athers
gave to the teachings of Christ. From being the form and activation, or
function, of the organism in life, the soul feature of man was given an
appearance in which it could neither be grasped nor understood, nor
shaped, nor guided by man when it got into trouble. From the Middle Ages
there arose an artificial soul and an artificial world of souls
presented as being in eternal conflict with the evil of the flesh--_and
thus the house of human nature was divided against itself_.

Science of the nineteenth century came nearer bringing mind and body
together again. The new astronomical conception of the world and the
growing objective experimental science gradually began to command
confidence, and from being a destroyer of excessively dogmatic notions,
science began to rise to its modern constructive and creative position.
But the problem of _mind_ remained on a wrong basis and still does so
even with most scientists. Too much had been claimed for the psyche, and
because of the singling out of a great world of spirit, the world of
fact had been compromised and left cold and dry and unattractive and
unpromising. No doubt it was necessary that the scientist should become
hardened and weaned from all misleading expectation, and shy of all the
spurious claims of sordid superstition and of childish fancy. He may
have been unduly radical in cutting out everything that in any way
recalled the misleading notions. In the end, we had to go through a
stage of psychology without a "soul," and lately even a psychology
without "consciousness," so that we might be safe from unscientific
pretensions. All the gyrations no doubt tended to retard the wholesome
practical attack upon the problems in the form in which we find them in
our common-sense life.

The first effort at a fresh start tried to explain everything rather
one-sidedly out of the meagre knowledge of the body. Spinoza had said in
his remarkable Ethics (III, Prop. II, Schol.): "Nobody has thus far
determined what the body can do, _i.e._, nobody has as yet shown by
experience and trial what the body can do by the laws of nature alone in
so far as nature is considered merely as corporeal and extended, and
what it cannot do save when determined by mind."

This challenge of Spinoza's had to be met. With some investigators this
seemed very literally all there was to be done about the study of
man--to show how far the body could explain the activity we call "the
mind." The unf