CHAPTER VI

"OLD CHILD" IS HIS NAME

"I die, and I am born again, and I renew myself, and I grow young each day." This is the utterance of the divine soul in man as voiced in the sublime literature of ancient Egypt. That literature depicted in forms and analogues of living reality the history of the god that comes to be the heavenly guest tenanting a human body for a season. This celestial visitant is no newcomer to try earthly hospitality; he has been here for similar visits many times. He has died and been born again, he has renewed his life and grown young as often as he has grown old. Indeed he is growing younger with each sally out into the adventure of life, for each excursion takes him deeper into the heart of eternal being, closer and ever closer to the Center of everlasting life where abides perpetual youth. Length of days is indeed in his right hand, for he is the Aged One of Heliopolis, the Ancient of Days. He comes each day as the infant, but he bears with him the wisdom garnered through his many cycles of birth, growth and death. He returns to earth until his wheel of birth and death has completed its turning, when he enters the kingdom of his Father, to go no more out. He is then a glorified Sahu, clothed in radiant body of solar light, and dwells among the gods. But antecedent to that climactic Day of the Lord he is the god in the becoming, hiding his growing light under the bushel of a human personality, toiling, striving, exhorting to righteousness in the milling scene of earthly life.

The vital truth so long and disastrously lost, then, is that man, in his essential and indestructible selfhood, is a soul, which alternately animates physical bodies, gains through them experience indispensable to its continued evolution, and drops them for periods

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of rest in ethereal worlds, during which it lives in a state of latency, or as the sheer potentiality of self-renewal.

The light this determination sheds on psychoanalysis is seen to be the substantial reification or hypostatization of the great new element of psychology, the "unconscious." Indeed it brings to this shadowy consciousness nothing less than a positive entification. It sets it up as a living individual entity, consciously pursuing its way through the labyrinth of evolution as actually as we conceive the mundane individual to be doing. It enables us to bring forth this nebulous presence from out its dusky habitat and to give it definitive form and character, as we recognize it to be a long familiar personage in our revered scriptures. For at last the "unconscious" is seen to be the soul, the godlike part of the dual nature of man. Only from the standpoint of our waking consciousness that functions directly through the physical mechanism of a brain is it fittingly denominated the "unconscious." On its own plane it is not unconscious, but more vividly and widely conscious than the earthly self can ever be. But it comes here in search of the offices of the outer personality of man to enable it to achieve an actualization of its capabilities of consciousness which it could not possibly gain by remaining continually in sublimated worlds. Consciousness, to be completely evolved, must be ground to a state of hard realism. This can be effected only in worlds of concrete experience. The soul must be centered in a physical body to win its growth. And once in body, it must await the slow evolution of the mechanical and physiological agencies of brain and nervous system before it can deploy its full forces outward to untrammeled expression.

From the standpoint of the open waking consciousness of the individual the soul within is the unconscious. For it is the Genius behind the scenes of the surface consciousness. It is the individual's own self--best spelled perhaps with a capital S--conditioned by the effects of its own long past history, standing in the shadow behind the curtain and appearing almost to play the part of a deus ex machina to the personal conscious self. To Socrates and the an-

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cient philosophers it was their Daemon, or guardian angel, interposing at times of crucial exigency to warn the personality against making false or dangerous moves. To the poet it is the source of his higher "inspiration," the spring of his divine afflatus. To all it is the rock of character which so clearly marks the individual's status of high and strong, or low and weak, in evolution. It stands behind--rather one should say above--in the overworld of the personal man, and is the generator or holder of that body of fixed qualities and dispositions which distinguish one person's life from another's. The physical and emotional personality is, so to say, an antenna of it, extended outward into the world of factuality in order to help it fend for itself in the arena of experience. Through the personality it has sensuous contact with the world in which it is destined to play a notable part. It registers the experience impressed upon it through the outer instrument and digests in consciousness the moral substance thereof.

