If the words "soul" and "mental" have been avoided in this book as far as possible, there is a good reason for this, which I will briefly explain.

I do not think that there are many other words which have so many different meanings, or, I might say: not many words are used so much as a label to put terms into order in so many different "drawers of our brain".

According to many ancient religious ideas the personality of the human being departs from the body after death and continues to live in an invisible form. Christianity teaches that the soul of a human being is breathed into it by God and is immortal. The soul is able to suffer and to experience changes. It gets "sullied" by sins and then is cleansed, it has to do penance or it goes to heaven. According to Buddhism, the soul inhabits numerous bodies, even those of other living beings. It belongs to the ego, the consciousness: after the death of a person consciousness leaves the body, too. Pythagoras also believed in "a journey" of the soul. While the soul, according to this idea, is something created by God or something which came into the world in some other way, which turns up connected to physical bodies and then dissolves from them, the soul is, according to another idea, part of a "roundabout ghost", an indivisible "world-soul", a part of God himself.

According to Spinoza, soul and body are one and the same thing, a "form of expression" of "divine essence". According to multiple ideas, the roundabout soul manifests itself in the whole world, even in the rocks and the stars. As Plotinus said, the physical "emanates" from the spiritual. "The soul is more real than the visible body", the body is a "tool of the soul" (Schubert). According to Emerson and Suabedissen, the human being is therefore an instrument of this "superior soul".

Aristoteles and many others after him, though, regarded the soul as something else: The soul is not a living thing, which exists separately from the human body, but a force which makes the body alive. This force is a forming principle, even plants benefit from it. It is a shaping principle: body and soul are like substance and form (Duns Scotus). Critolaos called the soul "quinta essentia".

According to E. Becher it is the "leading factor" in the world of organisms. H. Driesel took over the term of Aristoteles, "entelechy": the soul is a completing, arranging power, the human being is only aware of one part of the soul – the "I".

Plato however, regarded the body as a "vehicle" of the soul, which controls it like a "helmsman". This idea seems similar, but it is entirely different.: a helmsman just controls a ship, but he does not construct or build it. Thus we have already four completely different terms, which are described with the same word. Firstly, the soul is something, which slips into the body and leaves it again. Secondly, it is a part of an inseparable "roundabout soul", a part of God, which manifests itself in the entire world, also in the stars. Thirdly, it is force, which points toward the order, which builds the organisms. Fourthly, it is a controlling force which directs the body.

Many thinkers regarded the soul as the principle of all movement. Thales of Miletus stated that even the magnet had a soul, because it is able to move iron. Some Pythagoreans recognised the soul in the "sunbeam or in the movement of the sunbeam". Heraclitus regarded the soul as "most delicate matter, a part of the prehistoric fire". Here, the soul is equated extensively with the term "energy". Alcmaeon regarded the soul "as a self-moving number, which has its place in the brain".

Xenocrates too, called it "the self-moving number". Agrippa spoke about a "substantial number".

In glaring contradiction to such subtle views of the soul, Doctor Virchov stated:" If I examine what is summarised under the term soul, then I get a row of organic activities, which tie themselves to specific parts of the body located in such away that it is impossible for the force to get away and leave the organ". As soon as this organ is no longer present, the activity "cannot be found", "cannot be proved". Hobbes stated that soul and brain were identical.Not very sympathetic to other ideas of the soul, the zoologist C. Vogt provocatively stated a "materialistic" point of view. He said: "The brain dissects the soul like the kidney the urine".

Another conflict over differing points of view concerns the relation between soul and spirit. In their textbook on anthropology, R. Martin and K. Saller cite Fischel as the author of a modern definition of the soul. He regards the soul as "the experiencing determined totality of all reminiscent, controlling and creative super-physical movements (in my opinion this demonstrates that definitions of the soul have not become any clearer since the time of the Greek philosophers). About spirit he says that it is independent of the soul , represents the unity of all the higher contents of the brain, of all ideals and all the requirements of everyday life, which together make up experiences. If I understand him correctly, this means: the soul creates – at least to a large extent – the spirit.

Teilhard de Chardin – whose conception of the world I will explain later in appendix two – explains very clearly that an increased intensification of the spiritual (which is in all matter), leads to the development of the soul.

There are many people, who share Cicero’s opinion that the soul has to have a material nature, "because only material is able to act and to suffer".

However, the Viennese psychologist H. Rohracher writes: "Who is happy or unhappy? Maybe the mind. To ask this question, means to deny it." The ganglia cells and the atoms are not able to suffer, matter is not able to feel either fear or hope: "The human being is more than its mind." Democritus taught that the soul consisted of very distant, movable, round atoms, which are stored between the body atoms of the organism. However, Descartes explained that the soul was unexpanded. According to Reinhard Lotze and Hans Sihler, the processes of consciousness are "spaceless" and thus "entirely and substantial different" from physical events, which happen in the nervous system and in the brain. It is not possible to compare them. "We call this new thing mental."

