A Psychiatric Milestone | Page 6

special thing or substance, in contrast to and yet a counterpart of the physical body. As long as there was no objective experimental science, the culminating solution of life problems had to be intrusted to that remarkable development of religious philosophy which arose from the blending of Hebrew religion and tradition and the loftiest products of the Greek mind, in the form which St. Paul and the early Church fathers 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 unfortunate feature was that they thought they had to start with a body not only with mind and soul left out but also with practical disregard of the whole natural setting. They studied little more than corpses and experimental animals, and many a critic wondered how such a corpse or a frog could ever show any mind, normal or abnormal. To get things balanced again, the vision of man had to expand to take a sane and practical view of all of human life--not only of its machinery.
The human organism can never exist without its setting in the world. All we are and do is of the world and in the world. The great mistake of an overambitious science has been the desire to study man altogether as a mere sum of parts, if possible of atoms, or now of electrons, and as a machine, detached, by itself, because at least some points in the simpler sciences could be studied to the best advantage with this method of the so-called elementalist. It was a long time before willingness to see the large groups of facts, in their broad relations as well as in their inner structure, finally gave us the concept and vision of integration which now fits man as a live unit and transformer of energy into the world of fact and makes him frankly a consciously integrated psychobiological individual and member of a social group.
It is natural enough that man should want to travel on the road he knows and likes best. The philosopher uses his logic and analysis and synthesis. The introspectionist wants to get at the riddle of the universe by crawling into the innermost depth of his own self-scrutiny, even at the risk--to use a homely phrase--of drawing the hole in after him and losing all connection with the objective world. The physicist follows the reverse