CHAPTER IX
SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING
I
ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL
I
Every professed philosopher[philosopher] is forced to believe, without serious examination, in the existence of a Something that in his opinion is capable of being handled by the reason, for his whole spiritual existence depends on the possibility of such a Something. For every logician and psychologist, therefore, however sceptical he may be, there is a point at which criticism falls silent and faith begins, a point at which even the strictest analytical thinker must cease to employ his method—the point, namely, at which analysis is confronted with itself and with the question of whether its problem is soluble or even exists at all. The proposition “it is possible by thought to establish the forms of thought” was not doubted by Kant, dubious as it may appear to the unphilosophical. The proposition “there is a soul, the structure of which is scientifically accessible; and that which I determine, by critical dissection of conscious existence-acts into the form of psychic elements, functions, and complexes, is my soul” is a proposition that no psychologist has doubted hitherto. And yet it is just here that his strongest doubts should have arisen. Is an abstract science of the spiritual possible at all? Is that which one finds on this path identical with that which one is seeking? Why has psychology—meaning thereby not knowledge of men and experience of life but scientific psychology—always been the shallowest and most worthless of the disciplines of philosophy, a field so empty that it has been left entirely to mediocre minds and barren systematists? The reason is not far to seek. It is the misfortune of “experimental” psychology that it does not even possess an object as the word is understood in any and every scientific technique. Its searches and solutions are fights with shadows and ghosts. What is it—the Soul? If the mere reason could give an answer to that question, the science would be ab initio unnecessary.
Of the thousands of psychologists of to-day not one can give an actual analysis or definition of “the” Will—or of regret, anxiety, jealousy, disposition, artistic intention. Naturally, since only the systematic can be dissected, and we can only define notions by notions. No subtleties of intellectual play with notional distinctions, no plausible observations of connexions between sensuous-corporeal states and “inward processes” touch that which is in question here. Will—this is no notion, but a name, a prime-word like God, a sign for something of which we have an immediate inward certainty but which we are for ever unable to describe.
We are dealing here with something eternally inaccessible to learned investigation. It is not for nothing that every language presents a baffling complexity of labels for the spiritual, warning us thereby that it is something not susceptible of theoretical synthesis or systematic ordering. Here there is nothing for us to order. Critical (i.e., literally, separating) methods apply only to the world-as-Nature. It would be easier to break up a theme of Beethoven with dissecting-knife or acid than to break up the soul by methods of abstract thought. Nature-knowledge and man-knowledge have neither aims nor ways in common. The primitive man experiences “soul,” first in other men and then in himself, as a Numen, just as he knows numina of the outer world, and develops his impressions in mythological form. His words for these things are symbols, sounds, not descriptive of the indescribable but indicative of it for him who hath ears to hear. They evoke images, likenesses (in the sense of Faust II)—the only language of spiritual intercourse that man has discovered to this day. Rembrandt can reveal something of his soul, to those who are in inward kinship with him, by way of a self-portrait or a landscape, and to Goethe “a god gave it to say what he suffered.” Certain ineffable stirrings of soul can be imparted by one man to the sensibility of another man through a look, two bars of a melody, an almost imperceptible movement. That is the real language of souls, and it remains incomprehensible to the outsider. The word as utterance, as poetic element, may establish the link, but the word as notion, as element of scientific prose, never.
“Soul,” for the man who has advanced from mere living and feeling to the alert and observant state, is an image derived from quite primary experiences of life and death. It is as old as thought, i.e., as the articulate separation of thinking (thinking-over) from seeing. We see the world around us, and since every free-moving being must for its own safety understand that world, the accumulating daily detail of technical and empirical experience becomes a stock of permanent data which man, as soon as he is proficient in speech, collects into an image of what he understands. This is the World-as-Nature.[[369]] What is not environment we do not see, but we do divine “its” presence in ourselves and in others, and by virtue of “its” physiognomic impressive power it evokes in us the anxiety and the desire to know; and thus arises the meditated or pondered image of a counterworld which is our mode of visualizing that which remains eternally alien to the physical eye. The image of the soul is mythic and remains objective in the field of spiritual religion so long as the image of Nature is contemplated in the spirit of religion; and it transforms itself into a scientific notion and becomes objective in the field of scientific criticism as soon as “Nature” comes to be observed critically. As “Time” is a counter-concept[[370]] to space, so the “soul” is a counterworld to “Nature” and therefore variable in dependence upon the notion of Nature as this stands from moment to moment. It has been shown how “Time” arose, out of the feeling of the direction-quality possessed by ever-mobile Life, as a conceptual negative to a positive magnitude, as an incarnation of that which is not extension; and that all the “properties” of Time, by the cool analysis of which the philosophers believe they can solve the problem of Time, have been gradually formed and ordered in the intellect as inverses to the properties of space. In exactly the same way, the notion of the spiritual has come into being as the inverse and negative of the notion of the world, the spatial notion of polarity assisting ("outward"-“inward”) and the terms being suitably transvalued. Every psychology is a counter-physics.
To attempt to get an “exact” science out of the ever-mysterious soul is futile. But the late-period City must needs have abstract thinking and it forces the “physicist of the inner world” to elucidate a fictitious world by ever more fictions, notions by more notions. He transmutes the non-extended into the extended, builds up a system as “cause” for something that is only manifested physiognomically, and comes to believe that in this system he has the structure of “the” soul before his eyes. But the very words that he selects, in all the Cultures, to notify to others the results of his intellectual labours betray him. He talks of functions, feeling-complexes, mainsprings, thresholds of consciousness; course, breadth, intensity and parallelism in spiritual processes. All these are words proper to the mode of representation that Natural Science employs. “The Will is related to objects” is a spatial image pure and simple. “Conscious” and “unconscious” are only too obviously derivatives of “above-ground” and “below-ground.” In modern theories of the Will we meet with all the vocabulary of electro-dynamics. Will-functions and thought-functions are spoken of in just the same way as the function of a system of forces. To analyse a feeling means to set up a representative silhouette in its place and then to treat this silhouette mathematically and by definition, partition, and measurement. All soul-examination of this stamp, however remarkable as a study of cerebral anatomy, is penetrated with the mechanical notion of locality, and works without knowing it under imaginary co-ordinates in an imaginary space. The “pure” psychologist is quite unaware that he is copying the physicist, but it is not at all surprising that the naïvest methods of experimental psychology give depressingly orthodox results. Brain-paths and association-threads, as modes of representation, conform entirely to an optical scheme—the “course” of the will or the feeling; both deal with cognate spatial phantoms. It does not make much difference whether I define some psychic capacity conceptually or the corresponding brain-region graphically. Scientific psychology has worked out for itself a complete system of images, in which it moves with entire conviction. Every individual pronouncement of every individual psychologist proves on examination to be merely a variation of this system conformable to the style of outer-world science of the day.