Updates

4/7/10

Instead of writing an Update, I'm presenting Chapter I of "The Scientific Proofs of the Existence of the Soul" by Benito F. Reyes, M.A., published in 1949. (Amazon.com purchase link)

Why I Use the Word "Soul"

The word "soul", according to most psychologists, is unscientific. It has been discarded long ago, and no reputable writer on psychology uses it now. Today only philosophers, ministers, and poets use it, and most of them use it apologetically.

At present it seems more educated to use the word "behavior" to denote the phenomena of human personality. It carries more scientific prestige and it has the imprimatur of orthodox scientific psychology.

Even the terms "mind" and "consciousness" are regarded as being too vague and indefinite for scientific purposes. Besides, they smell too much of the odour of the soul.

All terminologies that smack of the soul, or even as much as approximate its traditional meaning, are held under suspicion. They are not scientific. They are medieval and superannuated. They belong to pre-scientific psychology. As far as the majority of modern doctors of psychology are concerned, they have no scientific usefulness.

From Psychology to Physiology
Thus, it has come to pass that psychology which auspiciously started as the "science of the soul" (psyche, soul, and logos, word or knowledge or science) became a "science of bodily functions" or physiology.

This transmogrification of psychology into physiology may be regarded as the greatest bathos of the twentieth century.

From the human psyche to the human physique: this is the history of modern psychology.

From the soul to the body.
From the mind to the brain.
From consciousness to behavior.
From the sublime to the ridiculous.
This is psychology, indeed!

Classroom Psychology
Consider, for example, the ordinary classroom instruction in the so-called fundamentals of psychology.

The professor is a specialist in his chosen field of study. He holds a doctorate degree in psychology from some reputable American university. He knows his business, as the saying goes.

On the other side, there are the students, young, eager, new. They have heard something about this science called psychology. Besides, they have been advised to study it. Three units.

And they want to know. What is the mind? Is there a soul? What is consciousness? What is intelligence? Who am I? What is the self? What is memory? I love? And so on and so forth.

The professor begins his lecture with the statement that psychology is a science. As such, therefore, it is based on facts What are the facts?.

Here the professor deceives both himself and his students. He becomes involved in what Stuart Chase calls "sheer verbalism"--the tyranny of words and phrases without discoverable referents, registering a semantic blank.

He talks of consciousness, but discusses the nervous system.

He talks of the mind, but discusses the areas and fissures of the brain.

He analyzes the personality, and reduces it to the body.

He is a professor of psychology, but he teaches physiology and anatomy.

Are these Facts?
What legacy of knowledge does a student inherit from such a class?

If he is reflective and philosophical, he emerges more confused than before. He learns a large number of new terms, but, like Omar, he "came out by the same door wherein I went."

If he is simply a mental blotter, absorbent but undiscriminating and uncritical, he comes out equipped with an accumulation of dogmatic and highly dubious information concerning neurones, synapses, engrams, hormones, axones, and dendrites.

Ask him what consciousness is, or the nature of the self, or the meaning of the mind, and he is as blank as an impressionless tabula rasa.

In fact, the so-called facts are all theories; and if there are facts at all, they are facts concerning the body and not the mind or the psyche.

They are physiological, not psychological facts.

What the Student Learns
The students learns, first of all, that psychology is not a science of the psyche or soul, as its etymology implies. It is simply a science of human behavior--how man behaves.

But what is man?

Here a gigantic semantic blank registers.

Modern psychology does not know exactly what man is, unless it dogmatically identifies him with the body. Limited by the rigors of its methodological philosophy, it finds itself compelled either to confess almost complete ignorance of man, or to assert that man is his body and no more.

Some scientists have taken the first alternative. They are quite frank in their admission, Dr. Alexis Carrel, that man's ignorance of himself is profound. "We do not apprehend man as a whole. We know him as composed of distinct parts. And even these parts are created by our methods. Man, as known to the specialists, is nothing but a schema, consisting of other schemata built up by the technique of each science. Each of us is made up of a procession of phantoms, in the midst of which strides an unknowable reality."

Man, according to Dr. Carrel, is the Unknown.

Others have championed the second alternative, declaring that man is purely a body, a protoplasmic machine, his mind merely an epiphenomenon or by-product of the brain, "a highly attenuated material substance surrounding the cerebrum, like the halo round the head of a saint."

In very truth, it can be said with a large margin of safety that the ancient riddle of the Sphinx until now is unsolved.

The proper study of mankind is still man, because man is still the biggest question mark in the universe.

Neither has modern psychology, with all its scientific instruments and appliances, explained the true nature of man's psychological functions, his consciousness, his memory, his perception.

It is as miraculous how we see as it is how we hold a piece of stone. And it is as difficult for psychology to explain how we see as it is for physics to explain how we hold a piece of stone.

Both are, from the standpoint of scientific erudition, as mysterious as the mystery of the Holy Trinity.

