Soul Farrago
What Is, and Where Is the Soul?
Until the Greek philosophy taught the world how to use and abuse abstract notions, immaterialism was not an attainable phase of thought. (Prof. Bain, “Mind and Body,” p. 143.)
Thought necessarily supposes conditions. To think is to condition, and conditional limitation is the fundamental law of the possibility of thought. For, as the greyhound cannot outstrip his shadow, nor (by a more appropriate simile) the eagle out-soar the atmosphere in which he floats, and by which alone he may be supported; so the mind cannot transcend the sphere of limitation, within and through which exclusively the possibility of thought is realized. (Sir William Hamilton, “Philosophy” p. 456.)
In this paper an attempt is made to answer two very important questions, namely: What is, and where is the soul? in such fashion that everybody will be satisfied that he has a soul, and the exact spot it occupies in his mundane tabernacle. Here are a number of opinions on this subject, by the most learned men the world has ever produced. In a multitude of counsel there is wisdom. The first witness I shall put upon the stand is:
Pythagoras: (6th c. B. C.) The soul is number and a harmony. Taught the doctrine of metempsychosis. His disciples held the soul to be an aggregate of particles of great subtilty pervading the air in constant agitation.
Heraclitus: (6th c. B. C.) The soul is a spark of the stellar essence: “Scintilla stellaris essentia.”
Pherecides: (6th c. B. C.) Souls existed from all eternity.
Anaximenes: (Ionic philosopher, 5th c. B. C.) God is air, air is a life-giving principle to man. The soul is air.
Diogenes of Appollonia: (Greek natural philosopher, 5th c. B. C.) The soul of the world and the soul of man is air.
Anaxagoras: (5th c. B. C.) The soul is an immortal, aerial spirit.
Socrates: (4th c. B. C.) The soul is corporeal and eternal.
Epicurus: (4th c. B. C.) The soul is a bodily substance, composed of subtile particles, disseminated through the whole frame, and having a great resemblance to spirit or breath.
Empedocles: (Sicilian philosopher and poet, 5th c. B. C.) Declared himself to have been “a boy, a girl, a bush, a bird, a fish;” that the soul inhabits every form of animal and plant.
Aristotle: (4th c. B. C.) Plants have souls without consciousness. Animals have souls, but inseparable from body. The human body is inseparable from mind, but the human mind is divided into active and passive intellect. The active intellect is pure form, detached from matter, and immortal.
Josephus: (1st c.) There were three sects among the Jews—the Pharisees, Sadducees, and the Essenes. The Pharisees believed in metempsychosis; the Sadducees believed that the soul perished with the body; the Essenes held that the soul was immortal. The soul descended in an aerial form into the body, from the highest region of the air, whither they were carried back again by a violent attraction, and after death those which had belonged to the good dwelled beyond the ocean in a country where there was neither heat nor cold, nor wind nor rain.
Pliny: (2d c.) The body and the soul have, from the moment of death, as little sensation as before birth.
Justin Martyr: (2d c.) It is heresy to say that the soul is taken up into heaven, men rise with the same bodies.
Tatian: (2d c.) There are two spirits conjoined in the human body. A material and an immaterial spirit.
Athenagoras: (2d c.) The soul is spiritual, but with a spirituality subject to material tendencies.
Origen: (3d c.) The soul is neither spirit nor matter.
Augustine: (4th c.) The soul has neither length, breadth, nor thickness. It acts on the body through the corporeal substances of light and air, which substances are mingled through the denser parts of the body. The commands of the soul are first communicated to this subtile matter, and by it immediately conveyed to the heavier elements.
Tertullian: (Latin father, about 160.) The soul has the human form, the same as its body, only it is delicate, clear, and ethereal. Unless it were corporeal, how could it be effected by the body, be able to suffer, or be nourished within the body?
St. Ambrose: (4th c.) We know nothing but what is material, excepting only the ever venerable Trinity.
St. Hilary: (5th c.) There is nothing created which is not corporeal, neither in heaven nor in earth, neither visible nor invisible; all is formed of elements; and souls, whether they inhabit a body, or are without a body, have always a corporeal substance.
Gregory Nazianzen: (4th c.) Soul, or spirit, is composed of two properties—motion and diffusion.
Bishop Nemesius: (5th c.) The soul is an immaterial substance. It is involved, as Plato taught, in eternal, self-produced motion, from which the motion of the body is derived. The pre-existence of the soul proves its supra-sensible character, and its immortality.
