metapsychosis,
we shall do well first to glance at the soul in general, and then give
particular consideration to the cell-soul.

What is the Soul or Psyche? The innumerable different answers which
have been given to this crowning question of psychology, may
collectively, when freed from all extraneous matter, be brought
under two groups which we may shortly designate as the dualistic and
the monistic soul-hypothesis. According to the monistic (or
realistic) soul-hypothesis, the "soul" is nothing more than the sum
or aggregate of a multitude of special cell-activities, among which
sensation and volition--sensual perception and voluntary
movement--are the most important, the most common, and the most
widely diffused; associated with these in the higher animals and in
man, we find the more developed activities of the ganglionic cells
which are included under the conceptions of Thought, Consciousness,
Intellect, and Reason. Like all the other functional-activities of
the organic cells, these soul-functions depend ultimately on
material phenomena of motion, and more particularly on the motions
of the plasson-molecules or plastidules, the ultimate atoms of the
protoplasma, and perhaps of the nucleus also; therefore we should be
able actually to grasp and explain them, as well as every other
cognisable natural process, if we were in a position to refer them
to the mechanics of atoms. This monistic soul-hypothesis, then, is
at bottom mechanistic. If psychical mechanics--psychophysics--were
not so infinitely complex and involved, if we were in a position to
take a complete view of the historical evolution of the psychic
functions, we could reduce the whole of them (including
consciousness) to a mathematical "soul-formula."

According to the opposite, or dualistic (or spiritualistic)
soul-hypothesis, the soul is, on the contrary, a peculiar substance,
which most people somewhat grossly conceive of as a gaseous body,
while others picture it with more subtlety, as an immaterial essence.
This "soul-substance" subsists independently of the animal-body, and
stands in only a temporary connection with certain organs of that
body--the soul-, or mental-organs. It has been imagined that this
soul-matter, which resembles that imponderable ether which is the
medium of light, is diffused between the ponderable molecules of the
soul-organs and especially of the nerve-cells, and that this
connection of the imponderable "soul" with the pond