Just the same, the student learns dogmatically enough that he sees with his eyes, hears with his ears, smells with his nose, tastes with his tongue, and thinks with his brain!

Consequently, he cannot see without his eyes, h ear without his ears, smell without his nose, taste without his tongue, and think without his brain.

Thus, the student learns to regard his body as himself and the brain as his mind.

Science Abolishes the Soul
The abolition of the soul-concept from scientific psychology was not a sudden eradication. It was rather a gradual retrogression.

First it was the soul, with all its religious, moral and metaphysical implications. Psychology, as its name indicates, began as the science of the soul. Psychologists, however, began doubting the scientific validity of the soul, because they resented its philosophical associations.

They jettisoned it and put in its place the term mind. Psychology became the science of the mind. But even mind was not good enough. It was as abstract and nebulous as the soul.

They got rid of it and took the word consciousness. Psychology became the science of consciousness.

But what are we conscious of at any given moment? The structuralists came in and introduced the concept of mental states. We are, according to them, conscious only of mental states. Psychology became the science of mental states.

But are there really mental states? Are there not only mental functions? The functionalist psychologists redefined psychology and called it the science of mental functions.

Entered Watson and his behaviorists. Mental functions, they said, are not directly observable. They are subjective. They can be reached only by introspections. And introspection is not scientific.

In fact, all we can observe is behavior, the obvert behavior of the organism interacting with its environment. Beyond this we can only surmise, speculate. We cannot be scientific.

In reducing psychology to the science of behavior, Watson has also reduced it to physiology and anatomy.

There have been strong reactions against the limited and materialistic philosophy of behaviorism, like Gestalt psychology, hormic psychology, and psycho-analysis. In the main, however, modern psychology has become what Watson wanted it to be--observational, non-introspective, measural, statistical, physiological, anatomical--but certainly not psychological.

The Watsonian attitude is similar to the attitude of the materialistic scientist who, in order to find out what made Goethe's novel "Werther" cause an epidemic of suicides, begins to study its first edition according to the method of exact, positive science. He weighs the book, measures it by the most precise instruments, notes the number of its pages, makes a chemical analysis of the paper and the ink, counts the number of lines on every page, the number of letters, and even how many times the letter A is repeated, how many times the letter B, and how many times the interrogation mark is used, the period, the comma, and so on. Now, on the basis of his very carefully investigations, he writes an erudite treatise on the relation of the letter A of the German alphabet to suicide.

Behaviorism is effective in the study of animal psychology, because animals are not self-analytic and they cannot talk, anyway. Their minds are inaccessible. Only their ostensive behavior can be observed.

But it is certainly not adequate enough in the study of human psychology.

It is lamentable to discover, however, that behaviorism is the dominant psychological philosophy of the present century.

It should not be surprising, in fact, if one of these days, the descendants of Watson and his behaviorists should suddenly announce their epoch-making discovery that man is really only a thinking machine and that such a machine could be manufactured in the laboratory.

From soul-psychology to behaviorism--that was the retrogression, the devolution, the materialization of the science of psychology.

The science of the soul.
The science of the mind.
The science of consciousness.
The science of mental states.
The science of mental functions.
The science of behavior.
The science of the body.

When psychology discovered the body, it immediately abolished the soul.

Now, psychology is indeed a science without a soul!

The Need For Psychological Re-Orientation
The twentieth century psychologist should attempt to bring about a complete re-orientation in the most difficult of all sciences--the Science of Man, Psychology.

The work of renovation and emancipation must start.

We must liberate man from the materialism where the genius of physics and chemistry has imprisoned him.

We must break the walls of inert matter where the dead inductive methodology of science has confined him.

Let us restore to man the unifying wholeness of being which the analytic technique of science has completely destroyed.

Man is an integer. Let no procedure, however, scientific, fractionalize him.

Man cannot be separated into parts. But science has divided him and, taking one part, the very obvious part--the Body, calls it Man!

But man is not only the physically obvious. He is a manifold, and we must grasp him in all his activities and in all his aspects.

Dr. Alelxis Carrel, in his book, "Man the Unknown", says:

"A thorough examination of man is indispensable. The barrenness of classical schemata is due to the fact that, despite the great scope of our knowledge, we have never apprehended our being with a sufficiently penetrating effort. We must grasp him in all his activities, those that are ordinarily apparent as well as those that may remain potential.