Many thinkers regarded the soul not as one phenomenon, but as two. According to Numerius, the human being has two souls: a reasonable soul and one without reason. The Manicheans distinguished between a "light-soul" and a "physical soul"( the same did the early Augustine); William of Occam distinguished between "a sensitive" and "an intellectual soul". Such ideas go back very far. In Buddhism, there is a difference between "vitality" ("akegerun"), and the "spiritual soul" ("erkin sunesun") – very similar to the Bible, where "nephes" ( a principle of life, existing in the blood) and ruach or n`schama, are distinguished. Aristoteles added to the psychological principle of creation within the human being, which belongs to all organisms, the spirit, which is separable from the body and immortal: "another kind of soul".

Kant explained, that the "soul" was only "the subject of the processes of the consciousness" and not "a thing in itself". That means that our brain is used to summing up phenomena as "terms" and eventually thinks that these terms – the result of its own activity – are reality. An example: we call a multitude of trees a "forest". But what we call a forest, is just a large number of trees, which stand next to one another. However, we describe this mental summary with a noun, we make it a subject and we add characteristics to it. The forest is dense, it changes its colour, it becomes deforested. In this way we turn – as Wundt said – the unity of our psychological experiences (that means, our inside experiences), to a "subject, to which we add all the individual facts of psychological life, as predicates". Therefore the soul is – as L. Knapp said – an "abstraction of the processes of the consciousness" and consists only of phenomena consciousness, "which the metabolism produces inside the living nerve". Jodl puts this point of view particularly clearly: It is not the "soul", which has "conditions or activities such as feelings, imaginings, sensations or wishes, but the totality of these functions of a living organism is its soul".¹

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche also shared this point of view. The word soul is only a word: a collective name for our inner life. Hume spoke about a multitude of perceptions which are constantly changing, and movement without real carriers. Most of today’s natural scientists share this point of view. The word "soul" or "mental" comes from the functions which happen in the organisms. It is, as R. Eisler defines in his "dictionary of philosophical terms", the "organisation determined from inside, which experiences itself immediately in its own quality, on which the individual states of consciousness are dependent, but through the interaction of which it is constructed and characterised".

This leads to the question, to what extent animals and plants can be granted such an inner experience – a "soul". R. Woltereck said concerning this that one should only use the term "mental processes" for the higher animals (warm-blooded animals): "It is absolutely in bad taste to call the experience of an intestinal cell or a potato psychological."²

At this point one has to ask, which functions that convey inner experiences should be called "mental". All of them? Here too, there are various levels of compartmentalisation into "drawers". The main categories usually given are: sensations, feelings, wishes and thinking. But there are many that do not include the "mental" in the actual acts of thinking, but only the "emotions". In this sense, Helvetius said, the soul was "only the ability to feel", ("la faculté de sentir"). If we consider everyday speech, then we see that it is generally rather the emotions, than the "mental", that we refer to when we talk about the soul. It is possible for a genius to be completely soulless, whereas a mentally rather limited person can have "the soul of a human being". Normally, not all emotions are regarded as "mental", but mostly the positive ones , regarded as pleasant by fellow creatures: having artistic sense, a sense of tact, brotherly love, kindness to animals, charm,the ability to love, fidelity and similar qualities are "mental values"- whereas rage, jealousy, ruse, maliciousness, sadism, etc. Are not. Nobody has expressed this point of view better than Goethe.

Das artige Wesen, das entzückt,
Sich selbst und andre gern beglückt,
Das möchte ich Seele nennen

This exegesis – leaving aside the spedific theme of the soul – is intended to show what a feeble tool words can represent. Their function is to promote understanding between humans. If one human takes one as a label from a chest of drawers containing ideas and uses it as a symbol, whilst another uses a different chest, then both use the same word, but ‘talk past each other’, rather as if they were using different languages. At all times there have been numerous such discussions, and they continue still today. Here to, I would like to end by quoting Goethe:

Mit Worten läßt sich trefflich streiten,
Mit Worten ein System bereiten,
An Worte läßt sich trefflich glauben,
Von einem Wort läßt sich kein Jota rauben.
(Gespräch zwischen Mephistophelese und Schüler, Faust, 1. Teil)
 
 

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Comments:

¹ “Lehrbuch der Psychologie I”, 1909, p. 109.
² “Grundzüge einer allgemeinen Biologie”, Stuttgart 1932, p. 532.