The reservoir of wisdom with which it stands to guard the outer mind is the accrued deposit of the moral value of all its past history. Wisdom can come in no other way than as the assimilated fruit of experience. If it comes otherwise it is unearned, and life bestows nothing without the expenditure of effort commensurate with the gains to be won. As a man soweth, so shall he reap. Wisdom is the rich harvest of seed sown, watered and tended. Modern thought has envisaged a near-divine, near-omniscient monitor residing in the over-area of man's constitution and standing ever ready to guard and counsel the personality, but has never even postulated for that monitor any known or unknown cycle of experience requisite to have dowered it with such a faculty or such a prerogative. Obviously nowhere in the present existence of the individual can there be found a body of experience qualified to endow an interior mind in man with such superior wisdom, as all experience comes through the personality. Biological science, through such a representative exponent as Sir Alfred Russell Wallace, has declared that there can nowhere be found in the line of evolving life from animal to man

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any chapter of experience sufficient to have developed human mentality in the highest animal orders. All observation of the stream of growth negatives the claim. Yet there exists in man's organization a grade of consciousness that manifests the highest knowledge and wisdom, exceeding always that of the conscious man himself, and deploying on occasions of his own strategic choosing resources unknown to the individual on behalf of the supreme welfare of the personality. And there is left no way for the mind to account for the presence and exalted genius of this inner mentor save by postulating for it cycles of living existence and experience in its past, such as the ancient seers allotted to it. So then for the first time in modern systematism both philosophy and psychology are confronted with the challenge of a thesis which, now as of old, can provide the mind with a formula adequate to rationalize the presence of a god in the life of man, and to account understandably for his divine status above the merely animal counterpart in the dual composition.

It is well to adduce several pronouncements from modern psychoanalysis itself that speak in confirmation of the diagnosis. One comes to light in the work on psychoanalysis already cited, The Recreating of the Individual. Says the author, Dr. Hinkle (p. 108):

"The unconscious proper is not formed or created by the individual in response to culture, but exists a priori behind all culture."

With the mere substitution, perhaps, of the word "experience" for "culture," no passage could hit and express the truth more pointedly. It is not any of Freud's Oedipus or Electra complexes generated by early infant reactions. It is not the product of a few years of odd idiosyncratic habitudes or circumstantial pressures, that warp the mind into unnatural and unwholesome fixations. These are of some account in the total, but they do not create or condition the unconscious. As the author of the citation says, that is already there as the old root out of which a new tree is to spring up. The Book of Daniel in its first chapters speaks of leaving the stump of

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the hewn tree in the ground, so that a new growth may start from it. Elsewhere Dr. Hinkle has noted that the conscious part of the individual remains "unaware of the ancient processes functioning in and influencing his present life." Nothing could be more revealing of ancient truth than such a statement, although its force is largely lost through default of the knowledge that the "ancient processes" that still function in and influence the present life of the individual were the past experience of the individual himself, as well as the collective experience of the race of his ancestry. The meaning is always made to embrace racial limits, when it should apply directly to the individual's own history. The same author says additionally that in the psychoanalytic talk of the unconscious as being composed of conscious motivations suppressed and driven underground, we are not here dealing with the "suppression of individual experience, but with the suppression of racial experience, belonging to an earlier phase of humanity."

This again reifies an ancient element in the makeup of present consciousness. But again the exposition advanced by modern psychology denies to the individual his own previous experience and the fruit of it, by ascribing his present deep-seated unconscious to racial heritage. Archaic philosophical acumen chose to believe that the individual was present anciently when the experience was acquired, that he indeed gained it for his own eternal possession. He did not come by it through a vicarious inheritance or through the transmitted blood of ancestry. They asked how justice could be meted out equably in the world if individuals were either exalted or saddled with a heritage other than that which they themselves had created. The human intuition of justice demands that no creature should be afflicted with the consequences of actions not his own. "The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge," observes a revered scripture. And it presents a harassing and disturbing anomaly to the reasoning mind which takes seriously the scriptural pronouncements of Deity as to absolute and impartial justice in the universe. Then, too, we recall that

