Rational soul

“ My Ought is my own will more rationally expressed than, at the instant of a capricious activity, I as yet consciously recognize. The consciousness of the more rational purpose, — of a purpose looming up, as it were, in the distance, beyond my present impulses, and yet even now seen as their own culmination, like a mountain crowning the ascent from the foothills, — the consciousness, I say, of such a purpose, is what we mean in Ethics by the Ought. ”

“ In observing these connections, so far as they fall within our own range of experience, we there find somehow our own rational Will better expressed, or embodied, than it would be without this idea, and thereby we better win our own inner clearness. ”

“ It expresses, therefore, the highest ascent of the rational intelligence, where, overlooking the whole realm of existence and relations known in other forms of knowledge, it sees, and through the emotional nature, feels, how to live as life ought to be lived. ”

“ This something—reason, consciousness, soul, call it what you will—unites us to the world; for everywhere in the world reason is at home, and gradually finds itself; it makes us aware of a great order in which we move; it breaks down the barriers of sense between us and the absolute consciousness, the eternal life—"not ourselves," yet in us and akin to us!—whence, if there is any validity in human logic, that order must spring. ”

“ What do we understand by soul? By soul is meant the power to think, to reflect, and to judge of the moral quality of actions and thoughts. Let me take the sceptic's standard of what we should believe, and what we should not believe; that is, we ought not to believe that of which we have no evidence, and for which we can give no satisfactory reason. I proceed by a process of elimination, as will be readily seen. My first proposition, interrogatively stated, is this. Is the power to think and reflect and to judge of the moral quality of thoughts and actions, a property of matter or not? ”

“ It is through these feelings that the conscience becomes a motive power for moral life. The perception of duty alone, as purely intellectual, would be, as said, "like a mirror accurately reflecting the ethical reality passing before it, but as indifferent as the mirror." But upon the perception the emotional nature springs into action. Knowledge, if at all, always goes into effect mediately through the sensibilities in which the soul is stirred by affections and desires. ”

“ Whence is intelligence but from the world's Soul, which is the soul of men? And towering above being, above life and reason, is conscience, the supreme guide, the light enlightening every man that cometh into this world. ”

“ Who can assure us of its reality, of its truth? We must measure it by those faculties under the manipulation of which it falls: but how can the faculties guarantee to us their own accuracy? How can we justify an extension of our own inner necessities to the world of outward things? How can we attribute to nature that rational and causative existence which we find ourselves forced to assume in it? Our justification, our confidence, all issue, in the last resort, from our sonship. ”

“ The conscience, in its essential perceptions and judgments, as appears from the analysis already given, is part of the rational intelligence. It designates the power and function of the intelligent ego, or personal self, for discernment in the sphere of right and duty—for insight into the reality of ethical law and obligation which belong to good conduct among rational, self-directing beings. ”

“ It is more than mere feeling or emotion; it is not blind, but rational, and above deception, having its ground in our moral and religious nature. It extends to the whole person, to body, mind, and spirit, to the character as well as to the face and form. ”

“ He believes he has made three discoveries regarding the intellectual, the affectional, and the moral nature of man: 1. "That the substance or hypostasis of thought is Being—the Being of the individual Ego being in every case the stand-point of rational judgment" ”

“ As we have seen, conscience is simply the self regarded as passing moral judgments, and conscience has absolute authority because it is the rational self. The free and rational self is, in the fullest sense, the author of its actions and its judgments. ”

“ Let us name the higher and the purer one, the spirit of the soul; and call the other, the spirit of the flesh; for both are distinct from mere intellect, which each uses as an agent, as each gains the ascendancy, or appeals to as a judge when the struggle is nearly equal. It is upon this struggle between these two principles that turns the greater part of each man's moral history. ”

“ They recognized man as a trinity, the three elements of which are "body, soul, and spirit." The soul, in their system of philosophy, corresponds to the objective mind, and the spirit to the subjective mind. ”

“ While the soul or self is a unit, its powers act under a law of inter-dependence, exhibiting a striking and beautiful order of conditioning and being conditioned, from the primary and fundamental forms of activity to those that are highest and crown all the rest. At the very base and beginning of its action are sense-perception and consciousness—these furnishing knowledge of the outer and inner worlds, of the realities and relations in the system of things in the midst of which man finds himself. ”

“ But to Him it appears, that they are superficially informed of the Frame and Tenor of the human Mind, who think that mere Reason (as it exists in Man) is more than a Power of discerning and chusing the properest Means for obtaining his desired Ends, whether these Ends be Good or Evil. The Passions, pre-established Habits, and infused Principles of the Soul are the universal Motives to human Action. ”

“ The part of man which is not body I will call the Spirit; under that term including all the faculties not sensual. Let me, for convenience' sake, distribute these faculties of the human spirit into four classes: the intellectual,—including the aesthetic,—moral, affectional, and religious. Let Mind be the name of the intellectual faculty, — including the threefold mental powers, reason, imagination, and understanding; Conscience shall be the short name for the moral, Heart for the affectional, and Soul for the religious faculties. ”

“ Accurately to define the exact point where the human will and a Divine agency meet in the moral renovation of the soul, or to say when this mysterious junction takes place, requires a knowledge of the laws of the spiritual world which we can never hope to attain in this imperfect state. Unquestionably, your thoughts and emotions, your desires and purposes, appear to rise spontaneously in your mind, and actually succeed each other in a perfectly logical order ”

“ What is the value of conscience?
It would seem, at first glance, as if the development of reason should make conscience unnecessary. When we are able to discern the consequences of our acts, formulate and weigh our motives and aims, what need of these vague pre-rational promptings and inhibitions? Why not train men to supplant a blind sense of duty by a conscious insight, a rational valuation of ends and means? Is not reason, as it has been recently called, "the ultimate conscience"? ”