Faustus: (Bishop of Regium, in Gaul, A. D. 470.) All created things are matter; the soul being composed of air, God alone is incorporeal.
Mamertus: (In reply to the bishop.) Man was made in the image of God. Now, as there can be no likeness to God in matter, therefore it must be found in the soul, therefore the soul is immaterial. The soul is present in every part of the body as well as in the whole, just as God is present in the whole universe, otherwise a part of it would be lost when any portion of the body is cut off. The soul is not contained in the body, but in reality contains it. Hence, it must be immaterial, for no material substance can at once contain the body and be within it as its animating principle.
Thomas Aquinas: (13th c.) The soul is the Actuality of body, as heat, which is the source whence bodies are made hot, is not body, but a sort of actuality of body. The soul of man is an independent substance.
Duns Scotus: (13th c. British philosopher.) The soul is a created something, the basis of all finite existence, including corporeal matter itself.
Albert Magnus: (13th c.) Held that the active intellect is a part of the soul, and is immortal by virtue of its community with God.
Gassendi: (French philosopher, 17th c.) There is no evidence of the spirituality of the soul.
Malebranche: (Priest and philosopher, 17th c.) We see all in God, who is in fact our soul.
Locke: (17th c.) Matter may think, and God may communicate thought to matter.
Paracelsus: (15th c.) Taught there were four souls—vegetal, sensitive, rational, and spiritual. Campanella demonstrates this last by the fact that carcasses bleed at the sight of the murderer.
Mansel: (“Philosophy of Consciousness,” p. 327.) We are not authorized to say that we know the soul to be simple, and that, therefore, it is indestructible; but only that we do not know the soul to be compound, and, therefore, that we cannot infer its mortality from the analogy of bodily dissolution.
“Buck’s Theo. Dic.” defines soul: That vital, immaterial, active substance, or principle in man, whereby he perceives, remembers, reasons, and wills. It is rather to be described as to its operations than to be defined as to its essence. Various, indeed, have been the opinions of philosophers concerning its substance.
Parkhurst: (A distinguished Hebrew lexicographer.) As a noun, nephesh hath been supposed to signify the spiritual part of man, or what we commonly call the soul. I must, for myself, confess that I can find no passage where it hath undoubtedly this meaning.
Hobbes: Spirit is synonymous with ghost—a mere phantom of the imagination.
Locke: (“Understanding,” p. 419.) We can no more know that there are finite spirits really existing, by the idea we have of such things in our minds, than by the ideas any one has of fairies, or centaurs; he can come to know that things answering those ideas do really exist.
Voltaire: The Greeks distinguish three sorts of souls—Psyche, signifying the sensitive soul—the soul of the senses; hence it was that Love, the son of Aphrodite, had so much passion for Psyche, and that she loved him so tenderly. Pneuma, the breath which gave life and motion to the whole machine, and which we have rendered by spiritus—spirit—a vague term which has received a thousand different acceptations. And lastly, Nous, intelligence. Thus we possess three souls, without having the slightest notion of any of them.... What are we to think of a child with two heads, which is otherwise well formed? Some say that it has two souls, because it is furnished with two pineal glands, with two callous substances, with two sensoria communia. Others answer, that there cannot be two souls with but one breast and one navel.... The word soul is one of those which everyone pronounces without understanding it. We understand those things of which we have an idea, but we have no idea of soul—spirit; therefore, we do not understand it.
John Calvin: The soul is an immortal essence, the nobler part of man. It is a creation out of nothing, not an emanation; it is essence without motion, not motion without essence. It is not properly bounded by space, still it occupies the body as a habitation, animating its parts and endowing its organs for their several functions.
Dugald Stewart: Although we have the strongest evidence that there is a thinking and sentient principle within us, essentially distinct from matter, yet we have no direct evidence of the possibility of this principle exercising its various powers in a separate state from the body. On the contrary, the union of the two, while it subsists, is evidently of the most intimate nature.
Joseph Priestly: It being a rigid canon of the Newtonian logic not to multiply causes without necessity, we should adhere to a single substance until it be shown, which cannot be, that the properties of mind are incompatible with the properties of matter. He was opposed to protecting and perpetuating absurdity by dodging behind mystery. That there is no difference between spiritual substance and nothing at all. That the doctrine of a separate soul embarrasses the whole system of Christianity.