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the same scriptures tell of "visiting the iniquities of the parents upon the children unto the third and fourth generation." If in any way these declarations are to be harmonized with the simple and direct human sense of justice, it must be assumed that the children involved in these visitations were in line, through previous faulty action, for the ill fortune that traces to parental dereliction. Otherwise the simple mind of man must give over the effort to vindicate the operation of clear justice in the law of inheritance. If you are afflicted with your forefather's sinful consequences, you will look doubtfully toward a God whose sense of fairness seems less rigorously true than your own. A morbid and sin-haunted Christianity has forever refused to face these corollaries of its announced Biblical canons with untrammeled logic or sincere intellectual probity. In the most godlike exercise of human judgment a Deity whose operation of living laws afflicts a soul from the very start of life with the iniquitous consequences of action not its own, must be categorized as outside the pale of what man must think of as justice. Since the early centuries of Christian history the logical and moral issue here involved has been sedulously evaded. But the ancient philosophers met it and they were able to maintain their predication of a God of total justice. This they did by virtue of their knowledge that souls come into an earthly heritage accurately suited to the needs of their own growth at their status. They could assume that a soul born into a malformed physical or material legacy inherited his own, and not his parents' past defects. He falls heir to his own mistakes, not another's. For he brings back with him into renewed expression--until they are at last obliterated--the germs of his own waywardness, to flower out afresh in the new embodiment. The forefathers' physical transmission through the outer line of descent merely provides the good or bad body conditioned to give the old soul its appropriate milieu and circumstantial influences which enable it to work ahead on its own ground.

Lending corroboration to the thesis that the unconscious is an element in us given a priori, and not the outgrowth of earthly expe-

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rience in this life, is another excerpt from Dr. Hinkle's work (p. 39):

"But psychoanalysis is built entirely upon the theory of unconscious motives and purposes, different and antecedent to those known by man in consciousness and upon which his present conscious manifestations and symptoms rest."

This says in effect that there is in man, buried below his normal consciousness, another consciousness which knows more than the man and is greater than the man himself, but which has not been limited to this man's experience. It has the stored-up experience of all previous racial history, explains modern psychoanalysis. Well, then, the situation stands thus: there are two strata of consciousness in man's constitution, the personal open consciousness and the unconscious. Both carry the heritage of the past, yet one is conscious of it, the other is not. The one has it, the other possesses no memory of it. The one has it not, ostensibly because it is a totally new creation, never in existence before and having no link with the past. Then, if the other has it, the legitimate obvious inference is that it is not likewise a new first creation in this life, but that it has a link with its past, that it is a durable entity treasuring all its previous experience and that it was a participant in whatever experience it carries in memory. In a full, frank and fair envisagement of the elements in the situation this is the only channel of explanation open to logic. If there is in man a consciousness which retains the memory of the past, and another which does not have such a memory because it did not share the past, the inescapable inference is that the entity that does retain the memory did share the experience. It (or he) is verily "the Ancient of Days," the eternal pilgrim through the cycles of time and the kingdoms of nature, gathering up and holding the digest of all experience in faculties of supermind and higher consciousness which transcend the three-dimensional scope of man's open awareness. As far as he has not been brought out to expression in the brain consciousness of the outer

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personality, he dwells in covert position within the deepest recesses of the individual self, the silent guardian and watchful daemon, the "higher ego" of the person. In Dr. Hopper's work already cited, The Crisis of Faith, the author takes a dozen or more pages to present and support the thesis that the god whose influence molds the individual's life from the hidden depths is an a priori reality, given from the start, in relation to the present existence.

