the general connotation given it in that celebrated treatise. The essential notion, which forms the common foundation of all varieties of Animism, is that all, or some, of those manifestations of life and mind which distinguish the living man from the corpse and from inorganic bodies arc due to the operation within him of something which is of a nature different from that of the body, an animating principle generally, but not necessarily or always, conceived as an immaterial and individual being or soul. " Primitive Animism " seems to have grown up by extension of PREFACE ix this notion to the explanation of all the more striking phenomena of nature. And the Animism of civilized men, which has been and is the foundation of every religious system, except the more rigid Pantheisms, is historically continuous with the primitive doctrine. But, while religion, superstition, and the hope of a life beyond the grave, have kept alive amongst us a variety of animistic beliefs, ranging in degree of refinement and subtlety from primitive Animism to that taught by Plato, Leibnitz, Lotze, William James, or Henri Bergson, modern science and philosophy have turned their backs upon Animism of every kind with constantly increasing decision ; and the efforts of modern philosophy have been largely directed towards the excogitation of a view of man and of the world which shall hold fast to the primacy and efficiency of mind or spirit, while rejecting the animistic conception of human personality. My prolonged puzzling over the psycho- physical problem has inclined me to believe that these attempts cannot be successfully carried through, and that we must accept without reserve Professor Tylor's dictum that Animism " embodies the very essence of spiritualistic, as opposed to materialistic, philosophy," l and that the deepest of all schisms is that which divides Animism from Materialism. 2 The main body of this volume is therefore occupied with the presentation and examination of the reasonings which have led the great majority of philosophers and men of science to reject Animism, and of the modern attempts to render an intelligible account of the nature of man which, in spite of the rejection of Animism, shall escape Materialism. This survey leads to the con- clusion that these reasonings are inconclusive and these attempts unsuccessful, and that we are therefore compelled to choose between Animism and Materialism ; and, since the logical necessity of preferring the animistic horn of this dilemma cannot be in doubt, my survey constitutes a defense and justification of Animism. I have chosen to use the word Animism rather than any other, not only because it clearly marks the historical continuity of the modern with the ancient conception, but also because no other term indicates precisely all those theories of human personality 1 " Primitive Culture," vol. i. p. 415. l Op. tit., p. 502. x BODY AND MINI) which have in common the notion which, as I believe, provides the only alternative to Materialism. The word " Spiritualism " as used in philosophy is ambiguous, and it has been spoilt for scientific purposes by its current usage to denote that popular belief which is more properly called Spiritism. Nor is all Animism spiritualistic ; during long ages the dominant form of it was a materialistic Dualism. The term " psycho-physical dualism " accurately expresses the essential animistic notion ; but it is cumbrous, and the word Dualism is apt to be taken to imply metaphysical Dualism, an implication which I am anxious to avoid ; for Animism does not necessarily imply metaphysical Dualism, or indeed any metaphysical or ontological doctrine, and may logically be held in conjunction with a monistic metaphysic, or indeed with any metaphysical doctrine, Solipsism alone ex- cepted. The expression " psycho-physical interactionism " will not serve my purpose, because (as we see in the philosophy of Leibnitz, and in that modification of the Cartesian system known as Occasionalism) Animism may be combined with the denial of psycho-physical interaction. Again, the term " soul-theory " does not cover all varieties of Animism, in illustration of which state- ment I may remind the reader that the late Prof. James advocated a distinctly animistic view of human personality, which he called the " transmission theory," but explicitly rejected the conception of the soul as a unitary and individual being. The reader may perhaps be helped to grasp the long argu- ment of the book, if I make here a summary statement of its course. The first six chapters trace in outline through the European culture-tradition, from primitive ages to the present time, the history of Animism and of the attacks upon it from the sides of metaphysic, epistemology, and the natural sciences, and they indicate the principal doctrines proposed as alternatives to it. Chapters VII., VIII., IX., and X. display the grounds on which at the present day the rejection of Animism is generally founded. It is shown that, although in former ages the psycho-physical problem has generally been regarded as one to be solved by metaphysic, it is now widely recognized that the issue must be decided by the methods of empirical science ; and it is shown how PREFACE xi the modern rejection of Animism finds its principal ground in the claim of the physical sciences that their mechanical principles of explanation must hold exclusive sway throughout the universe, a claim which I venture to characterize as " the mechanistic dogma." Chapters XI. and XII. state, examine, and display the special difficulties of, the more important of the monistic doctrines proposed as substitutes for Animism. The least un- satisfactory of these are closely allied, and in accordance with current usage are classed together under the head of psycho- physical Parallelism. In Chapter XIII. it is shown that the choice of Parallelism or Animism is a dilemma from which we cannot escape, unless indeed we are prepared to adopt all the absurdities of thoroughgoing Materialism or of Solipsism. Chapters XIV., XV., and XVI. examine the modern arguments against Animism, and show that no one of them, nor all of them together, logically necessitate its rejection. Chapters XVII. to XXIV. exhibit the inadequacy of the mechanical principles to the explanation of the facts of general physiology, of biological evolution, of human and animal behaviour, and of psychology, and bring forward certain positive arguments in favour of Animism. Chapter XXV. states my attitude towards the work of the Society for Psychical Research, and shows how, as it seems to me, the results hitherto achieved by that line of investigation strengthen the case against the " mechanistic dogma." In the last chapter I have tried to draw together the threads of the argument, and regarding the " mechanistic dogma " (the only serious objection to Animism) as discredited, I have weighed the claims of the principal varieties of Animism in a discussion which results in favour of the hypothesis of the soul. Finally, I have endeavoured to indicate a view of the nature of the soul which shall be in harmony with all the facts established by empirical science. I am aware that to many minds it must appear nothing short of a scandal that anyone occupying a position in an academy of learning, other than a Roman Catholic seminary, should in this twentieth century defend the old-world notion of the soul of man. xii BODY AND MIND For it is matter of common knowledge that " Science " has given its verdict against the soul, has declared that the conception of the soul as a thing, or being, or substance, or mode of existence or activity, different from, distinguishable from, or in any sense or degree independent of, the body is a mere survival from primitive culture, one of the many relics of savage superstition that obstinately persist among us in defiance of the clear teachings of modern science, The greater part of the philosophic world also, mainly owing to the influence of the natural sciences, has arrived at the same conclusion. In short, it cannot be denied that, as William James told us at Oxford three years ago, " souls are out of fashion." But I am aware also that not one in a hundred of those scientists and philosophers who confidently and even scornfully reject the notion has made any impartial and thorough attempt to think out the psycho-physical problem in the light of all the relevant data now available and of the history of previous thought on the question. And I am young enough to believe