McBeth: The times have been that when the brains were out the man would die, and there an end.
Buchner: Experience and daily occupation teach us that the spirit perishes with the material substratum—that man dies. (“Matter and Force.”)
Burmeister: That the soul of a deceased person does not re-appear after death, is not contested by rational people. Spirits and ghosts are only seen by diseased or superstitious individuals.
Vogt: Physiology decides definitely and categorically against individual immortality, as against any special existence of the soul. The soul does not enter the fœtus like the evil spirit into persons possessed, but is a product of the development of the brain, just as muscular activity is a product of muscular development. So soon as the substances composing the brain are aggregated in a similar form, will they exhibit the same functions. We have seen that we can destroy mental activity by injuring the brain. By observing the development of the child we also arrive at the conviction that the activity of the soul progresses in proportion as the brain is gradually developed. The fœtus manifests no mental activity, which only shows itself after birth when the brain acquires the necessary material condition. Mental activity changes with the period of life, and ceases altogether at death.
Lecky: (“Rat. in Europe,” p. 341, v. I.) Not one of the early fathers entertained the same opinion as the majority of Christians do of the present day, that the soul is perfectly simple, and entirely destitute of all body, figure, form, and extension. On the contrary, they all acknowledged it to contain something corporeal, although of a different kind and nature from the bodies of this mortal sphere.... Tertullian mentions a woman who had seen a soul, which she described as “a transparent and lucid figure, in the perfect form of a man.” St. Anthony saw the soul of Ammon carried up to heaven. The soul of a Libyan hermit named Marc was borne to heaven in a napkin. Angels also were not unfrequently seen, and were universally believed to have cohabited with the daughters of the antediluvians.... Sometimes the soul was portrayed as a sexless child, rising out of the mouth of the corpse.
John Meslier: (“Testimony of a Dying Priest.”) The barbarians, like all ignorant men, attribute to spirits all the effects of which their inexperience prevents them from discovering the true causes. Ask a barbarian what causes your watch to move, he will answer, “A spirit.” Ask our philosophers what moves the universe, they will tell you, “It is a spirit.” Ask a theologian what he means by a spirit. He will answer that it is an unknown substance, which is perfectly simple, which has nothing tangible, nothing in common with matter. In good faith, is there any mortal who can form the least idea of such a substance.
James F. Ferrier: (Institutes of Metaphysics.) In vain does the Spiritualist found an argument for the existence of a separate immaterial substance on the alleged incompatibility of the intellectual and physical phenomena to co-inhere in the same sub-stratum. Materiality may very well stand the brunt of that unshotted broadside. This mild artifice can scarcely expect to be treated as a serious observation. Such a hypothesis cannot be meant to be in earnest. Who is to dictate to nature what phenomena, or what qualities inhere in what substances; what effects may result from what causes? Matter is already in the field as an acknowledged entity—this both parties admit. Mind, considered as an independent entity, is not so unmistakably in the field. Therefore as entities are not to be multiplied without necessity, we are not entitled to postulate a new cause, so long as it is possible to account for the phenomena by a cause already in existence; which possibility has never yet been disproved.
Draper: (John William.) Chemistry furnishes us with a striking example of the doctrine of Diogenes of Apollonia, that the air is actually a spiritual being; for, on the discovery of several of the gases by the early experimenters, they were not only regarded as of a spiritual nature, but actually received the name under which they pass to this day, gheist or gas, from a belief that they were ghosts. (“Int. Dev.,” p. 103, v. 1.)
W. R. Grove: (“Correlation and Conservation of Forces,” p. 103.) The ancients when they witnessed natural phenomenon, removed from ordinary analogies, and unexplained by any mechanical action known to them, referred it to a soul, a spiritual or preternatural power: thus amber and the magnet were supposed by Thales to have a soul; the functions of digestion, assimilation, etc., were supposed by Paracelsus to be effected by a spirit (the Archæus). Air and gases were also at first deemed spiritual, but subsequently became invested with a more material character, and the word gas, from geist, a ghost or spirit, affords us an instance of the gradual transmission of a spiritual into a physical conception.
Buchner: Now, in the same manner as the steam engine produces motion, so does the organic complication of force-endowed materials produce in the animal body a sum of effects, so interwoven as to become a unit, and is then by us called spirit, soul, thought.
