The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2)James, William
Philosophy
The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2)
James, William
Psychology
But is this my last word? By no means. Many readers have certainly been
saying to themselves for the last few pages: "Why on earth doesn't
the poor man say _the Soul_ and have done with it?" Other readers, of
anti-spiritualistic training and prepossessions, advanced thinkers,
or popular evolutionists, will perhaps be a little surprised to
find this much-despised word now sprung upon them at the end of so
physiological a train of thought. But the plain fact is that all the
arguments for a 'pontifical cell' or an 'arch-monad' are also arguments
for that well-known spiritual agent in which scholastic psychology
and common-sense have always believed. And my only reason for beating
the bushes so, and not bringing it in earlier as a possible solution
of our difficulties, has been that by this procedure I might perhaps
force some of these materialistic minds to feel the more strongly the
logical respectability of the spiritualistic position. The fact is that
one cannot afford to despise any of these great traditional objects of
belief. Whether we realize it or not, there is always a great drift
of reasons, positive and negative, towing us in their direction. If
there be such entities as Souls in the universe, they may possibly be
affected by the manifold occurrences that go on in the nervous centres.
To the state of the entire brain at a given moment they may respond
by inward modifications of their own. These changes of state may be
pulses of consciousness, cognitive of objects few or many, simple or
complex. The soul would be thus a medium upon which (to use our earlier
phraseology) the manifold brain-processes _combine their effects_.
Not needing to consider it as the 'inner aspect' of any arch-molecule
or brain-cell, we escape that physiological improbability; and as its
pulses of consciousness are unitary and integral affairs from the
outset, we escape the absurdity of supposing feelings which exist
separately and then 'fuse together' by themselves. The separateness is
in the brain-world, on this theory, and the unity in the soul-world;
and the only trouble that remains to haunt us is the metaphysical one
of understanding how one sort of world or existent thing can affect or
influence another at all. This trouble, however, since it also exists
inside of both worlds, and involves neither physical improbability nor
logical contradiction, is relatively small.
I confess, therefore, that to posit a soul influenced in some
mysterious way by the brain-states and responding to them by conscious
affections of its own, seems to me the line of least logical
resistance, so far as we yet have attained.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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