Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/263

Rh task of attempting to define the actual composition of the soul, a few only of the most wildly transcendental satisfying themselves that it consisted of "a drop of ether," of a "globule or spark of heat or light," of an "animated vapor," etc.

Not more widely divergent than the metaphysical notions of the nature of soul were the doctrines held as to the manner of intercourse between the soul and the body, the school of Aristotle holding that all objects enter into the soul by influx through the senses; the Cartesians, per contra, maintaining that it is the soul that sees and hears, that perception is a primary faculty, not of an organ, but of the soul; while Leibnitz and his followers, denying alike the imagined influx from the body into the soul, and from the soul into the body, maintain the existence of a joint consent and coeval operation of both under the influence of a so-called pre-established harmony.

Passing from the earlier metaphysical speculators to Kant (1724–1804), we find once more in the history of human struggles after truth how much easier it is to destroy than to construct. In the firm analytical grasp of that extraordinary thinker ("the most tremendous disintegrating force of modern times") the past fallacies concerning the nature of the soul had scant chance of mercy—the past short-comings as little of escaping exposure. Ancient philosophic creeds crumbled to dust before him. But did he raise any edifice of practical significance on their ruins? Did he identify the soul? Where are they who can fancy that they are the wiser—that they have made a nearer approach to such identification—by accepting his quasi-mystic reveries on the "ego which exists beneath or rather outside consciousness,&hellip;a noumenon, an indescribable something, safely located out of space and time, as such not subject to the mutabilities of these phenomenal spheres,&hellip;and of whos eontologic existence we are made aware by its phenomenal projections or effects in consciousness." The first clauses of this definition seem pure assumption, soaring aloft beyond the comprehension of ordinary mortals; the latter (granting the premises of the so-called "noumenon") seems a mystified version of a necessary inference. Even Kant himself admits the total concept to be incapable of scientific proof; and of any other form of alleged proof—the so-called transcendental—what is the practical