Dr. Hinkle likewise is insistent, as her chief ground of refutation of Freud's central presentments regarding the infantile sexual motivations of the child, that the main "drive" of the ego in man is of precisely that character which it would be presumed to be if the premises were granted that an aged, wise and benevolent soul occupied the place and performed the function allotted to the unconscious. That is to say that the unconscious is characterized by an incessant perennial urge toward the actualization of an ever-enlarging potential "divine" expression through the personality. She says (p. 31):

"He [man] bears within himself all the potentiality of individualistic development; the future claims him as well as the past."

She also quotes the words of Antigone:

"The moral law is sacred because it is not a thing of today or of yesterday, but lives forever, and none knows whence it sprang."

It needs no dramatic flourish, however, to declare that there is no unfathomable mystery as to the genetic history of the moral law. The ancient sages give evidence that they were not ignorant of it. The great Egyptologist, William H. Breasted, in his last work, The Origin of Conscience, traced its course of development back to remote Egyptian religious conceptions and cultures. The moral law is the deposit of the conscious resultant of all experience undergone by that fragment of the divine mind that tenants one physical body after another, building each in turn over the model of its inner nature, and carries the everlasting memory of its past with it. The

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moral law is framed in an indelible memory out of the impacts of the consequences of action perpetrated by a conscious perduring entity able to hold the lessons learned and create from their ensemble a code of determinative norms. It is just the fixing of the recognized values accruing from experience upon the consciousness of a spiritual entity which is able to hold them in perpetuity. For its "spiritual" body is imperishable, its substance indestructible. And that which is impressed thereon is retained forever.

The discovery and recognition of the unconscious in modern psychology is bringing out to open view the data which corroborate ancient scriptures in their predication of a divine consciousness in the upper reaches of man's life. Says Dr. Hinkle again (p. 4):

"It is this sense in the individual man of his potential but unfulfilled greatness that forces him to become aware of his incompleteness as a human being. It is this state of faulty development of his psychic capacities that psychoanalysis has brought so clearly into view, and for the improvement of which, to those interested in and capable of using its method, it offers a technic--an aid toward the conscious development of a greater self."

True indeed is all this, since, it is pertinent to ask, how would the personal entity man be able to register a sense of his imperfection and shortcoming in the first place if there was not resident and conscious within him a being possessing familiarity with higher norms of attainment and standards of perfection by contrast with which the present performance of the outer man exhibits faultiness and failure? If psychoanalysis is just discovering this inner mentor, it has taken just about two millennia for the world to regain what its ancient hierophants of religion possessed.

The Hopper claim that the divine element is as "given" a presence in man's make-up as is the body is again substantiated by a quotation from Dr. Hinkle's work (p. 43):

"Man possesses, independent of any frustrated pleasure aims, the capacity for individual development and the need for its fulfillment, as definitely as he possesses the physiological sexual desire."

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This statement is part of her refutation of Freud's position that psychic neuroses and mental disturbances trace their genesis always to frustrations of the basic sexual instincts. Disturbances may of course arise from frustration of the life of the outer man; but it is to the credit of the Jung school and such psychoanalysts as Dr. Hinkle that they have recognized likewise something of far deeper import, namely that violent inner tempers will arise from the frustration of the evolutionary purposes and aims of the indwelling god-ego.

And Dr. Hinkle adds a most significant statement, which should carry the minds of both theorists and clinicians to decisive conclusions, when she adds to the above citation the results of actual empirical practice:

"When the obstacles to this forward movement are removed, when he is able to achieve some progress toward the inner goal of his being, then his neurotic symptoms and his psychic disturbances disappear."

Here, in short, is the specific demonstration that if the mind of the outer personality of the individual is not measurably conducting the life so as to minister to the onward progress of the soul in the subterranean--or superior--recesses of the consciousness, the soul will register objection, dissatisfaction and disturbance by bringing the untoward condition to light through neurotic inharmony and unbalance, wretchedness or pain. Indeed some such situation is the nub and crux of nearly every drama and novel, representing the desperate or heroic efforts of the soul to break through a cordon of environing circumstances which have tangled it in a predicament threatening its expression of diviner qualities or thwarting its free growth. Lending corroboration of the very highest sort to Dr. Hinkle's conclusions regarding the voice of the inner god is Jung's repeated affirmation that people only come to the psychoanalyst if and when they have lost possession of a positive religious philosophy and that he has not been able to send them away cured

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unless he has been able to restore to them an affirmative mental grasp on basic life meanings.