that there is amongst us a considerable number of persons who prefer the dispassionate pursuit of truth to the interests of any system, and to hope that some of them may find my book acceptable as an honest attempt to grapple once more with this central problem. And I am fortified by the knowledge that a few influential contemporary philosophers adhere to the animistic conception of human personality, or at least regard the psycho-physical-question as still open, as also by certain indications that the " mechanistic dogma " no longer holds the scientific world in so close a grip as during the later part of the nineteenth century. n Animism," writes Professor Tylor, " is, in fact, the ground- work of the Philosophy of Religion, from that of savages up to that of civilized men." x And, though modern Pantheisms have generally rejected Animism, the statement remains substantially correct. And it must be admitted that most of those who have defended Animism in the modern period have been openly or secretly moved by the desire to support religious doctrines 1 " Primitive Culture," i. p. 426. PREFACE xiii which they have accepted on other than scientific grounds. It follows that anyone who undertakes to defend the theory is liable to be suspected of a bias of this kind. These considerations are my apology for setting down here a personal confession, which may aid the reader in judging of the nature and degree of any bias that may have affected my presentation of the arguments for and against Animism. I believe that the future of religion is intimately bound up with the fate of Animism ; and especially I believe that, if science should continue to maintain the mechanistic dogma, and consequently to repudiate Animism, the belief in any form of life after the death of the body will continue rapidly to decline among all civilized peoples, and will, before many genera- tions have passed away, become a negligible quantity. Never- theless, I claim that the discussions of the following pages are conducted with as much impartiality as is possible for one to whom the argument seems to point strongly towards one of the rival hypotheses. For I can lay claim to no religious convictions ; I am not aware of any strong desire for any continuance of my person- ality after death ; and 1 could accept with equanimity a thorough- going Materialism, if that seemed to me the inevitable outcome of a dispassionate and critical reflection. Nevertheless, I am in sympathy with the religious attitude towards life ; and I should welcome the establishment of sure empirical founda- tions for the belief that human personality is not wholly de- stroyed by death. For, as was said above, I judge that this belief can only be kept alive if a proof of it, or at least a presumption in favour of it, can be furnished by the methods of empirical science. And it seems to me highly probable that the passing away of this belief would be calamitous for our civilization. For every vigorous nation seems to have possessed this belief, and the loss of it has accompanied the decay of national vigour in many instances. Apart from any hope of rewards or fear of punishment after death, the belief must have, it seems to me, a moralizing influence upon our thought and conduct that we can ill afford to dispense with. The admirable Stoic attitude of a Marcus Aurelius or a xiv BODY AND MIND Huxley may suffice for those who rise to it in the moral environ- ment created by civilizations based upon a belief in a future life and upon other positive religious beliefs ; but I gravely doubt whether whole nations could rise to the level of an austere morality, or even maintain a decent working standard of conduct, after losing those beliefs. A proof that our life does not end with death, even though we knew nothing of the nature of the life beyond the grave, would justify the belief that we have our share in a larger scheme of things than the universe described by physical science ; and this conviction must add dignity, seriousness, and significance to our lives, and must thus throw a great weight into the scale against the dangers that threaten every advanced civilization. While, then, I should prefer for myself a confident anticipation of total extinction at death to a belief that I must venture anew upon a life of whose nature and conditions we have no knowledge, I desire, on impersonal grounds, to see the world-old belief in a future life established on a scientific founda- tion. To that extent, and to that extent only, I think, my inquiry is biassed. Finally, I wish to state emphatically that my inquiry is not conceived as a search for metaphysical truth, but that it is rather conducted by the methods and with the aims of all empirical science ; that is to say, it aims at discovering the hypotheses which will enable us best to co-ordinate the chaotic data of immediate experience by means of a conceptual system as con- sistent as may be, while recognizing that such conceptions must always be subject to revision with the progress of science. Of course, if the term metaphysic be taken in the older sense as implying an inquiry into that which is not physical, the theme of this work is metaphysical ; but that is a usage which is no longer accepted ; metaphysic is now distinguished from empirical science by its aims and methods rather than by its subject-matter. I claim, then, for the conception of the soul, advocated in the last chapter of this book, no more than that it is an hypothesis which is indispensable to science at the present time. CONTENTS CHAPTER I ANIMISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD PAGES Primitive Animism or Anthropomorphism— The ghost-soul — Burial customs — Origin of ghost-soul— Ghost-soul not immaterial — Extension of original idea of soul — Survivals of ghost-soul — Hebrew Animism — Homeric Animism — The Ionian physicists — Post-Homeric Animism — Greek Materialism — Plato — Aristotle — Stoicism and Scepticism ....... 1-27 CHAPTER II ANIMISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES Pneuma— Materialistic Animism of early Fathers— Spiritualisation of the soul— Neoplatonism— The Schoolmen— Averroism— Roman Materialism . . 28-38 CHAPTER III ANIMISM AT THE TIME OF THE RENASCENCE OF LEARNING Pomponazzi — Vives — Telesio — Bruno — Physiology founded — Vesalius and Van Helmont ......•••• 39"45 CHAPTER IV ANIMISM IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Rise of modern Materialism — Descartes — Occasionalism — Leibnitz— Spinoza — Hobbes .......••• 46-60 CHAPTER V ANIMISM IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY The attack on " Substance "—Locke leads the attack— His dualism— The Deists- Bishop Berkeley's idealism— Hume's scepticism — The Wollfian rationalism dominant on the Continent— French materialism of the "Enlightenment" — Kant's reconciliation of Spiritualism with Materialism— The Vitalists . 61-78 CHAPTER VI ANIMISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY The romantic speculation— Reaction against it— The modern phase of psycho- physical discussion introduced by Fechner— Modern defenders of Animism in Germany, France, Great Britain, and America .... 79-86 xv xvi BODY AND MINI) CHAPTER VII MODERN DEVELOPMENTS OF PHYSICAL SCIENCE ADVERSE TO ANIMISM PAGES Solipsism unacceptable — The psycho-physical problem to be dealt with by methods of empirical science— Kinetic mechanism — The law of the conservation of energy 87-93 CHAPTER VIII THE RISE OF THE MECHANISTIC PHYSIOLOGY AND OF THE "PSYCHOLOGY WITHOUT A SOUL" Hylozoism of the " Enlightment" — Vitalists — Mechanical explanations of vital pro- cesses confidently assumed — The search for the seat of the soul fails — The doctrine of the reflex type of all nervous process — Unconscious cerebration — The association-psychology and the law of habit — The dependence of thought on integrity of brain-functions — The law of psycho-neural correlation — The composite nature of the mind ....... 94-nE CHAPTER IX THE INFLUENCE OF THE DARWINIAN THEORY Lamarckism — Neo-Darvvinism — Organic adaptations mechanically explained — No need for teleology— Continuity of evolution — Interment of Animism by Tyndall .......... 119-121 CHAPTER X CURRENT PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENTS AGAINST ANIMISM Inconceivability of psycho physical interaction — Variants of the inconceivability argument — Immediate knowledge of consciousness, but not of the soul — Rapprochement of science and philosophy on basis of Monism . . 