Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Beginning at the splintering of Christianity during the Reformation, the spiritually vertical aspirations of Europeans became crisscrossed with the horizontal voyages of discovery and the widening search for scientific truths. People began to believe less in an invisible human spirit and more in the things they could see and touch. Spirituality was orphaned.

The materialist view, that everything is just swirling atoms, is just as arbitrary, and exerts the same social pressure, as the old belief that everything comes from God’s will. Today, it’s heretical to assert that the soul or psyche is a real, separate thing. God and spirit have been replaced by matter and its laws; we believe uncritically that matter creates and controls the mind.

The sciences are singular: one zoology, one astronomy, one physics. Philosophies and psychologies, though, are legion because they are “are systems of opinion about subject-matter which cannot be fully experienced and therefore cannot be comprehended by a purely empirical approach” (183). Modern bias limits these theories to those that consider the psyche to be an appendage of physical matter.

Older beliefs held that a breath of spirit—a name that, in many languages, is closely connected to words for “air”—animates matter and inhabits it in the form of a body.