stinct and different from the other
manifestations of phenomena. And reason is naturally monist. For it is
the function of reason to understand and explain the universe, and in
order to understand and explain it, it is in no way necessary for the
soul to be an imperishable substance. For the purpose of explaining and
understanding our psychic life, for psychology, the hypothesis of the
soul is unnecessary. What was formerly called rational psychology, in
opposition to empirical psychology, is not psychology but metaphysics,
and very muddy metaphysics; neither is it rational, but profoundly
irrational, or rather contra-rational.

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. The bread-substance must have been withdrawn and the Divine
substance substituted miraculously without altering the immediate
sensible properties. But though these do not alter, a tremendous
difference has been made--no less a one than this, that we who take the
sacrament now feed upon