From Individuality to Personality

A GENERATION ago, when psychology was mentioned in connexion with religion, it was Biblical Psychology that was thought of. It was the time when Biblical Theology — that is, the science of the succession and growth of ideas first in the Old Testament and then in the New — was asserting its right to a place among the theological sciences; and those who were captured by this new study seemed to themselves to discern in the Old Testament, but especially in the New, indications of the presence of a Biblical Psychology. That this should be found in the books of the Bible need occasion no surprise; because, if the first subject about which the Bible speaks is God, the second is undoubtedly man, and it can scarcely speak as much as it does on this theme without bodying forth some connected system of ideas in relation to man’s constitution and destiny. In the very first chapter of the

Bible occurs the great saying: ‘’ God created

(17) 2 man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them,” and in the second chapter appears the equally suggestive statement: “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul “. We have not proceeded far when we come upon the great commandment: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might,”’ where “soul,” “heart” and “might” seem to indicate a primitive effort to distinguish the different parts of the inner man; and to distinguish these is always the purpose of psychology. When we come down to the New Testament, writers on Biblical Theology are quite in the way of assuming that certain psychological principles lie at the back of the teaching of Jesus Himself; and they are still more confident that they can discern such in the writings of St. Paul. Delitzsch’s “Biblical Psychology” was a work much read in those days, as was also the smaller but not less penetrative book of Beck on the same subject. A scholar of our own time, Mr. Fletcher, in a work recently published under the same 1 Deut. VI. 5.

title, has admirably reproduced the substance of these older treatises, besides noticing whatever of importance has been contributed by more recent speculation. It is not pretended that there is anywhere in the Bible a doctrine on the constitution of the human mind carrying the same authority as attaches to what is there said on the method of human salvation. When speaking on this subject the writers of the Bible made use of the conceptions and the phraseology current in their own times; and St. Paul especially may have employed such ideas as were taught in the schools where he received his education; but these ideas could not be used as extensively as they are in the sacred text without deriving a colouring from the context; and an acquaintance with them forms a kind of grammar for the comprehension of not a little of the writing in which they occur. This must, in fact, always remain one of the keys for the interpretation of the Scriptures; and we shall regard it as open to ourselves to revert to anything in Biblical Psychology which may help in the attainment of the object of which we are in pursuit.

In times more recent, when psychology and religion have been connected, the object in view has been the Psychology of Religion. This phrase might be supposed to mean an inquiry as to whether there exists a special faculty for religion and, if so, what is its nature — an inquiry much needed to be raised and promising interesting results. But it has been limited to an inquiry into the phenomena of conversion.

This study has been peculiarly congenial to America; and it may be traced back at least as far as Jonathan Edwards, who, in his great work on the Religious Affections, nobly led the way in the discussion of the subject, though I do not remember whether he himself made

Wobbermin, who has played a conspicuous part in introducing the study of the Psychology of Religion into Germany, frankly confesses the indebtedness of this new branch of theological science to America. Thus, in his recent work “Zum Streit um die Religionspsychologie,” pp. 1, 2, he says; “Auf diesem Gebiet ist unsere deutsche Theologie starker als auf irgend einem andern der Arbeit des Auslandes fiir mannigfache Anregung und Befruchtung zu aufrichtigstem Dank verpflichtet. Ganz insonderheit gilt dies letztere gegeniiber der religionspsychologischen Arbeit Nordamerikas. Es ist das in dem Masze der Fall, dass bei uns vielfach die Religionspsychologie ausschliesslich und allein nach den Intentionen der amerikanischen Religionspsychologie beurteilt wird, und dass demgemass der Begriff amerikanische Religionspsychologie zur Bezeichnung des ganzen Forschungszweiges, um den es sich hier handelt, verwandt wird.”

