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254 weight? Such "proof," inasmuch as it transcends experience, can never advance beyond the unreality of subjective formulation, can never attain the reality appertaining to objective demonstration. Nay, Kant admits more than this: he grants nothing can really be proved by metaphysics concerning the attributes, or even the existence, of the soul; while holding that, inasmuch as its reality can not, on the other hand, be disproved, such reality may, for moral purposes, be assumed. So that this sublimest of the world's thinkers is obliged in ultimate analysis to admit that ordinary common-sense may prove as successful in wrestling with the problem as the vastest inborn intellectual potentiality intensified by prolonged culture.

Reaching next the modified or hybrid metaphysical and physiological school of the present day (the former element largely predominant), we find one of its most eminent representatives. Bain, seeming to teach that, whatever it is, the soul has but loose connection with the body. "The body might," he assures us, "have its bodily functions without the soul, and the soul might have its psychical functions in some other connection than our present bodies.." [sic] But surely, as indeed this psychologist elsewhere himself admits, mind is a function of the body; therefore it follows implicitly from his propositions that mind may exist without the soul, whereas the metaphysical contention denies the possibility of thought without it. Note further that this thinker, with wise discretion, shrinks from any disclosure of his own idea, either by affirmation or negation, of the nature of the soul, and leaves us in total ignorance of what he desires us to understand, when on his own behalf he employs the word.

We may remark in passing, that Plato thought the soul could exist without a habitat in the human body. Kant, on the other hand, held it to be beyond our powers to make any affirmation as to the possibility of its separate existence. Dugald Stewart, somewhat in the same vein, held that we "have no direct evidence of the possibility of the thinking and sentient principle exercising its various powers in a separate state from the body." Here, be it observed, the soul, as with Descartes, is a "principle." Is this anything more than a mere word? What is the actual meaning of the term in this connection? or has it any meaning? What explanation does it furnish of the facts?

The foregoing brief analysis of metaphysical opinion, though obviously and necessarily imperfect, is not one-sided or dishonest, and seems to render the conclusion inevitable that introspective psychology has failed to supply a definite presentment of the nature of soul. Metaphysicians have, in truth, merely postulated its existence and endowed their creation with a series of attributes, the nexus of no single one of which with its assumed factor has ever been made the subject of serious proof; while, in speaking of mind as one manifestation of its activity, they simply ascribe the performance of a positive act (that of