This modern psychology proudly styles itself the “psychology without the soul,” in imitation of its much over-rated founder, Friedrich Albert Lange. I think I have proved in this work that without the acknowledgment of a soul there would be no way of dealing with psychic phenomena; just as much in the case of the male who has a soul as in the case of the female who is soulless.
Modern psychology is eminently womanish, and that is why this comparative investigation of the sexes is so specially instructive, and it is not without reason that I have delayed pointing out this radical difference; it is only now that it can be seen what the acceptation of the ego implies, and how the confusing of masculine and feminine spiritual life (in the broadest and deepest sense) has been at the root of all the difficulties and errors into which those who have sought to establish a universal psychology have fallen.
I must now raise the question—is a psychology of the male possible as a science? The answer must be that it is not possible. I must be understood to reject all the investigations of the experimenters, and those who are still sick with the experimental fever may ask in wonder if all these have no value? Experimental psychology has not given a single explanation as to the deeper laws of masculine life; it can be regarded only as a series of sporadic empirical efforts, and its method is wrong inasmuch as it seeks to reach the kernel of things by surface examination, and as it cannot possibly give an explanation of the deep-seated source of all psychical phenomena. When it has attempted to discover the real nature of psychical phenomena by measurements of the physical phenomena that accompany them, it has succeeded in showing that even in the most favourable cases there is an inconstancy and variation. The fundamental possibility of reaching the mathematical idea of knowledge is that the data should be constant. As the mind itself is the creator of time and space, it is impossible to expect that geometry and arithmetic should explain the mind, that the creature should explain the creator.
There can be no scientific psychology of man, for the aim of psychology is to derive what is not derivative, to prove to every man what his real nature and essence are, to deduce these. But the possibility of deducing them would imply that they were not free. As soon as it has been admitted that the conduct, action, nature, of an individual man can be determined scientifically, it will be proved that man has no free-will. Kant and Schopenhauer understood this fully, and, on the other hand, Hume and Herbart, the founders of modern psychology, did not believe in free-will. It is this dilemma that is the cause of the pitiful relation of modern psychology to all fundamental questions. The wild and repeated efforts to derive the will from psychological factors, from perception and feeling, are in themselves evidence that it cannot be taken as an empirical factor. The will, like the power of judgment, is associated inevitably with the existence of an ego, or soul. It is not a matter of experience, it transcends experience, and until psychology recognises this extraneous factor, it will remain no more than a methodical annex of physiology and biology. If the soul is only a complex of experiences it cannot be the factor that makes experiences possible. Modern psychology in reality denies the existence of the soul, but the soul rejects modern psychology.
This work has decided in favour of the soul against the absurd and pitiable psychology without a soul. In fact, it may be doubted if, on the assumption that the soul exists and has free thought and free-will, there can be a science of causal laws and self-imposed rules of willing and thinking. I have no intention of trying to inaugurate a new era of rational psychology. I wish to follow Kant in positing the existence of a soul as the unifying and central conception, without which any explanation or description of psychic life, however faithful in its details, however sympathetically undertaken, must be wholly unsatisfying. It is extraordinary how inquirers who have made no attempt to analyse such phenomena as shame and the sense of guilt, faith and hope, fear and repentance, love and hate, yearning and solitude, vanity and sensitiveness, ambition and the desire for immortality, have yet the courage simply to deny the ego because it does not flaunt itself like the colour of an orange or the taste of a peach. How can Mach and Hume account for such a thing as style, if individuality does not exist? Or again, consider this: no animal is made afraid by seeing its reflection in a glass, whilst there is no man who could spend his life in a room surrounded with mirrors. Can this fear, the fear of the doppelganger,[14] be explained on Darwinian principles? The word doppelganger has only to be mentioned to raise a deep dread in the mind of any man. Empirical psychology cannot explain this; it reaches the depths. It cannot be explained, as Mach would explain the fear of little children, as an inheritance from some primitive, less secure stage of society. I have taken this example only to remind the empirical psychologists that there are many things inexplicable on their hypotheses.
[14] It is notable that women are devoid of this fear; female doppelgangers are not heard of.
Why is any man annoyed when he is described as a Wagnerite, a Nietzchite, a Herbartian, or so forth? He objects to be thought a mere echo. Even Ernst Mach is angry in anticipation at the thought that some friend will describe him as a Positivist, Idealist, or any other non-individual term. This feeling must not be confused with the results of the fact that a man may describe himself as a Wagnerite, and so forth. The latter is simply a deep approval of Wagnerism, because the approver is himself a Wagnerite. The man is conscious that his agreement is in reality a raising of the value of Wagnerism. And so also a man will say much about himself that he would not permit another to say of him. As Cyrano de Bergerac put it:
“Je me les sers moi-même, avec assez de verve, Mais je ne permets pas qu’un autre me les serve.”
It cannot be right to consider such men as Pascal and Newton, on the one hand, as men of the highest genius, on the other, as limited by a mass of prejudices which we of the present generation have long overcome. Is the present generation with its electrical railways and empirical psychology so much higher than these earlier times? Is culture, if culture has any real value, to be compared with science, which is always social and never individual, and to be measured by the number of public libraries and laboratories? Is culture outside human beings and not always in human beings?
It is in striking harmony with the ascription to men alone of an ineffable, inexplicable personality, that in all the authenticated cases of double or multiple personality the subjects have been women. The absolute female is capable of sub-division; the male, even to the most complete characterology and the most acute experiment, is always an indivisible unit. The male has a central nucleus of his being which has no parts, and cannot be divided; the female is composite, and so can be dissociated and cleft.
And so it is most amusing to hear writers talking of the soul of the woman, of her heart and its mysteries, of the psyche of the modern woman. It seems almost as if even an accoucheur would have to prove his capacity by the strength of his belief in the soul of women. Most women, at least, delight to hear discussions on their souls, although they know, so far as they can be said to know anything, that the whole thing is a swindle. The woman as the Sphinx! Never was a more ridiculous, a more audacious fraud perpetrated. Man is infinitely more mysterious, incomparably more complicated.
It is only necessary to look at the faces of women one passes in the streets. There is scarcely one whose expression could not at once be summed up. The register of woman’s feelings and disposition is so terribly poor, whereas men’s countenances can scarcely be read after long and earnest scrutiny.
Finally, I come to the question as to whether there exists a complete parallelism or a condition of reciprocal interaction between mind and body. In the case of the female, psycho-physical parallelism exists in the form of a complete co-ordination between the mental and the physical; in women the capacity for mental exertion ceases with senile involution, just as it developed in connection with and in subservience to the sexual instincts. The intelligence of man never grows as old as that of the woman, and it is only in isolated cases that degeneration of the mind is linked with degeneration of the body. Least of all does mental degeneration accompany the bodily weakness of old age in those who have genius, the highest development of mental masculinity.
It is only to be expected that the philosophers who most strongly argued in favour of parallelism, such as Spinoza and Fechner, were also determinists. In the case of the male, the free intelligible agent who by his own will can distinguish between good and evil,