use of the phrase, Psychology of Keligion. Being both a thoroughly trained metaphysician and an ardent revivalist, he submitted the cases coming within the range of his observation in the revivals at Northampton to searching scrutiny, for the practical purpose of discriminating between those features of the movement which were healthy and those which were the reverse; but, as a by-product, he supplied the most interesting psychological observations on what takes place in the mind under religious excitement and under the operation of the Spirit of God. The multitudes of cases which can be studied in a revival tempt the student to close observation; and, as revivals have been very characteristic elements in American Christianity, the best American preaching has been strongly tinged with this kind of philosophy. Not only, for example, will there be found in Henry Ward Beecher’s ‘’Lectures on Preaching,” the shrewdest and most penetrating observations on revivals, but in his sermons there is a constant element which may be called psychological, and this of a massive and realistic order. However lofty and spiritual might be the religious phenomena encountered by Beecher, his first instinctive tendency was always to ask whether they might not have their origin in some mental or even physical peculiarity of the person who was their subject; and he recognised that, in seeking spiritual results, a preacher must begin with bodily conditions, sometimes very remote from the object at which he is aiming. The same realism characterizes the work entitled ‘’ The Psychology of Religion,” by E. D. Starbuck. The author published this book in a ‘’ Contemporary Science Series,” and he accumulated the cases on which his conclusions were based by the issue of circulars, addressed to numbers of persons whom he requested to furnish carefully specified particulars of their own conversion. His most interesting conclusion was, that conversion is essentially a phenomenon of adolescence, closely associated with the peculiarities of puberty; and he believed he could demonstrate that the same tendencies which issued in conversion in persons having a religious turn might manifest themselves in corresponding ethical developments in persons otherwise brought up.^ Professor James’

1 There is a close resemblance between the Christian doctrine of conversion and the conviction to which Eucken so often gives expression — it is, indeed, the ground-idea of all his thinking — that the principle which separates between the sheep and the goats is a decisive and ever-repeated choice between ideal and material ends in life.

work, entitled ‘’ The Varieties of Religious Experience,” with its intellectual brilliance and literary skill, carried the ideas of Starbuck to the ends of the earth. An English imitator, Mr. Harold Begbie, in a wonderful collection of conversions made in connexion with the work of the Salvation Army,^ characterized his book as a footnote to the work of Professor James; whereupon that scholar courteously rejoined, that his own work might as well be called a footnote to Mr. Harold Begbie’s — a remark which he might have made with far more truth in reference to Mr. Starbuck; for, though he introduced this student of his own to the public, by writing a commendatory note to ‘’ The Psychology of Religion,” his own work follows so closely on the lines of Starbuck as to create the impression that the disciple had captured the master, convincing him of the vastness and attractiveness of the field of inquiry into which the celebrated psychologist entered in his Gifford Lectures.

The most vital question touched upon by James is, how far religious experience guarantees the existence and reality of the supernatural world from which it is supposed to descend. But this question had been investigated with 1 “Broken Earthenware.”

great acumen a generation earlier by Von Frank, of Erlangen, in his epochmaking work on Religious Certainty, wherein he strove to prove that religious experience does demand for its production all the great realities of the Gospel. If it be real — and it is the most unmistakably real of all the things whereof human beings can be certain — then God and Christ and salvation must be real too. In Germany the work of Von Frank has been followed up by likeminded scholars, such as Koestlin and Ihmels; and at least one scholar belonging to the Hitschlian School,^ has proceeded on the same lines. In France the tendency has found an able representative in Professor Henri Bois, of Montauban, who manifested his zeal by visiting Wales during the recent revival and writing a large volume on the cases which he was able to observe on the spot.^ The late Dr. Dale, in his later years, gave expression to his belief in the value of the argument from experience in his highly prized volume entitled ‘’ The Living Christ and the Four Gospels “; and a Scottish scholar. Dr. George Steven, has associated himself with all that is best in these

1 Herzog, “Der Begriff der Bekehrung “.

2 M. Bois’ books are “Le R6veil au Pays de Galles” and “Quelques Reflexions sur la Psychologic des R6 veils “.

American and Continental speculations both in his Cunningham Lectures, entitled ‘’The Psychology of the Christian Soul,” and in a thrilling narrative of conversion edited by him under the title, ‘’ Out of the Abyss “.

From these observations it will be gathered how wide is the scope of Religious Psychology in the sense just indicated; and we shall consider ourselves at liberty, wherever it may seem desirable, to advert to the facts included in such experience/

It is not, however, in the sense above assigned to either Biblical Psychology or the Psychology of Religion that Christian Psychology will be used

The most succinct and enlightening account I have anywhere seen of the scope of EeUgious Psychology, when understood in the sense indicated above, is a brief sketch, from the pen of Professor Beckwith, published in the “Kegister of the Chicago Theological Seminary,” to which he belongs. It is the wont of the members of the staff of this seminary to publish from time to time in this Quarterly their several views on some topic of interest. In the number for January of the present year the subject was Evangelism, and each of the professors discussed it from the point of view of his own chair. Professor Beckwith’s contribution was entitled “Psychology and Evangelism “; and it seems to me so masterly that, with the gracious permission of the author, I have reprinted it in its entirety; and it will be found in Appendix B, p. 269.

