The various opinions men have built up around the idea of a soul are instructive. How gravely men have written about such hidden things! Only very slowly have they learned to separate an experience from its interpretation, and to seek a wide range of facts before erecting even an hypothesis. To explain by means of _agents_, visible and invisible, is the plausible method to which man always resorts first. It is only when he becomes more sophisticated that he thinks in terms of _processes_. The following examples of divergent opinion upon the soul, gathered by an able French author, show the vagueness of the idea:
Origen, the Alexandrian theologian: "The soul is material and has a definite shape."
St. Augustine: "The soul is incorporeal and immortal."
A Polynesian: "The soul is a breath, and when I saw that I was on the point of expiring, I pinched my nose in order to retain my soul in my body. But I did not grasp it tightly enough--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.'"
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."