122-125 CHAPTER XI THE AUTOMATON THEORIES I'.piphenomenalism — Its " energetic " variant — Psycho-physical Parallelism proper — Phcnomenalistic Parallelism — Psychical Monism as expounded by Paulsen, Strong, Clifford, and Fechner — Fechner's "proof" of the sub-conscious— Fechner's " day-view " of nature — Continuity of evolution — Psychical Monism compatible with scientific Materialism — Its many advantages . . . 122-148 CONTENTS xvii CHAPTER XII EXAMINATION OF THE AUTOMATON-THEORIES AND OF THE SPECIAL ARGUMENTS IN THEIR FAVOUR PASES Epiphenomenalism combines the difficulties of materialism and of interaction — Parallelism proper must go on to accept the identity hypothesis in one or other of its two forms — The " two-aspect doctrine " meaningless — Therefore " Psychical Monism" the only form of Parallelism deserving of serious con- sideration — The difficulty of doing without "things" — My self is not my consciousness, but rather the sum of enduring conditions which we call the structure of the mind — Difficulties of the compounding of consciousnesses — Difficulties common to all forms of Parallelism — Universal consciousness — It necessitates assumption of unconscious consciousness — Parallelism of mechanical sequences with the logical and teleological . . . 149-178 CHAPTER XIII IS THERE ANY WAY OF ESCAPE FROM THE DILEMMA — ANIMISM OR PARALLELISM ? The acceptance of "idealism" does not absolve us from the psycho-physical problem — Kant neither resolved nor dissolved the problem — Three attitudes towards it of Post-Kantians, represented by Parallelism of Paulsen, the ambiguity of Lange, and the transubjective Idealism of Ward — The last implies Animism as hypothesis necessary to natural science . . . 179-188 CHAPTER XIV ARGUMENTA AD HOMINEM Proposed dualism of science and philosophy — A calculable universe — Animism does not necessarily imply metaphysical Dualism or Pluralism — Parallelism admits only pantheistic religion — Parallelism incompatible with belief in any continu- ance of personality after death — Fechner, Kant, and Paulsen fail to reconcile the mechanistic dogma with human immortality — High authorities for and against Animism ......... 189-20^ CHAPTER XV EXAMINATION OF THE ARGUMENTS AGAINST ANIMISM FROM EPISTEMOLOGY, "INCONCEIVABILITY," AND THE LAW OF CONSERVATION OF ENERGY Necessity of giving all scientific explanation the mechanical form not proved — Guidance without work— Various possibilities — Argument from conservation of energy describes a circle — Difficulty of defining the " physical " — Immediate awareness not the highest type of knowledge ..... 206-223 CHAPTER XVI EXAMINATION OF THE ARGUMENTS AGAINST ANIMISM DRAWN FROM PHYSIOLOGY AND GENERAL BIOLOGY Inadequate conceptions of interaction alone give plausibility to arguments from cerebral physiology — Continuity of evolution a postulate — But, if accepted, not fatal to Animism — Statistics and teleology — Abiogenesis . . . 224-234 xviii BODY AND MIND CHAPTER XVII THE INADEQUACY OK MECHANICAL CONCEPTIONS IN PHYSIOLOGY PAGES Last half-century has done nothing to justify physiological materialism- The impossibility of mechanistic explanation of morphogenesis and heredity — Experimental embryology, restitution, and regeneration — Organisms and machines — Organisms and the degradation of energy .... 235-245 CHAPTER XVIII INADEQUACY OF MECHANICAL PRINCIPLES TO EXPLAIN ORGANIC EVOLUTION Neo-Darwinism based on mechanistic assumption in regard to heredity — Natural selection implies the struggle for existence — Difficulties of Neo-Darwinism — Diminished by " organic selection " — But this is a teleological principle — Muta- tions not fortuitous — Regeneration not explicable on Darwinian principles — Resuscitation of Vitalism — Appendix on organic selection . . . 246-257 CHAPTER XIX INADEQUACY OF MECHANICAL CONCEPTIONS TO EXPLAIN ANIMAL AND HUMAN BEHAVIOUR The " total reactions" of animalcules are not tropisms — Persistence and " trial and error " among the lowest animals — Purely instinctive actions initiated by per- ceptions which involve mental synthesis — Instinctive actions co-operating with intelligence imply more extensive synthesis— Meaning and purpose as factors in instinctive behaviour — Human instincts — "Meaning" is an essential link between sense-impression and reaction — Values .... 258-271 CHAPTER XX THE ARGUMENT TO PSYCHO-PHYSICAL INTERACTION FROM THE "DISTRIBUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS" Darwinism implies the usefulness of consciousness — And not merely of infra-con- sciousness, but of integrated personal consciousness — True consciousness accompanies not all nervous processes, but only those which result in modifi- cation .......••• 272-280 CHAPTER XXI THE UNITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS Two lines of argument — The metaphysical (Lotze) valid, but not capable of con- vincing — The physiological — The sen sorium commune, variously conceived — All these conceptions untenable — No physical medium of composition of effects of sense-stimuli— Some medium demanded by our intellect — Why refuse to trust it ? — Fechner's doctrine of the threshold and of psycho-physical con- tinuity — The facts of sensory " fusion " incompatible with Parallelism, however stated— Multiple personality ....... 281-300 CONTENTS xix CHAPTER XXII THE PSYCHO-PHYSICS OF "MEANING" PAGES The association-psychology ignored "meaning" — But without meaning "ideas" are meaningless — The doctrine of the "psychic fringe" — Spatial meanings are not identical with clusters of kinassthetic sensations— Sensations are merely cues to meanings — And meanings are relatively independent of sensa- tions and have no physical parallels ...... 301-311 CHAPTER XXIII PLEASURE, PAIN, AND CONATION The facts of feeling-tone — Feeling has no immediate correlate among the brain- processes — Yet feeling determines the trend of thought and action — Feeling and the establishment of associations — Feeling and evolution — The peculiarities of conative process have no physical analogues . . . 312-329 CHAPTER XXIV MEMORY Parallelism implies that all mental retention can be described in terms of brain- structure — The fantastic " memory-cell"— Motor-habit the type of all retention founded in brain-structure — But true memory cannot be identified with habit — The law of neural association as generally stated is false — All remembering involves co-operation of two factors, habit and true memory — Suggestion towards a theory of memory ....... 330-346 CHAPTER XXV THE BEARING OF THE RESULTS OF " PSYCHICAL RESEARCH " ON THE PSYCHO-PHYSICAL PROBLEM The search for empirical evidence of survival — Telepathy seems to be established — Hypernormal control of bodily by mental processes — Post-hypnotic apprecia- tion of time ......... 347354 CHAPTER XXVI CONCLUSION Animism preferable to Parallelism — Four varieties of Animism — The animistic " actuelle Seele " — The transmission theory of James and Bergson — The objections to the soul-theory flimsy, if psycho-physical interaction is accepted — The contentless soul — The soul a developing system of psychical disposi- tions — Multiple personalities are of two kinds, both consistent with the soul- theory — The vegetative functions of the soul — The soul-theory and organic evolution .......... 355-379 Index , 381-384 BODY AND MIND CHAPTER I ANIMISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD IT would seem that from a very remote period men of almost all races have entertained the belief that the living man differs irom the corpse in that his body contains some more subtle thing or principle which determines its purposive movements, its growth and self-repair, and to which is due his capacity for sensation, thought, and feeling. For the belief in some such animating principle, or soul, is held by almost every existing race of men, no matter how lowly their grade of culture nor how limited their mental powers ; and we find evidences of a similar belief among the earliest human records. Among the more highly civilized peoples, the soul has generally been regarded by the more cultured members of each community as an immaterial being or agency ; but the distinction between material and immaterial things was only achieved after long ages of discussion and by many steps of refinement of the conception of the soul. The belief most widely current among the peoples of lower culture is that each man consists, not only of the body which is constantly present among his fellows, but also of a shadowy vapour-like duplicate of his body ; this shadow-like image, the