nough--and I am dead."

Albertus Magnus: "There are thirty arguments against the immortality of
the soul and thirty-six for, which is a majority of six arguments in
favor of the affirmative."

Rabbi Maimonides: "It is written: 'The wicked will be destroyed and
there will not rest anything of him.'"

{145}

Ecclesiastes: "Men die as the beasts and their fate is the same. They
have all one breath."

The soul was at first conceived in very material ways. The idealistic
movement in Greek philosophy is responsible for the concept of an
_immaterial substance_. "Under the influence of mystical, religious
motives the soul becomes more and more non-spatial and intangible. The
words used are negative and abstract. It is generally supposed that
Plotinus was the first to describe the soul as an immaterial substance.
But this immaterial substance must somehow be brought into relation
with the physical body." It was this situation which gave rise to the
soul-body problem in philosophy, a problem which has gradually changed
into the mind-body problem. This transformation of the puzzle is
significant. The very terms have changed and have become more concrete
and empirical. A quotation from William James--a man who had no bias
against theology--will bring out the essential reasons for this
significant change of terms: "Yet it is not for idle or fantastical
reasons that the notion of the substantial soul, so freely used by
common men and the more popular philosophies, has fallen upon such evil
days, and has no prestige in the eyes of critical thinkers. It only
shares the fate of other unrepresentable substances and principles.
They are without exception all so barren that to sincere inquirers they
appear as little more than names masquerading."

I am inclined to believe that, to most people, to-day, the soul means
no more than the personality, and the conviction that this cannot be
reduced to the body. It stands for consciousness and character as
somehow rooted in something permanent. Plato's idea of the {146} soul
as a simple, indestructible substance awakens hardly an echo in their
minds--and why should it? Something which guarantees and makes
possible the continued existence of their conscious self after the
death of the body is the association which is uppermost. Educated
people, at least, have outgrown the ghost-soul of primitive times and
have put their hope in the inability of the philosophic scientist to
exp