philosophers deny this reality altogether. I
refer to Bergson and William James.

In the systems of thought of both these writers there is no place
left for that concrete, real, actual "monad," with its semi-mental,
semi-material substratum of unknown hyper-physical, hyper-psychic
substance, which is what we mean, in philosophical as well as
in popular language when we talk of the "soul."

According to the revelation of man's complex vision this
hyper-physical, hyper-psychic "something," which is the concrete centre
of will and consciousness and energy, is also the invisible core or
base of what we term personality, and, without its real existence,
personality can have no permanence. Without the assumption of
its real existence personality cannot hold its own or remain
integral and identical in the midst of the process of life.

This then being the nature and character of the soul, what weight
is there in the arguments used against the soul's concrete existence
by such thinkers as James and Bergson? The position of the
American philosopher in regard to this matter seems less plausible
and less consistent than that of his French master.

James is prepared to give his adherence to a belief in a soul of the
earth and in planetary souls and stellar souls. He quotes with
approval on this point the writings of Gustav Theodor Fechner, the
Leipzig chemist. He is also prepared to find a place in his
pluralistic world for at least one quite personal and quite finite
god.

If he is not merely exercising his philosophical fancy in all this,
but is actually prepared to assume the real concrete existence of an
earth-soul and of planetary souls and of at least one beneficent and
quite personal god, why should he find himself unable to accept
the same sort of real concrete soul in living human beings? Why
should he find himself compelled to say--"the notion of the
substantial soul, so freely used by common men and the more
popular philosophers has fallen upon evil days and has no prestige
in the eyes of critical thinkers . . . like the word 'cause' the word
'soul' is but a theoretic stop-gap . . . it marks a place and claims it
for a future explanation to occupy . . . let us leave out the soul,
then, and confront the original dilemma"?

This scepticism of the pragmatic philosophy in regard to the
"substantial soul" is surely an unpardonable inconsistency. For in
all other problems the fact of an idea being "freely used by
comm