Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 43:170 (Apr 1886)
Article: Soul And Body
Author: John Dewey

BSac 43:170 (April 1886) p. 239

Soul And Body

Professor John Dewey

Lest the reader trained in a school which holds that there is nothing to be said of the relations of soul and body, except that there is soul and there is body and that is the end of it, should turn away at the outset in disgust from what must seem to him an attempt to solve the insoluble—let me say a word or two to avoid misapprehension. Lotze has somewhere called attention to the fact that the natural tendency of an historical age, priding itself on its historical sense, and working by an historical method, is to surrender the understanding to the imagination, and to demand pictures instead of principles. We are not contented until we can see the object matter as a series of definite images. Instead of explanation we want a drama before our eyes. It is because of this tendency, I believe, that it is assumed that there is some difficulty special in kind surrounding the question of the relations of soul and body which makes all attempts to consider the subject necessarily futile. It seems to be assumed on the one hand that nothing can be said about it unless we can see into the bowels of the molecules constituting the brain, and behold from their mutual attractions and repulsions, a sensation and a thought engendered. Or on the other hand, it is assumed that to know any thing about the relations of soul and body, we must be able to contemplate the soul, seated as on a throne in the body, thence sending forth her messengers to lay hold of the nerves and cause them to bring her reports of what is going on in the outlying regions of her domain, or to execute her orders among refractory subjects. And if the only way of knowing any thing about their relations were some such imaginative exploit, the question were

BSac 43:170 (April 1886) p. 240

well called insoluble. But questions, as science and philosophy can well testify, are more often insoluble by reason of some unnecessary and absurd assumption, than from the inherent nature of the case. And so the failure of all attempts on this line is rather, I conceive, testimony to the absurdity of the mode of search, than to the absurdity of the question itself. We have an understanding as well as an imagination; principles may be thought as well as pictures seen; laws exist as well as panoramas. We may well give up the attempt to imagine the neural and psychical processes so as to see a transition from one to another, and confine ourselves to the less picturesque, but more hopeful, task of inquiring what principles shall be employed in order to render intelligible the relations of the physical and psychical, so far as these relations have been actually made known. We have certain facts declared by physiology and psychology. The sole question is: what principles, conceptions, shall...