animating principle of the living organism, is thought to be capable of leaving the body, of transporting itself rapidly, if not instantaneously, from place to place, and of manifesting in those places all or most of the powers that it exerts in the body during waking life. Sleep is regarded as due to its temporary withdrawal from the body ; trance, coma, and other serious illness, as due to longer absence ; and death is thought to imply its final departure to some distant place. That this belief is a very real one among many peoples, is shown by their careful observance of customs in which it finds 2 BODY AND MIND expression. Thus, among some of the peoples who entertain this belief, it is customary to avoid wakening a sleeper, lest his wander- ing soul should not return to him ; and, if it becomes absolutely necessary to waken him, it is done as gradually as possible, in order that his soul may have time to find its way back to the body. Or again, the friends of a sick person will procure a medicine-man, who, falling into trance, will send his soul after the retreating soul, to arrest it if possible on its journey toward the land of the dead, and to lead it back to the body of the patient. And after death the friends or relatives will take all possible measures to aid the departing soul on its journey, and to promote its welfare in the land of shades, where it is believed to lead a life very much like that of its embodied state in this world. 1 The burial customs of many peoples afford the best evidence that the disembodied soul is conceived as like in all essential respects to the living whole of soul and body. The widespread custom of killing slaves or wives on the death of a man of some importance is an expression of the belief that the souls of the victims will accompany his soul and will continue to serve it as they served him before death. And the even more widely spread custom of burying or burning with the body of the dead man his most valued possessions, especially weapons and ornaments, is due to the belief that even these things have their shadowy duplicates or ghost-souls, which can be carried away by the departing soul and used by it as the real objects were used by the living man. Professor E. B. Tylor first clearly expounded this primitive conception of the ghost-soul, showed its wide distribution in space and time, and illustrated with a wealth of detail its many varia- tions, in his celebrated chapters on Animism ; 2 and there can be no reasonable doubt that he has given the true account of its origin, in attributing it in the main to reflection upon the experi- ences of dreams and visions, in conjunction with the objectively observed facts of sleep, trance, and death. In sleep, while the body lies at rest, the sleeper remains unconscious of the surround- ings of his body ; he seems to himself to visit other scenes, to meet and converse with other persons, and to have the use in these dream-adventures of his dress and weapons. In visions and 1 Among the Kayans of Borneo, for example, it is the custom for an elderly person learned in such matters to sit beside the corpse, where the soul is sup- posed to hover for some davs after death, and to impart to the latter minute directions for its journey to the land of the dead. * " Primitive Culture," first edition, London, 187 1 ; especially chap. xi. ANIMISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 3 in dreams he sees, too, the shadowy forms of dead friends. Since, then, most savages regard their dream-experiences as equally real with those of waking life, they naturally and inevitably arrive at the theory that the ghost-self, which in dreams can appear in distant places, leaving the deserted body in death-like stillness, is identical with the animating principle. It is sometimes said that primitive man conceives the ghost- soul as material ; while Professor Tylor describes it as a spiritual- istic conception. But to describe the primitive ghost-soul as either matter or spirit is misleading ; if these terms are to be applied to it, we must describe it as a material spirit. This is, of course, a contradiction in terms, which we can only resolve by recognizing that the peoples who believe in the ghost-soul have not achieved the comparatively modern distinction between material and immaterial or spiritual existents. It is clear that the ghost-soul is generally conceived as having many of the pro- perties of matter, and as having the same needs as the embodied soul, as subject to the pains of cold and heat, of hunger and thirst, and as being bound, though less strictly than the body, by con- ditions of space and matter. This quasi-materiality of the ghost-soul is well illustrated by the custom, observed among many peoples, of making a hole in the roof or wall of the death- chamber for the exit of the departing soul, or by that of sinking a bamboo tube through the earth above the buried corpse in order to allow the soul to revisit it. Two things seem chiefly to have determined the form of the primitive belief as to the substance of the ghost-soul, namely, the shadow and the breath. Each man's shadow is an impalpable something which has a certain likeness to the man, and which accompanies him when actively employed, but which disappears when he lies down in sleep or death. And the breath that comes and goes from his nostrils seems bound up with his life, and dis- appears at death. In some regions the new-born babe is held to the mouth of a dying person, in order to receive his escaping soul or breath. And language clearly shows the important part played by the ideas of the shadow and of the breath in such words as manes and shade, spirit, spiritus, anima> animus, pneuma, and in similar words of many other languages. The conception of the ghost-soul cannot be better defined than in the following words of Professor Tylor, from whose classical account the foregoing brief description has been con- 4 BODY AND MIND densed. He writes : "It is a thin, unsubstantial human image, in its nature a sort of vapour, film, or shadow ; the cause of life and thought in the individual it animates ; independently possess- ing the personal consciousness and volition of its corporeal owner, past or present ; capable of leaving the body far behind, to flash swiftly from place to place ; mostly impalpable and invisible, yet also manifesting physical power, and especially appearing to men waking or asleep as a phantasm separate from the body of which it bears the likeness ; continuing to exist and appear to men after the death of that body ; able to enter into, possess, and act in the bodies of other men, of animals, and even of things." * Since the publication of " Primitive Culture," the origin of Animism has been the subject of much discussion and con- troversy ; but in their main outlines Dr Tylor's account of the ghost-soul, and his theory of the genesis of the idea, seem to remain unshaken. Mr Andrew Lang has urged that waking hallucinations or apparitions (in common phrase, the seeing of ghosts) may have played an important part in developing the idea. Mr R. R. Marett 2 and others have attempted to describe a pre-animistic conception, which attributed an ill-defined power or virtue to all things that evoked awe in the mind of primitive man ; it is suggested that this notion was the common matrix from which ideas of the souls of men, animals, and plants, anthropo- morphic conceptions of natural forces, the ideas of gods and demons, in fact, all ideas of spiritual existences, have been differentiated. These are interesting suggestions which, in so far as they are accepted (and to me a strong case seems to be made out for both views), are to be regarded as supplementing Dr Tylor's doctrine, rather than as conflicting with it. 3 1 " Primitive Culture," third edition, vol. i. p. 429. 2 " The Threshold of Religion," London, 1908. 