Dr. Hinkle and Dr. Hopper unite in asserting that it is this disagreement, this default of the lower mind from the purposes of the inner, that constitutes the real essence of "sin," and in this they are substantially in accord with the early sage Greek philosophy. Jung is cited (by Dr. Hinkle) as interpreting the psychic discord or disturbance as a longing of the ego for "rebirth," "the desire for a necessary psychic birth which uses the symbols of physical birth to represent the psychological need." This again is startlingly in consonance with ancient theory. The Platonists, the Neo-Platonists and Jesus of the Gospels alike lay down the necessity for a new birth--a second birth--of the soul, Indeed it is general in all archaic religions. The soul can not tolerate stagnation too long. To be normal and "happy" it must have the sense of growth and progress, the assurance of making steady advance on the road it is traveling. This feeling is the perennial condition and prerequisite of its conscious well-being. The soul has needs that must be ministered unto through and by the external paraphernalia of the body,--and philosophies of ascetic religious tendency should never forget this. But also it has interests that reach to higher worlds and that no amount of sensual gratification can promote. St. Paul emphasizes that "the natural man" has no cognizance of the things of the spirit, "neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned." Rather the physical man is to the god within as soil is to the tree: the base and ground of its ability to expand its life in the air above. Like the tree the soul can not grow unless it is deeply and firmly rooted in the life of the physical, but its concern with the physical is in no sense an ultimate objective. It is but the necessary foundation and starting point of its own primary business, as it is that of every unit of conscious being, of advancing from the point of present attainment to wider consciousness and more abundant life. The soul sustains a relation to the body that demands its enjoyment of the body's strength, health, buoyancy, comfort and the fullest

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and freest flow of its elan. The failure of ascetic movements to recognize this fact had led to untold psychic disaster, warping into discord the lives of both the body and the soul and defeating the purposes of evolution. But the soul did not come to link its life with that of the body merely to indulge in that enjoyment. That would indeed to be to take the downward path, to fall into "sin." Its way of growth runs through the exercise of its own potential powers and faculties in the development of a higher consciousness, to all of which its happy relation of harmony with the body is a primary and fundamental condition. The soul builds the body as the house in which it is to dwell and work, cycle after cycle. Its prime aim is to build it to be most commodious and comfortable for its tenancy and in such fashion that to live in it is a delight. But once built and ability to maintain it in good state established, it would surely be a mistaken philosophy to assume that the soul's chief business in life was to end with the fulfillment of its enjoyment of the house. It can not do its work in the world without a proper house to dwell in, but once the house is constructed, it can then turn its attention to the higher work it came here to do.

The job of constructing and accommodating itself to its house, however, is an integral part of its incarnational mission and takes on a larger measure of importance than might at first glance be assumed. Its work in spiritual worlds transcending bodily influences still is greatly affected and conditioned by the need of complete harmony with the instrument. As the body is the keyboard, so to say, of the soul's expression, it is essential that there be maintained at all times the most delicate balance and nicest adjustment of conscious motivation to organic reaction. And it is now the province of psychoanalysis to diagnose the conditions of maladjustment between the two factors. The discovery of such maladjustment and the location of its basic causes is indeed its high function.

