Book 3
(synthetical)

Laws governing the activity of the soul.
How the different laws governing the activity of the soul take their origin from the nature of the soul

Introduction

1113. Every time human ingenuity turns to the study of natural things, the analytical method gains ground. There is an explanation for this. Matter is known by us through its divisibility, through its parts and their different proximities, aspects and sensible appearances. At least, this is the knowledge aimed at by the natural sciences. They go no further than perception, on which they are wholly based.

This way of carrying out analysis is extremely helpful for training and gradually perfecting intellectual ability in scientific work. On the other hand, human beings are limited, and it is easy, when they devote themselves to some partial method, to forget that other good and necessary methods exist to perfect knowledge. There is a danger that such methods will no longer be appreciated.

It is also true that we tend to extremes. In this particular case, the attraction of results obtained from analytical reasoning make us imagine and persuade ourselves that this method is sufficient for every eventuality and that analysis is the only source of all wisdom. This exaggerated confidence in analysis is found in ages when natural sciences prevail. It has its advantages for the education of the spirit, which is never happy with the work of scientific synthesis unless analysis has first been perfected and, if possible, exhausted. And perhaps analysis would never have made such advances if the mind had applied itself simultaneously to analysis and synthesis.

1114. For two centuries, human ingenuity has been engaged in analysis. During this period, physical and mathematical sciences have tended to displace intellectual and moral sciences, which have felt the disastrous effects proper to analytical method when it ousts synthesis. Analysis is not capable of finding certain truths and, in attempting to work outside its possibilities, gives rise to errors.

Amongst the truths of which analysis, unaccompanied by synthesis, is incapable are many whose object are the nature and laws of spirits. Simple as they are, spirits are impossible to divide into material parts. It is quite certain that the study of spiritual natures cannot usefully be carried forward by analysis alone, and still less by material analysis. The disaster that fell upon sciences connected with spirits after the Scholastic era must, therefore, be attributed to two causes: 1. these sciences have been dealt with only analytically, without reference to synthesis; 2. the kind of analysis used in this work is proper to matter, which is multiple, not to spirit, which is simple and one.

1115. The history of the philosophy of the spirit from Condillac through to the Scottish school shows that these philosophers lost sight of the unity of the human spirit (although I do not wish to suggest that the Scots were materialists). The human spirit became a mere aggregation of faculties, placed next to one another as it were. We hear nothing, or very little, about principles of action, about first-order facts, about the principle from which faculties arise and to which they return, or about substance-principle. This is treated as an accessory, or some kind of deus ex machina. Yet it, and it alone, is spirit.

1116. These philosophers have in fact decapitated the psychological sciences through their exclusive use of analysis and their almost total inability to use synthesis. Phrenologists, who succeeded them, went much further. Their works are riddled with extremely serious errors that spring not only from the application of the analytical method alone to the spirit (to the exclusion of synthesis), but also from the use of the material analytical method (proper only to bodies). Phrenologists claim that the aggregation of faculties which preceding philosophers considered as the soul is nothing more than the aggregation of quite distinct organs which make up the brain.

1117. This explains why a recent author, in comparing writers of the Scottish school with phrenologists, concluded that both sides were guilty of neglecting the unity of the subject, which they either dismembered into distinct faculties, or into organs, which are no longer the object of mental analysis but of the anatomist's knife.(93)

1118. Obviously, I am not opposed to analysis. I repeat: there can be no true scientific synthesis, no truthful synthesis, until analysis has in some way been exhausted. It is true that I began the present work with an eminently synthetical investigation about the nature of the soul, but this was authorised by the long analysis made in preceding works as a result of all possible observation of acts and faculties of the soul. The whole of this analysis was carried out in a way suitable to the spirit alone. Such analysis does not divide the spirit into separate parts, but considers individual parts without cutting them off from the single root in which they live and move and have their being, that is, in the substance of the soul itself.

1119. After dealing with the first, synthetical question about the nature of the human soul, I moved on from the soul to distinguish and enumerate the faculties and functions of which it is the root. This required analysis. Having completed this work by deriving human faculties from their principle, I now have to bring them back to the same principle in order to draw out the laws of operation proper both to the principle itself and its faculties. This is why I have called the next three books 'synthetical'; they deal with the laws according to which the potencies of the human spirit work. These laws are in fact derived from the intimate nature of the spirit and follow upon the first, substantial act through which and in which the spirit is what it is - or better, they follow on the act which is the spirit itself. Another necessary reason for attributing synthesis to teaching about the laws governing the activity of the spirit is this: every law that we succeed in establishing is finally nothing more than a great synthesis embracing innumerable acts carried out in the same way. The identical mode of activity is precisely the sign and substance of the law.

1120. In the preceding book, I set out to enumerate and describe the special potencies of the soul by deriving and assembling them from the essence itself of the soul. In the same way, I now have to indicate first the single source of all the laws that the spirit and its activities follow in the acts they posit. This source is the essence itself of the soul. I shall start immediately.

Notes

(93) Analyse critique des doctrines phrénologiques , M. Flourens, honorary secretary of the Academy of Sciences, etc ., Paris, 1842.