The pretended rational doctrine of the substantiality and spirituality
of the soul, with all the apparatus that accompanies it, is born simply
of the necessity which men feel of grounding upon reason their
inexpugnable longing for immortality and the subsequent belief in it.
All the sophistries which aim at proving that the soul is substance,
simple and incorruptible, proceed from this source. And further, the
very concept of substance, as it was fixed and defined by scholasticism,
a concept which does not bear criticism, is a theological concept,
designed expressly to sustain faith in the immortality of the soul.
William James, in the third of the lectures which he devoted to
pragmatism in the Lowell Institute in Boston, in December, 1906, and
January, 1907[26]--the weakest thing in all the work of the famous
American thinker, an extremely weak thing indeed--speaks as follows:
"Scholasticism has taken the notion of substance from common sense and
made it very technical and articulate. Few things would seem to have
fewer pragmatic consequences for us than substances, cut off as we are
from every contact with them. Yet in one case scholasticism has proved
the importance of the substance-idea by treating it pragmatically. I
refer to certain disputes about the mystery of the Eucharist. Substance
here would appear to have momentous pragmatic value. Since the accidents
of the wafer do not change in the Lord's Supper, and yet it has become
the very body of Christ, it must be that the change is in the substance
solely.
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