3 More recently Mr A. E. Crawley has published a work (" The Idea of the Soul ") in which he claims to have completely refuted Dr Tylor's theory of the origin of the ghost -soul, and to have established a rival. To my mind the weight of the arguments brought forward against Dr Tylor's view is a negligible quantity, and the hypothesis proposed as an alternative seems highly improbable. Mr Crawley maintains that the visual images of waking life are the source from which primitive man derived his ideas of the souls of men and things. Though tins view cannot be seriously entertained as a sub- stitute for Dr Tylor's theory, it may, I think, be regarded as supplementing it, by drawing attention to a factor which may have played some considerable part in the genesis of the ghost-soul, and which, perhaps, has not been sufficiently taken into account. The tendency to visualize our dead friends, when we think ANIMISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 5 The ascription by primitive men of ghost-souls to animals, plants, and inert objects, is probably regarded as an extension of the theory first arrived at by reflection on the problem of human life. Such extension was rendered almost inevitable by the fact that persons met in dreams and visions, as well as the dreamer himself, seem to have about them their dogs, their weapons, their dress, and other material objects. It seems probable also that the ghost-soul of man was the first definite conception of personal intelligent powers, living and working in detachment from ordinary solid matter and all the narrow limitations of embodied existence. If so, the developments of ideas of other powers of a similar, but non-human, nature, demons, gods, spirits good and evil of all sorts, must have been in large degree merely extensions and differentiations of this fundamental notion of the human ghost-soul. 1 In various ages and places many variants of this primitive conception of the ghost-soul have been held ; some savages, for example, agree with certain philosophers of classical antiquity in assigning to each man two, three, or even four souls of different functions. But the diversities of the opinions of uncultured peoples on this great subject are far less striking than the uniformities ; and the theory of the ghost-soul is so widely distributed throughout all regions of the world, and gives so natural and satisfactory explanations of so many facts that force themselves upon the attention of men of every grade of culture, that we may suppose it to have been independently reached by many peoples. So concordant is it with the way of thinking of unsophisticated mankind, that it has lived on up to the present day in the popularly accepted traditions of almost all the peoples of the world ; and every feature of the primitive conception is illustrated by practices and beliefs still current among the most highly civilized peoples of Europe. Even the belief in the materiality of the soul still finds expression in the custom of opening the door or window of the death-chamber to give free egress to the departing soul, 2 and in the German superstition 3 of them, is strong in most of us, and perhaps stronger in the men of primitive culture than in others. And this tendency may well have facilitated the develop- ment of the notion of the ghost-soul by reflection upon the facts of sleep, dream, trance, and death. 1 This is the view forcibly defended by Prof. W. Wundt in his Volker-psycho- logie (second edition, vol. iv. part i.), Leipzig, 1910. 2 " Primitive Culture," vol. i. p. 454. 3 Ibid., vol. i. p. 455. 6 BODY AND MIND that the ghost-soul of a mother who dies in child-birth will return to suckle the infant and will leave the impress of its weight upon the bed. The history of Animism throughout the course of the develop- ment of European civilization affords one of the most striking illustrations of the law that, in every civilized community, two streams of tradition, two strata of belief and custom, persist side by side, influencing one another, but never fusing : namely, the stream of popular tradition and the literary tradition of the cultured few. Throughout the development of European civilization, popular beliefs regarding the nature and destiny of the human soul have remained vague, diversified, and fluctuating. Although, amid all changes, the primitive conception of the ghost -soul has persisted in the popular mind, for just the same reasons as have led to its independent adoption by so many savage peoples ; it has been modified in various ways, and partially overlaid and obscured, by the teachings of the leaders of religious, philoso- phical, and scientific thought. The elements taken up by the popular tradition from these sources have been for the most part logically incompatible with the theory of the ghost-soul ; and this incompatibility has no doubt played a principal part in preventing, within the stream of popular tradition, the formation of any definite and generally accepted notion, and in maintaining in every age among large numbers of the people a sceptical or negative attitude towards the doctrine of a future life. The further civilization has progressed, the more chaotic has the state of popular opinion upon this great question become ; until, at the present time, there is current among us almost every variety of opinion and belief that the foregoing generations have excogitated. To attempt to trace the devious and many-branched course of the muddy stream of popular tradition would be a hopeless task. In the following pages I am concerned only with the history of Animism in the culture-tradition. I have to attempt to show how, starting with primitive Animism, the culture- tradition has successively modified it and refined it ; until at the present day the venerable doctrine seems to be on the point of being finally dismissed to the anthropologists' museum of curiosities. The principal influences that differentiated the Animism of ANIMISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 7 the culture-tradition from primitive Animism, and set it upon its long and troubled course, were : (1) the teachings of the Hebrew prophets ; (2) the speculations of the theologians and philosophers of ancient Greece; and (3) the efforts of the Christian fathers, influenced by the culture-tradition of the ancient Greek world as well as by that of the Hebrews, to set up a consistent and generally acceptable doctrine of the soul among the dogmas of the Church. The operation of these influences will be briefly traced in the present and in the following chapter. The primitive Hebrew conception of the soul was essentially the same as the ghost-soul of so many other peoples. As the Rev. Prof. Charles points out, 1 we must distinguish the earlier from the later view expressed in the Old Testament. According to the earlier view, " man consists of two elements, spirit or soul and body " ; " the soul is the seat of feeling and desire, and, in a secondary degree, of the intelligence, and is identified with the personality " ; the soul leaves the body at death (though, as by so many other peoples, it was thought of as hovering in its neighbourhood for some time after death) to pass to the dark underworld of the souls of the dead, Sheol. " The relations and customs of earth were reproduced in Sheol. Thus the prophet was distinguished by his mantle, kings by their crowns and thrones, the uncircumcised by his foreskin. Each nation also preserved its individuality, and no doubt its national garb and customs. . . . Indeed the departed were regarded as reproducing exactly the same features as marked them at the moment of death." And the ghost-souls of ancestors were believed to have knowledge of their descendants and to benefit from their ministrations. Under the teaching of the prophets and the development of Monotheism, the spirit began to be dis- tinguished from the soul ; and, while the soul remained as the vital principle of the body and as the seat of all the mental activities, it was not conceived as surviving the death of the body — " in death the soul is extinguished and only the spirit survives. But since the spirit is only the impersonal force of life common to men and brutes, it returns to the Fount of all life, and thus all personal existence ceases at death." " In the above threefold division of man's personality the spirit and soul are distinct alike 1 " A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life in Israel, in Judaism, and in Christianity," by R. H. Charles, D.D. 8 BODY AM) MIND in essence and origin. The former is the impersonal basis of life coming from God, and returning on death to God. The latter, which is the personal factor in man, is simply the supreme function of the quickened body, and perishes on the withdrawal of the spirit." Hence, according to this later view, the soul is annihilated at the death of the body, and " Sheol, the abode of the souls, became a synonym of Abaddon or destruction." But, says Prof. Charles, " this doctrine never succeeded in dispossessing the older and rival doctrine ; their conflicting views of soul and spirit were current together " x ; that is to say, the primitive