The ancients, as is well indicated in the philosophy of Plato, adjudged virtue to be the individual knowledge of the art of keeping a perfect balance between the animal man and the indwelling

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god. Conversely they defined "sin" as the ignorance that stupidly permitted inharmony and discord to be generated in the interplay between the two. The soul, they said, stood at the point of middle ground between the divine spirit above and the animal body below, and its function was to mediate between the two in such fashion that a happy blending and merging of their forces was effected. Standing midway between the two, it could deploy its energies and center its interests and affections in either direction. It could cultivate the life of the higher spirit or devote itself to fostering the sensual expression of the animal. Its own intelligence, be it high or low, was the determinant. The destiny of the individual was the outcome of its decisions.

It is quite likely that the true definition of "sin" is to be reached by taking into account the terms of this philosophical situation. Surely "sin" is that which impedes the most felicitous and orderly flow of the stream of life forward to greater being. And obviously in the human world that which would most effectually block and thwart the movement of "the rivers of vivification," as the Greeks called them, would be the failure of the soul to perform with deft intelligence its high function of maintaining that just balance between the god and the animal in man upon which true growth depends.

"The soul that sinneth, it shall die," is the strong declaration of the scripture. Since all souls undergo death in its common meaning of the dissolution of soul from body, obviously another meaning of the word "death" is here involved. And this is of the greatest significance for all religious and scriptural interpretation. The entire understanding of the language of the Bible has been sadly warped out of line with truth by the failure to read into the words "death" and "the dead" in the scriptures the same meaning which was attached to them in the ancient Greek and Egyptian religions. The great lost light of antiquity comes out in glorious splendor when the original philosophical meaning is restored to these terms. By "death" is meant nothing less than what we call our "life" here!

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And "the dead" of the scriptures are none other than ourselves, the "living." This is now established beyond question. For the ancients regarded the life of the soul in the body as its death, using the term of course in a figurative and relative sense. In the body the high life of the soul was so reduced in potential capacity by the sluggish vibrations of the corporeal nature that it lay inert as in death, and the body was poetized as its prison, grave or tomb. Indeed the body and tomb are identical in the Greek words for body, soma, and tomb, sema. The soul was said to go to its death when it "was united to the ruinous bonds of the body." Socrates says to Cebes that he has "heard from one of the wise that we are now dead and that the body is our sepulcher."

This construction is directly in line with what St. Paul asserts in his Epistles. "To be carnally minded is death," he says. "Ye are dead in your trespasses and sins," he adds. And again he states most pointedly that "the interests of the flesh meant death; the interests of the spirit meant life and peace." The death referred to in the old books of wisdom was that of the soul, occurring when the unit of divine consciousness made its descent into the body of man on earth, there to come "under the law" of birth, growth, maturity and decay. The whole import of sage writings of the past has been utterly lost by the ignorant exoteric assumption that the "death" spoken of was that of the physical body. A thousand irreconcilable perplexities of scriptural interpretation vanish, and one clear and consistent flash of illuminated meaning takes their place the moment one reads the old Greek philosophical meaning back into the terms under discussion. And the whole systematic structure of archaic theology is restored to glowing significance and the old rendition vindicated, when St. Paul says in the seventh chapter of Romans: "the command that meant life proved death to me." The "command" he is speaking of has never to this date been understood to be the command--which comes to all souls in the empyrean--to incarnate. What the Apostle says in the verse immediately preceding this statement is of the utmost elucidative value

