Untitled Essay Research Paper The question of

Untitled Essay, Research Paper

The question of the reality of the soul and its distinction from the body is among the

most important problems of philosophy, for with it is bound up the doctrine of a future

life. The soul may be defined as the ultimate internal principle by which we think, feel,

and will, and by which our bodies are animated. The term "mind" usually denotes

this principle as the subject of our conscious states, while "soul" denotes the

source of our vegetative activities as well. If there is life after death, the agent of

our vital activities must be capable of an existence separate from the body. The belief in

an active principle in some sense distinct from the body is inference from the observed

facts of life. The lowest savages arrive at the concept of the soul almost without

reflection, certainly without any severe mental effort. The mysteries of birth and death,

the lapse of conscious life during sleep, even the most common operations of imagination

and memory, which abstract a man from his bodily presence even while awake; all such facts

suggest the existence of something besides the visible organism. An existence not entirely

defined by the material and to a large extent independent of it, leading a life of its

own. In the psychology of the savage, the soul is often represented as actually migrating

to and fro during dreams and trances, and after death haunting the neighborhood of its

body. Nearly always it is figured as something extremely volatile, a perfume or a breath.

In Greece, the heartland of our ancient philosophers, the first essays of philosophy took

a positive and somewhat materialistic direction, inherited from the pre-philosophic age,

from Homer and the early Greek religion. In Homer, while the distinction of soul and body

is recognized, the soul is hardly conceived as possessing a substantial existence of its

own. Severed from the body, it is a mere shadow, incapable of energetic life. Other

philosophers described the soul’s nature in terms of substance. Anaximander gives it an

aeriform constitution, Heraclitus describes it as a fire. The fundamental thought is the

same. The soul is the nourishing agent which imparts heat, life, sense, and intelligence

to all things in their several degrees and kinds. The Pythagoreans taught that the soul is

a harmony, its essence consisting in those perfect mathematical ratios which are the law

of the universe and the music of the heavenly spheres. All these early theories were

cosmological rather than psychological in character. Theology, physics, and mental science

were not as yet distinguished.

In the "Timaeus" (p. 30), one of Plato’s writings, we find an

account derived from Pythagorean sources of the origin of the soul. First the world-soul

is created according to the laws of mathematical symmetry and musical harmony. It is

composed of two elements, one an element of "sameness", corresponding to the

universal and intelligible order of truth, and the other an element of distinction or

"otherness", corresponding to the world of sensible and particular existences.

The individual human soul is constructed on the same plan.

The Stoics taught that all existence is material, and described the soul as "a breath

pervading the body". They also called it Divine, a particle of God; it was composed

of the most refined and ethereal matter. They denied absolute immortality; relative

immortality, ending with the universal conflagration and destruction of all things, some

of them admitted in the case of the wise man. Yet many others, such as Panaetius and

Posidonius, denied even this, arguing that, as "the soul began with the body, so it

must end with it".

With Socrates came a revolution in all manners

of thought. As, perhaps, the most influential of philosophers, and also one of the best

known, it is truly unfortunate he left the future so little of his theories. Only through

the writings of his students have we any idea of his philosophy. In the writing of Plato

much thought is given to the concept of the human soul. Socrates presents the soul having

three major ideas associated with it. The human soul is immortal, immaterial, and moral.

The question of immortality was a principal subject of Plato’s speculations. In the

"Phaedo" the chief argument for the immortality of the soul is based on the

nature of intellectual knowledge interpreted on the theory of reminiscence of past lives;

this implies the pre-existence of the soul, and logically derives its eternal

pre-existence. The human soul is eternal, existing with neither beginning nor end.

With Socrates, the individual aspects of the soul became dominant. It’s individuality and

its strict separation with the body. In dominant thought prior to the introduction of

Socratic ideas, the human soul was naught but a small part of a great wor

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