con- ception of the ghost-soul lived on among the Hebrews alongside the later developed and, doubtless, less popular, because more difficult, conception. Just as among the Hebrews the notion of the ghost-soul continued to be widely entertained, in spite of the teaching by the prophets of a more difficult conception of human personality ; so also among the Greeks the ghost-soul retained its place in popular belief, while the philosophers developed a literary tradition in which the conception of the soul underwent many changes, and in which almost every phase of later speculation upon this topic was either foreshadowed or definitely taught. The pages of Homer show clearly enough that the Greeks of the Homeric age believed in the ghost-soul. But their conception differed markedly in certain respects from the typical ghost-soul of primitive Animism and of so many savage and barbarous peoples in all ages. The typical ghost-soul enjoys all the powers, both bodily and mental, of the living man, and differs from the man chiefly in being less substantial and less strictly subject to limitations of time and space ; but the ghost-soul of the Homeric Greeks, the eidolon {i'ibuXov) or psyche {-^vyji), was not conceived as the bearer of the mental faculties, or at least not as enjoying the whole of the mental faculties of the living man. It was rather a shadowy image merely, which leaves the body of the dying man by way of the mouth or gaping wound ; and this shadow or shade, descending to Hades, enjoyed but the shadow of its former life and powers. The strength and will, the intellect and mental powers in general, were supposed to reside in the region of the diaphragm and to be dissolved or annihilated at the death of the body. Disembodied minds were unknown to 1 Op. cil., p. 44. ANIMISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 9 the Greeks of this age ; even their gods lived upon the earth, and were fully incarnate in bodies which differed from those of men only in that they were subject to neither disease nor death. The shades, once banished to Hades, were strictly imprisoned there ; and thus the Homeric world was freed from the terror of ghosts that has haunted, and still haunts, almost all other peoples. And the cult of the dead had no recognized place in that world ; for the dead were incapable of influencing the living for good or ill. It is clear, then, that the Homeric Greeks had departed widely from primitive Animism ; that they had modified it in a way natural to their vigorous, joyous, and but little religious dis- position, in a period of national expansion and victorious self- assertion. There is no reason to doubt that at an earlier period Animism of the more usual kind had been current among them ; traces of this, and of the cult of the dead appropriate to it, survive in the story of Achilles and Patroclus and of the funeral sacrifices of wine, sheep, oxen, horses, and Trojan youths. These seem to have been but ceremonial survivals of a cult of souls that had prevailed in an earlier age, when souls were dreaded for their active powers of intervention in human life. 1 There appears in the Homeric writings a foretaste of that tendency to the reification of abstractions which was to play so great a part in the philosophy of later ages. The psyche is sometimes identified with life ; and the mental powers, regarded as resident in the region of the diaphragm, are sometimes attri- buted to the 6vfj.bg, or /3ouX»j, entities which, though belonging to the body, are not identified with any bodily organs. The continuance of the ghost-soul in Hades did not constitute a survival of personality ; for to the Greeks of this age the body was an essential part of personality. Nevertheless there appears in Homer, possibly as a late addition, the belief in the immortality of a favoured few. This immortality was not an immortality of the soul alone, but rather of the whole person, who was conceived as transported bodily by the favour of some divinity to " the isles of the blest," or to " the Elysian fields," a distant region of the earth which might yet be discovered by the daring voyager. This notion, probably a poetic invention, was given a permanent place in popular belief by its embodiment in the Homeric poems; 1 In this brief account of the Homeric and post-Homeric beliefs I follow Erwin Rhode's " Psyche," second edition, Leipzig, 1906. to BODY AND MIND it was a natural supplement to the peculiar form that Greek Animism had assumed. The Homeric beliefs continued to be generally held up to the sixth century B.C.; but a new class of immortals arose, men who, like the dwellers in the Happy Isles, had not known death, but who, by the power of some god, were engulfed in some deep chasm or cave, swallowed by earthquake, or struck but not killed by the bolt of Zeus ; and these heroes became in many cases the centres of local cults. It was probably under the influence of this belief and of these cults that the pre-Homeric belief in the survival of the personality after death was revived. Hesiod's doctrine of the Golden Age seems to have played a considerable part in restoring this belief. For he taught that, though the men of the Golden Age had died, their souls were raised by the will of Zeus to a life even fuller and richer than that they had enjoyed in the body ; and these souls, partaking of the immortal nature of the gods, and known like them as Daemons, were regarded by him as wandering invisible among men, seeing their good and their evil deeds. There can be little doubt that these influences played a con- siderable part in bringing into prominence in the religious life of post-Homeric Greece a new cult of the dead. Not all men were held to survive the death of the body, but only great leaders, men who in life had bulked large in the eyes of their fellows. At this time earth-burial had replaced the funeral pyre of the Homeric age, and the soul of the dead hero was believed to hover in the neighbourhood of the tomb where his bones were laid. Since these surviving souls were held to be capable of affecting the welfare of men, especially of their own descendants, they became the objects of local and family cults and of propitiatory rites. Wine, honey, oil, and burnt sheep were offered to the dead hero ; and the whole cult implied the belief that the dead man lived on among his people but little changed by death. This survival did not imply immortality of the soul ; rather the con- tinuance of the soul depended upon the maintenance of the cult by the friends, especially the family, of the dead hero. The hero attained this life after death by the favour of some god, generally announced by the Delphic oracle ; but the process became easier and more frequent, and the heroes multiplied rapidly, until it was customary to regard as surviving in this way all that fell in glorious battle. ANIMISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD u A still wider gate to the life after death was opened by the Eleusinian Mysteries. These were derived from the cult of Demeter and Persephone of Eleusis, the local divinities of the underworld. The cult was adopted by Athens, and became ever more widely open ; until even slaves were admitted to initiation Those initiated to participation in this cult were held to be assured of a future life less shadowy and unreal than the life of the dim underworld of shades, which still was all that the uninitiated could look forward to. Thus the hope of a future life became possible to all men ; but still there was no general acceptance of a belief in the immortality of the soul. This first appeared in Greece with the Dionysiac cult, whose central feature was a mystic union of the worshipper with the god. In the original form of the cult as practised in Thrace, the wor- shippers gave themselves up to a wild dance. In the excitement of the dance they attained an ecstatic exaltation which they believed to imply their possession by the bull-god ; the soul of the ecstatic was supposed to depart from his body and to wander in distant scenes, holding communion with gods and daemons. From Thrace this cult spread throughout all Greece, fusing with the cult of Apollo. Under its influence the populace became familiar with the notion that the soul, with all the mental faculties, is separable from the body ; and under the same influence there sprang up the belief that the soul is formed for a higher destiny than its life in the body, that it is clogged and held down by its association with the body, and that it must be freed from this degrading influence by purificatory and ascetic rites. In the Orphic cult these ideas were further developed, until the soul was regarded as having its true life among the gods, its life in the body being a temporary banishment from this true or higher life. The soul at death goes to judgment in the under- world. Thence it returns to be reincarnated again and again, until it is wholly purified ; when it is set free to live for ever with the gods. In fact, under the influence of the Dionysiac and Orphic cults, the soul came to be regarded as a god imprisoned in the body. 1 But immortality had always been the most funda- mental attribute of the gods, and thus the human soul, by assimilation to the gods, became immortal. While Animism was developing towards the theory of human 1 Rhode, op. cit., II. S. 133. 