"There is no privileged territory. In the abysses of our inner world everything has a meaning. We cannot choose only those that please us, according to the dictates of our feelings, our imagination, the scientific and philosophical form of our mind. A difficult or obscure subject must not be neglected just because it is difficult and obscure. All methods should be employed. The qualitative is as true as the quantitative. The relations that can be expressed in mathematical terms to not possess greater reality than those that cannot be so expressed. Darwin, Claude Bernard, and Pasteur, whose discovered could not be described in algebraic formulas, were as great scientists as Newton and Einstein. Reality is not necessarily clear and simple. It is not even sure that we are always able to understand it. In addition, it assumes infinitely varied aspects. A state of consciousness, the humeral bone, a wound, are equally real things. A phenomenon does not owe its importance to the facility with which scientific technique can be applied to its study. It must be conceived in function, not of the observer and his method, but of the subject, the human being. The grief of the mother who has lost her child, the distress of the mystical soul plunged into the 'dark night', the suffering of the patient tortured by cancer, are evident realities, although they are not measurable. The study of the phenomena of clairvoyance should not be neglected any more than that of the chronaxy of nerves, though clairvoyance can neither be produced at will nor measured. In making this inventory, we should utilize all possible means and be content with observing the phenomena that cannot be measured.

"It often happens that undue importance is given to some part at the expense of others. We are obliged to consider all the different aspects of man, physico-chemical, anatomical, physiological, metaphysical, intellectual, moral, artistic, religious, economic, and social. Every specialist, owing to a well-known professional bias, believes that he understand the entire human being, while in reality he only grasps a tiny part of him. Fragmentary aspects are considered as representing the whole. And these aspects are taken at random, following the fashion of the moment, which in turns gives more importance to the individual or to society, to physiological appetites or to spiritual activities, to muscular development or to brain power, to beauty or to utility, etc. Man, therefore, appears with many different visages. We arbitrarily choose among them the one that pleases us, and forget the others."

Why Science Rejected the Soul
In truth and in fact, scientists have proceeded arbitrarily in the choice of what should be studied and what should be regarded as fact in the field of psychological phenomena.

This arbitrariness is due to the inordinate predilection for a method which divides the world into the observable and the non-observable, the experimentable and the non-experimentable, the measurable and the non-measurable, the quantitative and the qualitative; and the dogmatic declaration that only the observable, the experimentable, the measurable, the quantitative is real, while the non-observable, the non-experimentable, the non-measurable, the qualitative is unreal.

The result of this excessive love for the observational, experimental, measural, and quantifying method of science was the elimination from the field of psychological investigation of all data that are not susceptible to observation, experimentation, measurement, and quantification.

This method is evidently fallacious.

For if it were true, then the world of micro-organisms never existed until the invention of the microscope. In other words, the microscope created the world of micro-organisms.

If it were true, then it is only an assumption that the earth is revolving around the sun, since the attestation of such fact is beyond all possibilities of human observation and experimentation.

Nevertheless, despite the obvious limitations of the scientific method, under its methodological imperative, the soul had to go.

Science rejected it, because it cannot be observed.

Because it cannot be experimented upon.

Because you cannot put in a test tube to discover its color and its chemical constituents.

Because you cannot measure it and find out its length and its breadth and its height.

Because you cannot put it on a scale to determine its weight in grams or in kilos.

Science rejected it, because it cannot be seen or smelt or heard or touched directly.

And in rejecting it, science committed treason against humanity.

I Use the Word "Soul"
Hence, I use the word "soul" deliberately, intentionally, and purposely.

I use it, because to me it is no less real than any so-called scientific fact, like the revolution of the earth or the existence of electrons.

I use it, because to permit the continuance of its banishment from the field of science is to perpetuate the tyranny of a method that cannot soar above the delusion of inert matter and the limitations of the sense-organs.

I use it, because it is a beautiful and meaningful word that may still become a bridge-builder between religion and science, between faith and reason.

I use it, because a psychology without soul completely deprives man of the true basis of the moral life.

I use it, because under different names, like old wine in new bottles, the soul-concept is coming into its own.

McDougall, the dynamic psychologist, employs it.

The Gestaltists call it "total configuration".

Frederick Myers calls it "subliminal consciousness."

William James gives it the name the "wider self".

P.D. Ouspensky employs the term "fourth dimensional consciousness".

Dr. R.M. Bucke and Edward Carpenter name it "cosmic consciousness".

The Freudians call it sometimes the Ego, sometimes the "Sub-conscious".

But none of these new terminologies gives the full meaning of the word "soul". Each of them emphasizes one aspect, but none has the richness, the comprehensiveness, the completeness of the ancient word "soul" or "psyche".

That is why I use the word "soul".

In the East, where the psychology of the soul has never lost its charms, both to the scientist and to the philosopher, the soul is called under various names.

The Vedantist calls it Atma, and identifies it with the Divine Essence, or Brahman.

The Sankhya names it Purusha.

The Jaina gives it the name Jiva.

But under whatever name it may pass, the soul is regarded in the East as a unitary and multi-dimensional consciousness which uses the body as a vehicle or instrument of manifestation in the physical universe.

It is distinct from the body.

It relinquishes the body at death. But even before death, it may, if it wants, emancipate itself from the limitations of the body by the practice of Yoga Science.

The soul is the "I am", the man himself; the body is only his garment.

Best regards,

Stephen S., Producer

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