The Idea of the Soul

An excerpt from: Chapter I. Psychology and Primitive Culture I. Nature of the Investigation, Few conceptions can show the universality and permanence, the creative power and morphological influence which have characterized throughout history the Idea of the Soul. To it we owe the conception of an order of spiritual beings, and of a spiritual world existing now and hereafter. At some relatively late stage of culture it became absolute in the idea of God. It is thus the basis of all religion. One typical case may be cited. The highest authority on the religions of China concludes that " the human soul is the original form of all beings of a higher order. Its worship is the basis of religion in that country. . . . Taoism was originally a compendium of customs and practices framed upon the prevailing ideas concerning the human soul.... It cast these into a system of philosophy, alchemy, and religion." But neither its origin nor its influence is confined to the religious sphere. Just as the soul itself is concerned with every mode of apprehending its total environment, so the idea of the soul is bound up with the evolution of mind in general. We may go farther and assert that not only have its results upon the mind, and the difficulties which its comprehension has produced, assisted mental development, or rather have been inevitable conditions of it, but its origin and development also are identical with the earliest steps in mental evolution. Both in the race and in the individual we shall find it to be the first purely intellectual result of human reaction to environment. It is thus our first effort towards an explanation of things, our first act of thought. In the early stages of culture the idea provides a form for consciousness, and in all stages its development involves the search for reality. This search is one aspect of that desire for knowledge, that instinct of curiosity, which is the mainspring of science. It is not too much to say that from the earliest culture known or inferable, up to the triumph of experimental science to-day, the idea has been the inspiration of all intellectual speculation - theological, metaphysical, and scientific. We may, therefore, employ another metaphor and describe it as the original cell out of which all thought and consequently all knowledge have been evolved. To trace its origin and development is thus in great measure to trace the origin and development of the soul itself, and the history of man's efforts to understand both himself and his world. This evolution has not been adequately expounded, and the reason is obvious. The anthropology of culture possesses an abundant material, but, as is often urged against it, its results are untrustworthy because its methods are inexact. The fact is that its methods are merely those of unaided common sense. Primitive psychology has yet to be written, but it cannot be written by methods like these....