12 BODY AND MIND immortality of the Orphic theologians, the philosophers known as the Ionian physicists initiated, in the sixth century B.C., that pro- longed effort to learn by pure unprejudiced reasoning the ultimate nature of things which we call European philosophy. It was their principal aim to exhibit the whole world as the manifestation of some fundamental and primary mode of being. And this aim led them to reject from the outset both the Animism of popular opinion and that of the theologians. For them the soul of man was but one mode of manifestation of the power which moves and works in all things, without which the world would be dead and motionless and unchanging. The psyche of these philosophers had nothing in common with the psyche of the Homeric traditions. The word was used by them to denote the powers of thinking, feeling, willing (and the untranslatable 0vft.6g), which, according to the Homeric tradition, were bodily functions resident about the diaphragm. Nor was their psyche an individual immortal being like that of the Animism of the Orphic priesthood. The question as to personal immortality seemed meaningless to these philo- sophers ; nevertheless, since the soul is the working in man of the power that moves all things, the universal life itself, it is, in a sense, imperishable and immortal. So conceived, " the soul acquired a new dignity ; in another sense than that of the mystics and the theologians, it could be claimed as divine ; in the sense, namely, that it is a partial manifestation of the one power which builds and guides the universe. Not a single daemon is it, but the divine power itself." 1 The principal Ionian physicists adopted different views of the nature of that which they sought as the foundation and origin of all things. Thales (B:C. 636), the first of them, held that the fundamental element is water ; Anaximenes, that it is the universal air. " Diogenes adopted the tenet of Anaximenes respecting Air as the origin of things ; but he gave a wider and deeper significance to the tenet by pointing out the analogy of air with the soul (or life). . . . The air is a soul ; therefore it is living and intelligent. But this Force of Intelligence is a higher thing than the air through which it manifests itself; it must con- sequently be prior in point of time ; it must be the dpyj philosophers have sought. The Universe is a living being, spontaneously evolving itself, deriving its transformations from its own vitality." 2 Thus air was for Diogenes but the symbol of mind. 1 Rhode, op. cit., II. S. 143. 2 Lewes* " History of Philosophy," vol. i. p. 1 1. ANIMISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 13 Heraclitus (503 B.C.), who belongs to this group of thinkers, elaborated this type of speculation on the basis of the assump- tion that fire is the principle of life and action which works in the perpetual flux of things. " Whatever in the manifold of phenomena partakes of the nature of the divine fire is for Heraclitus soul, and soul is fire. Fire and soul are interchange- able notions, and so the soul of man also is fire, a part of the universal vital fire which envelops it, and through the inbreathing of which the soul maintains itself alive, a part of the universal reason, by participation in which the soul itself is reasonable. In man lives the god. Not that, as in the doctrine of the theo- logians, he descends as a closed individuality into the form of a single human being ; but, as a unity, he envelops mankind, per- meating men as with tongues of fire. A part of the all-wisdom lives in the soul of man ; . . . the soul is such a part of the universal fire which, absorbed into the flux of existing forms, is bound up and interwoven with the bodily functions.' 1 The fire which is the soul perpetually converts itself into the water and earth of which the body is composed, and thus builds up the body ; while it renews itself by drafts from the universal fire. The soul, being thus constantly in process of conversion into the lower elements and constantly renewed, is no enduring self-identical entity. " So long as the soul renews itself from the enveloping world-fire, the individual lives. Separation from the source of all life, the universal fire, would be death. Now and then, in sleep and dreams, the individual soul loses its life-giving connexion with the universal fire and is for a time shut up in its own world, and this is a partial death. . . . There comes a moment at which the soul of man can no longer make good what it loses in the process of metabolism, and then comes death." Thus the individual dies, but the universal fire is eternal. " The question as to individual immortality, or even the continuance of the individual soul, has scarcely any meaning for Heraclitus. . . . The indi- vidual as a separate being has no value and significance ; the perpetuation of this separate existence (if it were possible) would seem to him an absurdity. For him only the fire as a whole is eternal ; not its separate manifestations in individuals, but only the universal energy which transmutes itself into all things and reabsorbs all things into itself." 2 1 Rhode, op. cit., II. S. 146. 2 Op. cit., II., S. 154. 14 BODY AND MIND For the Ionian philosophers of nature, the soul was, then, a part of nature, and psychology a part of natural science. There was for them no distinction between the physical and the psychical ; rather, all things, including life and mind, were manifestations of one universal energy. 1 Though philosophy had thus begun its course by the rejection of Animism, it was not long before the popular doctrine found a powerful defender among the philosophers. Pythagoras founded his school and acquired a great influence, hardly a generation after Thales appeared as the first of the philosophers. The Ionian philosophy, contemplating the whole of nature, had wellnigh over- looked man, regarding him as but an insignificant fragment of the whole. Pythagoras restored man and the problems ot human nature to their position of prime and central importance, giving the soul of man a central position in his doctrine. The human soul was conceived as in the Animism then current in the dominant religious sect, namely, as the double of the visible body and as a daemon, i.e. a godlike and immortal being fallen from the divine heights in which is its true home, and shut up in the body for punishment. The soul was distinguished from the body as something opposed to nature, rather than a part of it. Even during its sojourn in the body it has no organic relation to it, but maintains uncontaminated its peculiar nature. It does not constitute the personality of the man, for any soul may inhabit any body ; and after death it tarries in Hades, whence it returns again and again to earth, seeking each time a new body for its abode. So it wanders during long ages, inhabiting in turn many human and animal bodies ; its fate at each incarnation being deter- mined by its actions during its preceding periods of embodied life. But it is immortal, and in its essence an unchanging individual being. Its ultimate destiny is to be freed from the bonds of the natural life of the body, and to return to dwell for ever in the supernatural realm of pure souls whence it came. The practical aspect and ultimate aim of the Pythagorean philosophy was to learn how to hasten this return of the soul to its divine home by means of ascetic and purificatory rites. 