Metaphysical assertions are statements of the psyche
Metaphysical assertions are statements of the psyche, and are therefore psychological.
To the Western mind, which compensates its well-known feelings of resentment by a slavish regard for “rational” explanations, this obvious truth seems all too obvious, or else it is seen as an inadmissible negation of metaphysical “truth.”
Whenever the Westerner hears the word “psychological,” it always sounds to him like “only psychological.”
For him the “soul” is something pitifully small, unworthy, personal, subjective, and a lot more besides.
He therefore prefers to use the word “mind” instead, though he likes to pretend at the same time that a statement which may in fact be very subjective indeed is made by the “mind,” naturally by the “Universal Mind,” or even—at a pinch—by the “Absolute” itself.
This rather ridiculous presumption is probably a compensation for the regrettable smallness of the soul.
It almost seems as if Anatole France had uttered a truth which were valid for the whole Western world when, in his Penguin Island, Catherine d’Alexandrie offers this advice to God: “Donnezleur une ame, mais une petite!” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 835
We do not devalue statements that originally were intended to be metaphysical when we demonstrate their psychic nature; on the contrary, we confirm their factual
character.
But, by treating them as psychic phenomena, we remove them from the inaccessible realm of metaphysics, about which nothing verifiable can be said, and this disposes of the impossible question as to whether they are “true” or not.
We take our stand simply and solely on the facts, recognizing that the archetypal structure of the unconscious will produce, over and over again and irrespective of tradition, those figures which reappear in the history of all epochs and all peoples, and will endow them with the same significance and numinosity that have been theirs from the beginning. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 558