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for all theology, for all understanding. He says: "When the command came home to me, sin sprang to life and I died." It gives us final certification as to what is connoted by "sin." Evidently it is an inclination in the soul that lies dormant so long as it remains in static suspension of its energies in the celestial spheres, but which springs to life and activity as soon as the soul is embodied in a fleshly organism on earth. "Sin" is that disposition of the mind which can be implemented only by union with the carnal self of the animal body, and awaits its opportunity to awake to expression when that union is consummated. Then Paul makes that correlation between "sin" and "death" which should not have remained a sealed mystery for hundreds of years, with this passage of his in front of our eyes. "Sin sprang to life and I died." His "death" was his descent into the world of carnal mind, the indulgence in which is at last seen as the terrible hobgoblin that has plagued the Christian conscience with entirely needless morbidity for these many centuries. "Sin"--be it proclaimed to all the world in clarion tones--is the soul's indulgence in the life of the flesh. Indeed, with "the mount" being a symbol for the earth itself, this globe is many times referred to in the scriptures as the "Mount of Sin." It is likewise "Mount Sin-ai." Now it is possible to see what the Apostle meant by saying that "the wages of sin is death." For if sin is the addiction of the soul to the lusts of the flesh, and residence of the soul in the flesh is "death" to its higher nature, then continued sin necessitates continued "death." The longer the soul clings to carnal affections the longer it must return to earth and body to give play to its desires--until they are burned out in the fires of purificatory suffering. And again can be seen in clearer certitude the meaning, so terribly mutilated, of Paul's apocalyptic utterance: "The last enemy to be overcome is death." Of a surety it now is obvious that when the soul has at last been entirely purged of its bent to sin, which drags it again and again back to earth where alone the instincts of a physical body can give channel to its carnal leanings, it will

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have no further need to enter the "valley of the shadow of death." It then need "go no more out," as Revelation puts it.

Modern psychology has at last got around to the vantage point of envisaging the inner conflict in the area of human consciousness in much the same light as that in which it was viewed by the ancient Illuminati. It has made discovery of the "Aged One," the older soul hiding in the covert depths of the individual consciousness, and has seen the necessity of interpreting the phenomena of psychic disturbance and mental illness in terms of the phases of the mutual thwarting of the interests of higher soul by the instincts of the flesh, and those of the flesh by the cultural restraints imposed by the soul. And at last it stands and works on solid ground, the title to the authenticity and validity of which is volubly attested by ancient lore.

Nearly every word of the few fragments we have left of the writing of Heraclitus is an utterance of prime value. Among such is his brief sentence: "For all human laws are fed by one thing, the divine." And further than that, he grounds the roots of the divine in man in no less high and immediate a ray of the Absolute than the Logos itself:

"Go hence; the limits of the soul thou canst not discover, though thou shouldst traverse every way; so profoundly is it rooted in the Logos."--Fragment 45; Diels.

Clarity might long ago have supervened upon the mortal conception of divine things if the Occidental mind had been open to receive the assertion of Greek philosophy that the Logos is a ray or emanation from Supreme Deity, the spirit a further extended ray from the Logos, and the soul a still further diffraction, through the medium of matter, of a ray from the spirit. Use of this outline graph enables thought to fulfill every requirement in meeting both the theoretical and the empirical problems involved in the analysis. As Plotinus so capably has blue-printed the scheme of the universal construct, the emanation of divine energy from the heart of being,

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proceeding farther and farther from initial impulse, pierces ever deeper into matter, losing force as matter grows denser out on the periphery, until the last wave is just sufficient to enable the soul to nucleate around its node of power the physical body. So that Plotinus says that "the soul suspends from it the mundane body," which is characterized as "the last of things" in the chain that reaches from spirit at the top to dense matter at the lower rung.

The outcome also of the great Kant's elaborated philosophical lucubration was the conclusion that what constitutes in his system the highest "spirit" in man, "the transcendental unity of apperception," is "a condition which precedes all experience and in fact renders it possible." Here is the soul "given," a priori, again.

Irenaeus, who is not often found admitting or expressing his agreement with the principles or teachings of the antecedent pagan philosophies, which in so far as they came into early Christianity fell under the condemnation of his pen as "heresies," puts general ancient philosophical understanding of the triplicity of spiritual elements in man in splendid clarity in the following (Adversus Haereses, V, ix, I):

"The perfect man consists of these three, flesh, soul and spirit. One of these saves and fashions--that is, the spirit. Another is united and formed--that is, the flesh; while that which lies between the two is the soul, which sometimes follows the spirit and is raised by it, but at other times sympathizes with the flesh and is drawn by it into earthly passions."

