“When then,” said Socrates, in the Phædo, “does the soul light on the truth? for when it attempts to consider anything in conjunction with the body, it is plain that it is led astray by it.”
“And surely,” he continues, “the soul reasons best when none of these things disturb it, neither hearing, nor sight, nor pain, nor pleasure of any kind, but it retires as much as possible within itself, taking leave of the body, and as far as it can, not communicating or being in contact with it, it aims at the discovery of that which is.”
I hold that the most valuable triumphs of science in the future lie in the realm of psychology, and that by no means the least important contribution in this direction will come from the study of Folklore, of which belief in the separable soul, and the phenomena and universality of the dream state must form a very important part.
One final consideration is suggested not without some degree of hesitation and diffidence. If there be a soul in man destined to continued existence, and if in any case perfection is the goal of evolution as formulated by Herbert Spencer for a future residue of the human race, then this soul in its essential elements is without beginning in time.
Pre-existence and evolution necessitate repeated re-embodiment on the physical plane, and the continuity of self-consciousness in man I hold to be the proof of life without beginning or end.
Viewed in this light, dreams and all subjective experiences in man must mingle reminiscences of the soul with the experiences of the present life, and the theory of innate ideas assumes a purely scientific form. We hence arrive at the intuition of the soul to account for universal belief. The experience of Socrates and the Fiji Islander agree as to the subjective plane as perfectly as in regard to the beating of the heart. They differ only in degree of evolution.