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 foetus 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 foetus 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.