A Psychiatric Milestone | Page 6

he would
probably now say with us, the activity and function as an individual or
person.
Through the disharmonies and inevitable disruption of a
self-disorganizing civilization, the Greek and Roman world was
plunged into the dark centuries during which the perils of the soul and
the sacrificial attainment of salvation by monastic life and crusades
threatened to overshadow all other concern. This had some inevitable

results: it favored all those views through which the soul became like a
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