The soul not only thinks, feels, and wills, but
moves the body and prompts its vital functions; in the human soul are
united the vegetative, animal, and rational functions. Such is the
theory. But the soul separated from the body can have neither
vegetative nor animal functions.
A theory, in short, which for the reason is a veritable contexture of
confusions.
After the Renaissance and the restoration of purely rational thought,
emancipated from all theology, the doctrine of the mortality of the soul
was re-established by the newly published writings of the second-century
philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisias and by Pietro Pomponazzi and
others. And in point of fact, little or nothing can be added to what
Pomponazzi has written in his _Tractatus de immortalitate animae_. It is
reason itself, and it serves nothing to reiterate his arguments.
Attempts have not been wanting, however, to find an empirical support
for belief in the immortality of the soul, and among these may be
counted the work of Frederic W.H. Myers on _Human Personality and its
Survival of Bodily Death_. No one ever approached more eagerly than
myself the two thick volumes of this work in which the leading spirit of
the Society for Psychical Research resumed that formidable mass of data
relating to presentiments, apparitions of the dead, the phenomena of
dreams, telepathy, hypnotism, sensorial automatism, ecstasy, and all the
rest that goes to furnish the spiritualist arsenal.
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