Taylor: Mr. Darwin saw two Malay women in Keeling Island, who had a wooden spoon dressed in clothes like a doll. This spoon had been carried to the grave of a dead man, and becoming inspired at full moon, in fact lunatic, it danced about convulsively like a table or a hat at a modern spirit-seance. (“Early History of Mankind,” p. 139, v. 2.) Savages believe that their pots, kettles, pans, etc., have souls. His knives, tobacco-pipes, the winds, water, fire, storm, etc., have souls.
Samuel Johnson: (“Oriental Religions,” p. 543.) Various North-American tribes believe that the soul of a dying person may be drawn into the bosom of a sterile woman, or blown by the breath into that of the nearest relative, and so come again to birth in the way that the receiver desires.
Theodore Parker, John Wesley, Jeremy Taylor, Coleridge, Lamartine, Agassiz, and hosts of other men well known to fame, taught that animals as well as men, had immortal souls.
Brodie: (President of the Royal Society, 1858.) The mind of animals is essentially the same as that of man. Every one familiar with the dog will admit that that creature knows right from wrong, and is conscious when he has committed a fault.
Du Bois-Reymond: With awe and wonder must the student of nature regard that microscopic molecule of nervous substance which is the seat of the laborious, constructive, orderly, loyal, dauntless soul of the ant. It has developed itself to its present state through a countless series of generations.
John Fiske: But the propriety of identifying soul and breath, which really quits the body at its decease, has furnished the chief name for the soul, not only to the Hebrew, the Sanskrit, and the classic tongues; not only to German and English, where geist, and ghost, according to Max Muller, have the meaning of “breath,” and are akin to such words as gas, gust, and geyser; but also to numerous barbaric languages. (“Myths and Myth-Makers,” p. 225.) The belief in wraiths has survived into modern times, and now and then appears in that remnant of primeval philosophy known as “Spiritualism,” as for example, in the case of the lady who “thought she saw her own father look in at the church window at the moment he was dying at his own house.” (Ib., p. 229.) The Kamtchadales expressly declare that all animals, even flies and bugs, will live after death,—a belief, which, in our day, has been indorsed on philosophical grounds by an eminent living naturalist. (Ib., 230.) [Mr. Fiske refers to Agassiz.]
M. Figuier: Human souls are for the most part the surviving souls of deceased animals; in general, the souls of precocious children like Mozart come from nightingales, while the souls of great architects have passed into them from beavers, and etc., etc. (“The To-morrow of Death,” p. 247.)
W. Lauder Lindsay: By no kind of scientific evidence can it be proved that soul exists, whether in man or other animals.... Nor should it be forgotten that, according to many writers, the word or term “soul” is regarded as synonymous with “mind,” in which case there can be no question as to its possession by the higher animals. While the term “soul” has also been applied—in figurative senses no doubt—even to plants. (“Mind in the Lower Animals,” v. 1, p. 101.) It obviously lies with those who assert dogmatically that all men have immortal souls, while no animals possess them, to reconcile with such a conviction the provable fact that many animals are superior to many men, not only in general intelligence, but also as regards moral sense and religious feeling. (Ib.) Ideas of justice or right, feelings of decency or shame, that combination or essence of moral qualities known as conscience, are as certainly present in some animals as they appear to be absent in countless numbers of men. (Ib., p. 103.)
Ernst Haeckel: The final result of this comparison is this: That between the most highly developed animal souls, and the lowest developed human souls there exists only a small quantitative, but no qualitative difference, and this difference is much less than the difference between the lowest and the highest human souls, or than the difference between the lowest and the highest animal souls. (“Hist. of Creation,” v. 2, p. 362.) Some of the wildest tribes, of men, in Southern Asia and Eastern Africa have no trace whatever of the first foundations of all human civilization of family life, and marriage. They live together, in herds, like apes, generally climbing on trees and eating fruits; they do not know of fire, and use stones and clubs as weapons, just like the higher apes. (Ib., p. 363.)
Descartes: (17 c.) Matter, whose essence is extension, is known by the senses; mind, whose essence is thinking, can be known only by self-consciousness. The thinking principle is immaterial.
Origen: The nature of the soul is such as to make her capable of existing eternally, backward as well as forward, because her spiritual essence, as such, makes it impossible that she should, either through age or violence, be dissolved.