This is admirable; and finds buttressing also in Plutarch:

"But in his [Plato's] Book of Laws, when he was now grown old, he affirmed, not in riddles and emblems, but in plain and proper words, that the world is not moved by one soul . . . but not by fewer than two; the one of which is beneficent, and the other contrary to it, and the author of things contrary. He also leaves a certain third nature in the midst between, which is neither without soul nor without reason, nor void of a self-moving power, but rests upon both of the preceding principles, but yet so as to affect, desire and pursue the better of them."

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Indeed here is seen the basic formulation of that which became the doctrine of the "mediator" in Christian theology, the higher and the lower natures in man, with the soul standing on midground between them, and functioning as the way or the bridge over which the two might ultimately effect their reconciliation and atonement.

From Erasmus comes an equally direct statement of the duofold man-god constitution, with the soul mediating between upper and lower:

"The spirit makes us gods; the flesh makes us beasts; the soul makes us men."--Enchiridion v. 20--D.

So definitely did ancient insight comprehend the tripartite division or gradation of man's nature that it typified the mediatorial function of the middle-man, the human, standing on the horizon or boundary line between the gross body below and the divine mind above, by the symbol of the bee, which became the living zoötype of the soul because of its function in fertilizing female ova in the flower with male pollen and thus effecting the new birth. The insect performed the mediatorial function of priest in the marriage of the opposite poles of the plant. So even the Christos in man was characterized as the High Priest, since he functioned in the union of male and female elements in man in holy marriage. The soul it is that mediates between spirit and flesh and unites the logos of the higher with the atomic mothering and nurturing capabilities of the physical. The soul is the agent and focal point of the interplay between the two natures.

Now psychoanalysis has discerned the forms and features of this interplay and speaks of it in the most direct terms. Here is Dr. Hinkle giving us her statement of it in the vernacular of psychology (The Recreating of the Individual, p. 50):

"As a matter of fact there is a constant interplay between the two aspects of human life--the external world and our own concrete objective tendencies and needs which are a part of it, and the subjective

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human creative and transforming processes lying entirely within the individual psyche."

This is of course likewise the conflict of the lower man with the higher god, who find themselves co-tenants of the same domicile. The words of Prof. N. Shaler apply most fitly here:

"It is hardly too much to say that all the important errors of contact, all the burdens of men or of society, are caused by the inadequacies in the association of the primal animal emotions with those mental powers which have been so rapidly developed in mankind."

It is the struggle between the emotions and the intellect! When has mankind not been keenly aware of it? It is so much the burden of every day's conscious life that it does not shape itself out as a concrete and specific problem. It is nearly the whole focus of the psychological activity of life. How much one should yield to the bent of the feelings and desires, or how much to check them; how far one should follow the clear voice of reason, when it counsels adversely to the instinctual propensities, and how far one should sacrifice obvious present advantage or pleasure in the interests of deferred greater good;--these are the unending skirmishes in the vast struggle waged between the animal and the god in the nature of man on earth. They are the daily combats in the aeonial Battle of Armageddon. And never have the issues and conditions of the battle been sufficiently clarified in the world's understanding. The vast and calamitous ascetic movement aimed at victory for the god by the curt and conclusive method of crushing out the animal with a tragically mistaken austerity. Epicureanism and naturalistic hedonism sought a resolution through a free rein to the instincts, tempered with aesthetic norms. As might always have been known since Plato's day, the only safe and perfect modus is to be found in the gradual blending of the two natures through the experiences of both parties in the give and take of earthly evolution. St. Paul has well indicated this denouement, when he speaks of the breaking down of the "middle wall of partition between us," and the making

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of "one new man" out of the amalgamation of "the twain." Only thus can the great cyclic conflict be fought out "on the horizon," as it is said to be in the Egyptian texts. And only thus can the engagement terminate in a manner to promote the ends of the evolutionary movement, so that both soul and body acquire the maximum amount of beneficial development from the complications.