Chapter VI

we were led ourselves to the spiritualist theory of the 'Soul,' as a means of escape from the unintelligibilities of mind-stuff 'integrating' with itself, and from the physiological improbability of a material monad, with thought attached to it, in the brain. But at the end of the chapter we said we should examine the 'Soul' critically in a later place, to see whether it had any other advantages as a theory over the simple phenomenal notion of a stream of thought accompanying a stream of cerebral activity, by a law yet unexplained.

The theory of the Soul is the theory of popular philosophy and of scholasticism, which is only popular philosophy made systematic. It declares that the principle of individuality within us must be _substantial_, for psychic phenomena are activities, and there can be no activity without a concrete agent. This substantial agent cannot be the brain but must be something _immaterial_; for its activity, thought, is both immaterial, and takes cognizance of immaterial things, and of material things in general and intelligible, as well as in

## particular and sensible ways,--all which powers are incompatible with

the nature of matter, of which the brain is composed. Thought moreover is simple, whilst the activities of the brain are compounded of the elementary activities of each of its parts. Furthermore, thought is spontaneous or free, whilst all material activity is determined _ab extra_; and the will can turn itself against all corporeal goods and appetites, which would be impossible were it a corporeal function. For these objective reasons the principle of psychic life must be both immaterial and simple as well as substantial, must be what is called _a Soul_. The same consequence follows from subjective reasons. Our consciousness of personal identity assures us of our essential simplicity: the owner of the various constituents of the self, as we have seen them, the hypothetical Arch-Ego whom we provisionally conceived as possible, is a real entity of whose existence self-consciousness makes us directly aware. No material agent could thus turn round and grasp _itself_--material activities always grasp something else than the agent. And if a brain _could_ grasp itself and be self-conscious, it would be conscious of itself _as_ a brain and not as something of an altogether different kind. The Soul then exists as a simple spiritual substance in which the various psychic faculties, operations, and affections inhere.

If we ask what a Substance is, the only answer is that it is a self-existent being, or one which needs no other subject in which to inhere. At bottom its only positive determination is Being, and this is something whose meaning we all realize even though we find it hard to explain. The Soul is moreover an _individual_ being, and if we ask what that is, we are told to look in upon our Self, and we shall learn by direct intuition better than through any abstract reply. Our direct perception of our own inward being is in fact by many deemed to be the original prototype out of which our notion of simple active substance in general is fashioned. The _consequences_ of the simplicity and substantiality of the Soul are its incorruptibility and natural _immortality_--nothing but God's direct _fiat_ can annihilate it--and its _responsibility_ at all times for whatever it may have ever done.

This substantialist view of the soul was essentially the view of Plato and of Aristotle. It received its completely formal elaboration in the middle ages. It was believed in by Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Leibnitz, Wolf, Berkeley, and is now defended by the entire modern dualistic or spiritualistic or common-sense school. Kant held to it while denying its fruitfulness as a premise for deducing consequences verifiable here below. Kant's successors, the absolute idealists, profess to have discarded it,--how that may be we shall inquire ere long. Let us make up our minds what to think of it ourselves.

_It is at all events needless for expressing the actual subjective phenomena of consciousness as they appear._ We have formulated them all without its aid, by the supposition of a stream of thoughts, each substantially different from the rest, but cognitive of the rest and 'appropriative' of each other's content. At least, if I have not already succeeded in making this plausible to the reader, I am hopeless of convincing him by anything I could add now. The unity, the identity, the individuality, and the immateriality that appear in the psychic life are thus accounted for as phenomenal and temporal facts exclusively, and with no need of reference to any more simple or substantial agent than the present Thought or 'section' of the stream. We have seen it to be single and unique in the sense of having no _separable_ parts (above, p. 239 ff.)--perhaps that is the only kind of simplicity meant to be predicated of the soul. The present Thought also has being,--at least all believers in the Soul believe so--and if there be no other Being in which it 'inheres,' it ought itself to be a 'substance.' If _this_ kind of simplicity and substantiality were all that is predicated of the Soul, then it might appear that we had been talking of the soul all along, without knowing it, when we treated the present Thought as an agent, an owner, and the like. But the Thought is a perishing and not an immortal or incorruptible thing. Its successors may continuously succeed to it, resemble it, and appropriate it, but they _are_ not it, whereas the Soul-Substance is supposed to be a fixed unchanging thing. By the Soul is always meant something _behind_ the present Thought, another kind of substance, existing on a non-phenomenal plane.

When we brought in the Soul at the end of