in the following pages. Biblical Psychology is prescientific; the speakers and writers of the Bible found it necessary for their purpose to make use of the conceptions of a primitive knowledge of man; and it is reasonable to infer that those whose business it is to follow up their work may with advantage make use of the more scientific ideas on the same subject current in modern times. As has been stated above, the Psychology of Religion is at present restricted to the phenomena of conversion. But this is an arbitrary limitation. There is no reason whatever why the experiences of the religious life following conversion should not be treated in the same way; and there are religious impressions preparatory to conversion of which the same may be said; so that we might have a Psychology of Sanctification or a Psychology of Evangelization quite as well as a Psychology of Conversion. Besides, the spokesmen of the Psychology of Religion expressly include experiences not specifically Christian. It will be well, therefore, at this point to define more sharply what is intended by the use of the title Christian Psychology.

First, we begin with a saying of our Lord: ‘’ What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul “? This is not only a saying of our Lord but, one might almost say, the saying; so fundamental is it, and so numerous are the other sayings of His which cluster round it and expound its scope.

It has been noted that the word “” soul,” found in the most commonly quoted version of this saying, is rendered in other Gospels, or in other nearly equivalent sayings, by the alternatives, ‘^ self “and “life”/

The “self” is what we should in modern language call the personality.^ It is what a human being is capable of becoming, and what he is bound to grow to. The field of humanity is the garden of God, and the personalities it produces are the flowers in this Eden. They are of every

See this more fully developed in the author’s “Ethic of Jesus,” ch. V. Cf. Matthew xvi. 25, 26; Luke ix. 25.

On Personality there are three good and easily accessible books, Momeeie’s “Personality” is a vigorous defence of the view of this subject taken by the Commonsense Philosophy, against Bain and Spencer. Illingworth’s “Personality Human and Divine” shows how speculation concerning the personality of God and of Christ has widened and deepened the modes of conceiving the personality of man. Temple’s “The Nature of Personality” contains an alert analysis of the elements entering into human personality.

variety, for their Maker is no lover of monotony; and the glory of each is to attain to the size and beauty which will satisfy the Owner’s eye. To miss this development is to be “lost “. Even to miss it partially is a grave loss. Hence, on one occasion, when giving utterance to the great saying on which we are now commenting, Jesus gave warning not only against the loss but even the ‘’ damage” of the soul.^ Anything which stunts the personality, preventing it from unfolding all the possibilities hidden in its germ, is a calamity of the first order.^

The second alternative translation, “• life,” suggests something different. Not only is there for every human being an individual development, of which the scope and law are hidden in the personality, but there is a world outside, with a sphere to fill and a work to do for God and man. The late Professor Drummond, in evangelizing young men, habitually substituted “life “in this sense for ‘’ soul “; and, whatever may have been the reason, the substitution was singularly effective. He used to tell the students composing his audiences that they had only one

1 Luke IX. 25.

2 A work on Psychology, by Calkins, is significantly entitled “The Science of Selves “.

life to I live, and that they must make the most of it. They must not waste it on sin or squander it on trifles, but devote it, whole and unbroken, to an object on the accomplishment of which they would be able to look back with satisfaction, when life was coming to an end. Jesus Christ demanded their life; He would prize the gift, if they yielded it to Him; and He would make the very best of it. To make the best use of it by His aid was salvation.

It may have been because the salvation of the soul was a phrase which had become hackneyed and overworked that Drummond was led, half unconsciously, to substitute ‘’life” for it; and he had scriptural justification for doing so; but “the soul” is a term too characteristic of Jesus to be long exchanged for anything else in the preaching of His Gospel. It recalls all the most noble and astonishing things said by Him about the dignity and the destiny of man; and it recalls the most characteristic of His parables, such as the three in the fifteenth chapter of St. Luke. It recalls all that He said about the Fatherhood of God; because the reason why the soul of man is so precious is that it comes from God; and it recalls all that He said about the world unseen and the life to come; because the most characteristic thing about the soul is its immortality.^

Justice is not, however, done to the teaching of Jesus on this subject unless it be noted that the greatness attributed to the soul by Him consists not only in its own inherent qualities, but also in what it may grow to, when its destiny is linked with His own. His estimate of the worth of humanity was flushed with the foresight of