Rev. Joseph Baylee, D. D.: (Principal of St. Aidan’s College, Birkenhead, England.) Man is eternal. He was in existence before he was born; sinned before he was born, and if he had never been born would have suffered eternal damnation for that sin. (Dis. on God and the Bible between Dr. Baylee and Mr. Bradlaugh.)
Draper: (“Conflict,” p. 127.) Moreover, to many devout persons there is something very revolting in the suggestion that the Almighty is a servitor to the caprices and lusts of men, and that at a certain term after its origin, it is necessary for him to create for the embryo a soul.
Vedic Theology: The soul is a particle of that all-pervading principle, the Universal Intellect, or Soul of the World, detached for a while from its primitive source; and placed in connection with the bodily frame, but destined, by an inevitably as rivers run back to be lost in the ocean from whence they arose.
The Bible: As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away, so he that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more. (Job 7: 9.) They are dead, they shall not live; they are deceased, they shall not rise; therefore hast thou visited and destroyed them, and made all their memory to perish. (Isa. 26: 14.) For the living know that they shall die, but the dead know not anything, neither have they any more a reward, for the memory of them is forgotten. Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might, for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave whither thou goest. (Eccl. 9: 5, 10.) For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts, even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast; for all is vanity. All go unto one place, all are of the dust and all turn to dust again. Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward; and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth? (Eccl. 3: 19–22.) There (the grave) the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary be at rest. (Vide Job 3: 11–22.)
Having thus successfully responded to the interrogatory, What is the soul? that is to say, the constituent thereof, let us now very briefly settle the locus in quo:
Plato: The soul is located in the brain.
Aristotle: The soul is located in the heart.
Heraclitus: The soul is located in the blood.
Epicurus: The soul is located in the chest.
Critios: The soul is located in the blood.
Sommering: The soul is located in the ventricles.
Kant: The soul is located in the water contained in the ventricles.
Plotinus: The body is located in the soul, and not the soul in the body.
Ennemoser: The whole body is the seat of the soul.
Fischer: The soul is located in the nervous system.
Ficinus: The soul is located in the heart.
Descartes: The soul is located in the pineal gland.
Bontekoe: The soul is located in the corpus callosum.
Willis: The soul is located in the corpora striata.
Vieussens: The soul is located in the centrum ovale.
Boerhaave: The soul is located on the boundary line of the gray and white substance.
Mayer: The soul is located in the medulla oblongata.
Camper: The soul is located in the pineal gland, nates and testes.
Dohoney: Scientifically speaking, man is a threefold being: body, soul, and spirit. The home of the spirit is the cerebrum, while the seat of the soul is the cerebellum. (“Man,” p. 118.)
La Pieronie: The dwelling place of the soul is in the callous body.
Buchner: Some authors imagine that the soul, under certain circumstances, leaves the brain for a short time and occupies another part of the nervous system. The solar plexus, a concatenation of sympathetic nerves, situated in the abdomen, was especially pointed out as the favored spot. (“Force and Matter,” p. 195.)
Prochaska: Assumed that the cerebrum and the cerebellum were the seat of “soul sensations,” and the sensorium commune the seat of “body sensations.”
Whytt: As the schoolmen supposed the Deity to exist in every ubi but not in any place, which is to say in Latin that he exists everywhere, but in English nowhere, so they imagined the soul of man not to occupy space, but to exist in an indivisible point.
Prof. Erdmann: The theory that the soul has its seat in the brain, must lead to the result that when the body is separated from the head, the soul should continue to exist.
Fortlage: There are certain errors in the human mind. The error of the seat of the soul in the brain is one of them.
McCulloch says, in his able work on the “Credibility of the Scriptures”: There is no word in the Hebrew language that signifies either soul or spirit, in the technical sense in which we use the terms, as implying something distinct from the body. (“Credibility of Scriptures,” p. 491, v. 2.)
Kitto, in his “Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature,” renders Genesis 2: 7, as follows: “And Jehovah God formed the man [Heb. the Adam] of dust from the ground, and blew into his nostrils the breath of life: and the man became a living animal.
Bishop Tilotson says: The immortality of the soul is rather supposed, or taken for granted, than expressly revealed in the Bible.
The Egyptian doctrine of the soul is one of the most important, as it is the most ancient, for this nation seems to have been the first to declare that the soul was immortal. (Chambers’ Encyclopedia.)
R. Peterson.