In our first chapter we discussed the striking relations between the interior states of a human soul and the exterior expressions of those states through the instrumentality of a human body. We made an endeavour to show that it is perfectly possible to consider those relations between the inward and the outward in a perspective of totality.
And now we perhaps realize more easily just why there must necessarily be such a close connection between the inward impression and the outward expression: they do not take place in two "parts" of the person infinitely distant from each other, but rather exactly in the same "spot". For the soul is not a thing just "located in the brain", and thus "very far" from--let us say--the foot, or the hand, or any other limb or organ you might mention. No, the soul is of course in the entire body--and just as much in the foot or in the hand as in any other part of the body.
In its manifestations the soul is always inseparably connected with each and every one of the various functions of the body. For they are the basis for life exerting itself in a human being.(103)
Small wonder, then, that it has always proved so discouragingly difficult to distinguish clearly between, for instance, motion and emotion. Where there is true perfection of integration, no man can expect any interval to separate the integrating parts.
According to the Bible, God Himself is the perfect model of wholeness and harmony. With Him the thought coincides so perfectly with His external actions, which constitute the way that thought manifests itself, that they are described as instantaneous:
For he spake and it was done; he commanded and it stood fast. (Ps. xxxiii:9)
In the human being, too, who is such a supreme marvel of God's making, we must assume a similarly striking oneness and harmony. There is, indeed, perfect oneness and harmony between the means by which a human soul realizes itself and the means by which it expresses itself.
Without its tangible expression in the body, the mind would forever remain in a "frozen" state of pure virtuality. In order to have any existence at all, the soul must needs find its adequate expression and "take its place" in the world of phenomena.
Considered against the background of this principle of totality, it becomes equally understandable that the remarkable concomitance established in our first chapter as a fact of true relationship between the "inward" and the "outward" in everyday human life, simply could not be otherwise. The oneness we here experience is actually a category without which the human being cannot be imagined, without which it cannot exist.
To separate those interior functions of a human mind from their exterior manifestations in a human body, is simply a Platonic abstraction which has nothing to correspond to it in practical and living reality. That emotion (or thought) which we try to imagine as an independent entity of our deepest interior, simply does not exist. It has only one basis of real existence: it exists precisely in those exterior manifestations taking place in visible flesh and blood.
So to distinguish, in terms of a definite "opposition", between a state of mind (in its "pure potentiality") on the one hand, and its outer manifestations in bodily action on the other, that must be a distinction absolutely devoid of practical meaning, and as completely foreign to the reality of life as any kind of speculative dualism could ever be.
So we ask ourselves this question: What kind and what degree of dualism was it that Aristotle vanquished at the moment when, courageously, he rose up to the daring simplicity of considering the Idea as the form realized in matter? Was it not a dualism which, in any case, has the most serious bearing on vital issues in human life? Was it not, in the last analysis, some kind of dualism between the outward and the inward in man's most vital everyday reality?
In our opinion, it is just a far-reaching and most practical victory of this vital order that so many a monist in subsequent ages has in reality gained, although he may not always have expressed himself in the same terms. Some have expressed themselves in terms of modern psycho-physiology. Some have abstained from learned terminologies altogether. They have contented themselves with simply living that monism out in their modest individual lives.
According to Aristotle, the soul was the principle of action which moulds the body, making it into an organism capable of accomplishing the functions of life. Thus this philosopher, as Charles Werner reminds us, definitively established the harmonious unity of the soul on one hand and the living body on the other.
Hence, even in circles of theoretical philosophy, there should be no more mention of two substances, body and soul. The soul is the only real substance, but a substance penetrating matter and taking possession of it so thoroughly that no independent existence is ever left to it. In other words, the union of the soul and the body is not the mysterious union of two things which could exist separately under any circumstances.
This has always been the triumphant certainty of the thoroughbred monist, wherever his sturdy realism has succeeded in asserting itself, sporadically, in the history of Western ideas.
However, there is one thing about which we do not by any means feel as "triumphantly" certain as Professor Werner seems to feel. We are referring to his statement that "the doctrine of immortality has nothing to fear", as far as this attitude of victorious totality--as we would call it--is concerned. Let us rather quote his very words:
We do not think that there is a real difficulty here. Immortality has nothing to fear from a theory that shows, not the dependence of the soul on the body, but the power it exerts over the body. We will be left to admit, as Leibniz wanted, that the soul, in the afterlife, will continue to express itself through a material organism.
What is, exactly, that solution proposed by Leibniz, of a soul continuing to express itself, in the hereafter, as well, through a material organism? If it were an openly admitted refuge taken in revealed religion (i.e. in the peculiarly Christian doctrine of a resurrection of the whole man, realized, by and by, through a divine intervention just as specific and just as praeter-natural as that of man's first creation, according to a strictly fundamentalist interpretation of the Genesis record), well, then we would be perfectly able to understand the reasoning of both Leibniz and Charles Werner, but certainly not from a purely philosophical point of view; and that must, indeed, be the only natural viewpoint to assume in this present context.
No, in all candour, an existential and innate immortality would be a very different matter. Neither realistic common sense nor biblical revelation gives us any reason to expect anything like that automatic type of a human soul survival. What original Christianity promises is rather that final immortality, granted to the believers only after an intermediate period of a temporary, but indisputable death, an immortality granted as a special gift depending on God's mercy and on very special conditions which, after all, have to be met by the beneficiary, and therefore described in theological terminology as a conditional immortality. That, of course, would be a possibility which no philosopher could bluntly exclude, at least as a theoretical solution. But on the other hand, he could not openly accept it either, as the one great solution in which he believes--without immediately leaving the proper premises of philosophy.
The fact of the case is clearly that philosophy can neither prove nor disprove human immortality!