1 The conception of energy current at the present day was of course unknown to the ancients ; but if, in the teachings of Heraclitus, we substitute energy for fire, we shall realize that he was striving after the modern conception, and that he foreshadowed the modern doctrine of the conservation of energy and the view, upheld at the present time by some distinguished physicists, according to which both mind and matter are but manifestations of the universal energy. ANIMISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 15 Thus, at the very dawn of philosophy, we find the leading thinkers arrayed in the opposed camps of naturalistic Monism and animistic Pluralism. Another very influential philosopher, Empedocles (B.C. 444), gave to the soul a position very similar to that which it occu- pied in the Pythagorean doctrine. His teaching differed from the latter in that he attempted the impossible task of combining a wide-ranging Animism, similar to the Pythagorean, with a thoroughgoing Hylozoism like that of the Ionian school. The soul was for him " of a divine order, too noble for this visible world, only on release from which it will attain its full and true life. Banished to the body, it leads there its separate existence ; not everyday perception and feeling is its part, nor even reasoning, which is the function of the heart's blood ; but in the ' higher ' modes of thought and in ecstatic ' exaltation ' only is it active ; to it belongs the philosophical insight which, penetrating beyond the apprehension of the narrow range of sensory experience, knows the totality of the world's being according to its true nature." x About the same time that Empedocles thus formulated anew the animistic philosophy, Anaxagoras and Democritus took up again the way of thought of the Ionian school, and the latter especially carried it to a more definite issue than had been reached by any of his predecessors. Anaxagoras occupies a middle position between the animists and the naturalists. For him the universal power that moves and orders all things is Reason (vovg). Wherever in the world life and movement appear, there this universal power is active. Its activity within an animated being constitutes the soul of that being. At death, therefore, the individual soul ceases to exist, but the supreme power remains. Yet so uncertain still was the distinction between matter and spirit that, according to Lewes, the supreme energy " was only the abstract form of the vital principle animating animals and plants," and " was simply one among the numerous agents, material like the rest, and only differing from them in being pure " ; and Grote says of it that " it is one substance or form of matter among the rest, but thinner than all of them, thinner even than fire or air." Democritus (B.C. 460) gave the speculations of the Ionian school a more modern and definitely materialistic form by reducing all things to material atoms and their movements. 1 Rhode, op. ctt., II. S. 185. 16 BODY AND -MIND The atom was an indivisible unit constantly in motion, and by impact with others constantly imparting and receiving motion. The soul, that which animates living beings, consists also of atoms, which are peculiar only in being finer, smoother, more rounded, and therefore more mobile, than any others ; these finest atoms permeate the whole body and produce the phenomena of life. These soul atoms are drawn in with the breath, and, when they are no longer breathed in, death ensues. Democritus is assigned by Rhode the distinction of being the first Greek thinker explicitly to deny that the individual may in any sense survive the death of the body. Democritus' conception of the soul was thus very different from the primitive ghost-soul ; nevertheless this latter conception seems to have been familiar to him and to have been used by him in a novel manner ; he first proposed a theory of percep- tion, teaching that, when we see solid objects, it is because these objects throw off shadow-like images of themselves (uhu/.a.) which enter the eye and pass through it into the soul. As Professor Tylor x has pointed out, there is good reason to believe that these uiwKa were the ghost-souls of popular belief adapted to serve a new purpose ; in this changed capacity the ghost-soul survived for long ages in the literary tradition. Protagoras, the pupil of Democritus, developed into a thoroughgoing sensationalism his master's doctrine that thought and sensation are identical, and thus provided the mental atomism which has always been the necessary supplement of metaphysical materialism. The pre-Socratic philosophy thus culminated in a thorough- going Materialism. The doctrine of the Ionian philosophers was not properly Materialism, for the distinction between matter and spirit had not yet been clearly drawn. It is impossible to say that their universal principles (e.g. the air of Diogenes, the fire of Heraclitus) were more nearly allied to the spiritual or to the physical, as conceived by later thought. Nor did the conception of the soul entertained by the animistic philosophers imply any clear distinction between the material or physical and the spiritual or mental, such as has been commonly maintained in later ages. For them it seems to have retained something of the nature of the daemon of the theologians from which it derived, and this in turn was but the ghost-soul of primitive Animism, glorified by 1 " Primitive Culture," vol. i. p. 497. ANIMISM IN THE ANCIENT WORLD i; assimilation to the nature of the gods, but still, like them, incompletely dematerialized. That the distinction was not clearly drawn by the Pythago- reans appears from the fact that they saw in the motes, which dance in the sunbeam with apparently spontaneous movement, discarnate souls seeking new bodies, in which to take up again their earth- life. And that Empedocles also failed to achieve this distinction is shown by his assigning to the body all the mental functions, save only those which he regarded as of the most exalted kind and alone worthy of the soul, namely, processes of ecstatic vision and philosophic intuition. Democritus, by giving greater definition to the notion of matter and by describing the universe as composed wholly of atoms of matter in motion, sharpened the issue between Materialism and Animism, and prepared the way for the clearer distinction between matter and spirit which Plato established in the literary tradition of Europe, and to the abolition of which the efforts of modern philosophers have been so largely directed. Plato's teaching in regard to the soul and its relation to the body is scattered through a number of the dialogues, which were written at considerable intervals of time ; and during the long course of his philosophic activity his views seem to have under- gone considerable changes. Partly for this reason, and partly because much of what he wrote of the soul took the form of symbolism in the myths, whose aim was moral and aesthetic rather than strictly scientific, it is impossible to summarize his doctrine in any clear-cut and entirely consistent statement. The view of the soul expressed in the earlier dialogues is part of an ontological scheme whose nature was largely determined by ethical considerations. Two realms of being are distinguished ; on the one hand the realm of intelligible and true Being, consisting of the timeless unchanging Ideas ; on the other hand the realm of Becoming, to which belong all objects of sense-perception (including, of course, the human body). Souls are existences of a third class, whose function it is to mediate between these two realms. Their position in this ontological scheme is peculiar. They belong in a sense to both realms, for they are active in both. Souls have affinity to or kinship with the Ideas, and it is in virtue only of their kinship iS BODY AND MIND that they are able to contemplate and know the Ideas. Like the Ideas, they are wholly immaterial and wholly real ; yet they are necessarily different from them, if only because they know them, and because they are subject to change in their intercourse with the realm of becoming. But the soul differs still more widely from the body, with whose nature it has nothing in common. The soul's activities are of two principal kinds, knowing and moving or causing movement. The cognitive activity is exercised in two very different ways : on the one hand, by immediate contemplation of the Ideas the soul attains true knowledge ; on the other hand, by the aid of the bodily faculties, it becomes aware of the objects of the sensible world ; and these stir up within it imperfect reminiscences of the Ideas of which they are the symbols or shadows. These two modes of cognitive activity, distinguished as Reason (roue) and Sense (a'i