A.E. Crawley, The Idea of Soul
CHAPTER I
PSYCHOLOGY AND PRIMITIVE CULTURE
i. Nature of the Investigation.
Few conceptions can show the universality and permanence, the creative power and morphological influence which have characterised throughout history the Idea of the Soul.
To it we owe the conception of an order of spiritual beings, and of a spiritual world existing now and hereafter.
At some relatively late stage of culture it became absolute in the idea of God.
It is thus the basis of all religion. One typical case may be cited.
The highest authority on the religions of China concludes that ; the human soul is the original form of all beings of a higher order. Its worship is the basis of religion in that country. . . . Taoism was originally a compendium of customs and practices framed upon the prevailing ideas concerning the human soul. . . .
It cast these into a system of philosophy, alchemy, and religion.;
But neither its origin nor its influence is confined to the religious sphere.
Just as the soul itself is concerned with every mode of apprehending its total environment, so the idea of the soul is bound up with the evolution of mind in general.
We may go farther and assert that not only have its results upon the mind, and the difficulties which its comprehension has produced, assisted mental development, or rather have been inevitable conditions of it, but its origin and development also are identical with the earliest steps in mental evolution.
Both in the race and in the individual we shall find it to be the first purely intellectual result of human reaction to environment.
It is thus our first effort towards an explanation of things, our first act of thought.
In the early stages of culture the idea provides a form for consciousness, and in all stages its development involves the search for reality.
This search is one aspect of that desire for knowledge, that instinct of curiosity, which is the mainspring of science.
It is not too much to say that from the earliest culture known or inferable, up to the triumph of experimental science to-day, the idea has been the inspiration of all intellectual speculation theological, metaphysical, and scientific.
We may, therefore, employ another metaphor and describe it as the original cell out of which all thought and consequently all knowledge have been evolved.
To trace its origin and development is thus in great measure to trace the origin and development of the soul itself, and the history of man s efforts to understand both himself and his world.
This evolution has not been adequately expounded, and the reason is obvious.
The anthropology of calture possesses an abundant material, but, as is often urged against it, its results are untrustworthy because its methods are inexact.
The fact is that its methods are merely those of unaided common sense.
Primitive psychology has yet to be written, but it cannot be written by methods like these.
Their ineffectiveness is well illustrated by the present problem.
This, the most important and far-reaching of all sociological questions, the genesis of that great conception which divides man into body and soul, and the universe into matter and spirit, still, after years of study, remains unanswered.
The statement which to-day passes for a solution is little more advanced than that of Hobbes, two hundred and fifty years ago, or even than those of Aristotle and the still earlier Greek thinkers whom Lucretius followed.
For all practical purposes we are no nearer a solution than were the thinkers of more than two thousand years ago.
Yet this problem is the simplest, as it is the first, of all the problems presented by mental evolution in man.
When once anthropology employs the verified experimental results of psychology
the solution is obvious.
The origin not only of the idea of the soul itself, but of the idea of a spiritual or_supernatural world, is then automatically explained.
2. Tylor s Theory.
The only classical work on the subject has been done by Tylor, who colligated the facts of savage and barbarous culture by the principle of animism,; the doctrine of souls. of the idea in the evolution of culture.
But he was more concerned with its influence than with its origin.
In his explanation of the latter there is no psychological precision the fact being that his explanation was completed before the development of experimental psychology.
Nevertheless, its main features have not been materially altered ; all other work on the subject has been mainly descriptive.
Tylor s explanation, therefore, must be a starting-point for further inquiry.
We shall give an abstract of his account of animism and of his explanation of its origin, and shall then discuss some attempts at improving the explanation, and finally the explanation itself.
Tylor described animism as; a belief in the anima tion of all nature, rising at its highest pitch to personification.;
This belief is bound up with that primitive mental state where man recognises in every detail of his world the operation of personal life and will,; and is, in short, a conception of; pervading life and will in nature.; Animism is divided into; two great dogmas, forming part of one consistent doctrine.;
The first concerns the souls of individual creatures; the second concerns other spirits up to the rank of powerful deities.
He speaks of the whole as an ancient and world-wide philosophy, of which belief is the theory and worship is the practice,; and gives as a minimum definition ; of religion ; the belief in spiritual beings.;
For an explanation of the origin of the idea of souls in natural objects he relies on the presupposed belief in the animation of all nature.
The idea of the soul of man he explains thus: the earliest men were confronted with two intellectual problems,
(i) What makes the difference between a living body and a dead ? What causes waking, sleep, trance, disease, and death?
(2) What are those human shapes which appear in dreams and visions ?
The solution was that man possessed a; life; and a; phantom; these were separable, but could be, and, in the end, were combined as a dual manifestation of one and the same; soul.;
This explanation was partially anticipated by Hobbes.
For the matter or substance of the Invisible Agents so fancyed, they could not by naturall cogitation fall upon any other concept, but that it was the same as that of the Soule of man, and that the Soule of man was of the same substance with that which appeareth in a Dreame to one that sleepeth; or in a Looking-glasse to one that is awake ; which, men not knowing that such apparitions are nothing else but creatures of the Fancy, think to be reall and external Substances.;
;
From this ignorance of how to distinguish Dreams and other strong fancies from Vision and Sense did arise the greater part of the religion of the Gentiles in times past that worshipped Satyres, Faunes, Nymphs, and the like ; and nowadays the opinion that rude people have of Fayries, Ghosts, and Goblins, and of the power of Witches. ~A.E. Crawley, The Idea of Soul, Page 1-5