“ Now regarding the question whether the faculties of the mind and the human soul are one and the same. These faculties are but the inherent properties of the soul, such as the power of imagination, of thought, of understanding; powers that are the essential requisites of the reality of man, even as the solar ray is the inherent property of the sun. ”

“ Both the intellectual and emotional action of the soul are, therefore, included in what is named the conscience—the perceptive action, here as everywhere else, being primary and conditional for the emotional. If there were no ethical distinction perceived, none would be felt. The conscience, taken in its totality, thus includes both sides of the human psychology, the intellect and the sensibility, and it addresses its behests of duty to the will in its own peculiar way of moral law for conduct. ”

“ He, nearest of the near, my own self, the reality of my own life, my body and my soul.—I am Thee and Thou art Me. That is your own nature. Assert it, manifest it. Not to become pure, you are pure already. You are not to be perfect, you are that already. Every good thought which you think or act upon is simply tearing the veil, as it were, and the purity, the Infinity, the God behind, manifests itself—the eternal Subject of everything, the eternal Witness in this universe, your own Self. Knowledge is, as it were, a lower step, a degradation. ”

“ And thus the intellectual satisfaction which at first comes to him without reflection, at last excites in him the conscious wish to find realized throughout the entire phenomenal world those rational continuities, uniformities, and necessities which are the fundamental element and guiding principle of his own thought. ”

“ The uses of his intellect for practical affairs are therefore subordinate matters. 'The theoretic life' is his soul's genuine concern." Nothing can be more different in its results for our personal attitude than to take sides with one or the other of these views, and emphasize the practical or the theoretical ideal. In the latter case, abstraction from the emotions and passions and withdrawal from the strife of human affairs would be not only pardonable, but praiseworthy; and all that makes for quiet and contemplation should be regarded as conducive to the highest human perfection. ”

“ As eternal aspects of the complex vision, both conscience and the aesthetic sense, when their power is exercised in harmony with all the other aspects of the soul, indicate with an oracular clearness that the possessive instinct is not good but evil. ”

“ As a thinking, self-conscious being, indeed, he may be said, by his very nature, to live in the atmosphere of the Universal Life. As a thinking being, it is possible for me to suppress and quell in my consciousness every movement of self-assertion, every notion and opinion that is merely mine, every desire that belongs to me as this particular Self, and to become the pure medium of a thought that is universal—in one word, to live no more my own life, but let my consciousness be possessed and suffused by the Infinite and Eternal life of spirit. ”

“ The study of psychology has opened the mind to inspection as we open the back of a watch-case and see the wheels go round; and this study lays its crown of victorious explorations at the feet of ethics.... His view is that conscience is the sense of conflict between bodily and mental desires ... therefore not a guide; it is only a sense of lostness in the woods, that wants a guide. Good sense and good religion are the guides to be consulted. ”

“ The inevitable defects of philosophical study are to nobody clearer than to one who, sincerely loving philosophy, devotes his life, as best he can, to seeking clearness of thought and a soul-stirring vision of the truth. ”

“ Such as we are—moral and rational beings—thinking and talking in general conceptions about the facts that [46] make up our life, feeling a necessity to act, not for ourselves, but for Ourself, for the larger life of Man in which we are elements; such moral and rational beings, I say, Man has made us. ”

“ Evidently all rational beings have will as well as understanding; God wills, the Angels will, man wills. Indeed, how could knowledge progress but for the will to know? Yet of the two, considered in themselves, understanding is higher than will—
“for its object is the ratio, the very essential nature, of the desired good, while the object of will is the desired good whose ratio is in the understanding.... ”

“ To believe in an ever-living and perfect Mind, supreme over the universe, is to invest moral distinctions with immensity and eternity, and lift them from the provincial stage of human society to the imperishable theatre of all being. When planted thus in the very substance of things, they justify and support the ideal estimates of the conscience ”

“ This does not mean that conscience over-rules the understanding, or that the will can violate nature; but that conscience reveals another world, deeper and more real than nature, which is the proper sphere for the exercise of the will. ”

“ But we distinguish this mass of passions and pleasures, desire and knowledge and pain, which makes up most of my character at the moment, from that inner and deeper motive-choosing self which is called Reason, and the Will, and the Ego; which is only responsible when motives are voluntarily chosen by directing attention to them. It is responsible only for the choice of one motive out of those presented to it, not for the nature of the motives which are presented. ”

“ Now by soul is here meant the thinking, conscious, knowing, hating, loving, aspiring principle—that mysterious something about whose origin, nature, perdurability or co-perishability with the body, so much has been said, sung, and written, until philosophers generally have got by the ears, while waging the fiercest of all intellectual battles. ”

“ V THE PLACE OF AFFECTIONAL FACTS IN A WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE [75]
Common sense and popular philosophy are as dualistic as it is possible to be. Thoughts, we all naturally think, are made of one kind of substance, and things of another. Consciousness, flowing inside of us in the forms of conception or judgment, or concentrating itself in the shape of passion or emotion, can be directly felt as the spiritual activity which it is, and known in contrast with the space-filling objective ‘content’ which it envelopes and accompanies. ”

“ Beings thus possessed of a habit of virtue, would enjoy a rational felicity beyond the reach of physical evils which terminate with life; and in all rational probability would be advanced in the order of nature, to a more exalted and sublime manner of being, knowledge and action, than at present we can conceive of, where no joys or pains can approach, but of the mental kind; in which elevated state virtuous minds will be able, in a clearer and more copious manner in this life, to contemplate the superlative beauties of moral fitness ”