1 In a work entitled “Essays Philosophical and Psychological, in Honor of William James, Professor in Harvard University, by his Colleagues at Columbia University,” there is a chapter by Wendell T. Bush on “A Factor in the Genesis of Idealism,” in vrhich the soul is discussed as if it were a relic of a system of ideas ready to vanish over the edge of the world into the inane — “an animistic survival from primitive culture “. The author i is able to dignify his attempt with a quotation from Professor James, which seems to favour his own contention and can be paralleled, it must be confessed, by a few rash utterances of the same kind here and there in the same quarter; but it is quite opposed to James’ views as a whole. This is not the only contemptuous reference to the soul which has become notorious in America in recent times. Such sneers do little credit to those who have originated them; yet they may do good, if they be taken as protests against a way of speaking of the soul as if our concern about it belonged exclusively to the future. But, if “the soul” be understood in the wide sense indicated above, as the growing personality and as the life -task on which the powers of the personality are to be expended, to sneer at it is not becoming in any responsible man.

what the individual man might become in union with Himself. In the germ He saw the perfect flower; and He intended Himself to make the children of men perfect, if only they would accept Him in the role in which He offered Himself, as the gardener and husbandman of character.^

^” The attitude of Christianity to the individual is essentially dynamical. It does not merely declare that he has intrinsic value, as a new factor or aspect of truth may be declared. Still less does it make a sentimental assertion of the value of humanity and leave the assertion standing. Christianity not only proclaims, but creates the fact. In other words its character is redemptive; and it is in this light that its claim of the worth of the individual soul is to be judged. For the highest attestation of that claim is to be found in the fact that He who made it was willing to suffer even death for those whose value He proclaimed. The value of the souls of men depends on their relation to His work; and hence that value is asserted less as an accomplished and unalterable fact than as a great possibility. The definiteness with which He distinguished between those who were on the side of the good and those who were its enemies wholly separates Jesus from those who apply the idea of the value of humanity in an indiscriminate and merely sentimental way to all alike. For Him the human soul had real value only on certain conditions. When this point is grasped, part of the difficulty of the Christian view disappears. It does not demand that we should so far disregard the facts which are sternly forced upon us when we look out on the world as to attribute actual moral value to lives which are ranged on the side of evil rather than of good; nor are we called upon to declare that moral beauty exists where only meanness and deformity can be seen. So far, the Christian doctrine is easier

This idea of a development, which is the unfolding towards beauty and perfection of the seed sown in natural endowment, enters deeply into both philosophical and Christian ethics. It is the central conception in Fichte’s popular works; and it passed from him to such English and American writers as George Eliot, Matthew Arnold and Emerson, who preached it as a Gospel of Culture. The possibility of becoming far bigger and better than they at present are is immanent in all human beings; and, if there be anything which is of absolute and infinite value, it is the attainment of this goal. But Christ is the author and finisher of this development; He is the perfection to which others aspire; it is in imitation of Him and in company with Him that the aspiring grow; and, since He is the resurrection and the life, the path along which He conducts is one of unending progress.^

to accept than any attribution of an actual developed value to every human soul; for it recognises the fact of evil and the present degradation of many lives. But at the same time it asserts that evil may be conquered and that each life may become valuable, or, if we choose to put it so, that each life has value in virtue of its hidden possibilities of good.” Babbour, “A Philosophical Study of Christian Ethics,” pp. 98, 99. Some sentences omitted.

The element of aspiration is prominent in the biblical

There was published recently, in Transylvania, a little book with a title which attracted me — ‘’From Individuality to Personality”.^ By Individuality the author meant what is given to everyone at his entrance into this world, and by Personality the image to which he may attain, through discipline and self-control, before the close of life. I am not quite sure about the nomenclature; because individuality especially is hardly in our common usage limited to the sense here intended. But the conception is an inspiring one; and it would be well to have definite names for both the starting-point and the goal. In another book, published recently in Germany, the same thing was expressed by a different title

conception of man at all stages. The statement about man in Paradise, that he was created “in the image of God,” must refer to a perfection not only already complete but also still to be achieved; and to attain to the image of God is still the goal of man fallen, though now the path towards it is more prolonged and roundabout. There are some aspects of the image of God which man has not lost even by the Fall; and even those which have been lost are not in the same position as if they had never been possessed; because the recovery of them is now the problem of human salvation. The chapter on the Divine Image and Man’s Primitive State in the late Dr. Laidlaw’s “Bible Doctrine of Man” is the finest chapter in a fine book.

1 By 0. Netoliczka.

—“From Person to Personality” — and I have seen Nature used as the name for the starting-point, in place of either individuality or person. Whatever may be the phraseology employed, it is a most suggestive truth, that we come into the world with a certain quantity and quality of being, received from the hands of Nature, but issue out of life, at the opposite end, with the same transmuted and transfigured. This

1 NiEBERGALL, “Person und Personlichkeit “. The drift of this work is summed up in the following sentences from the closing paragraph: “So haben wir auf alien durchwanderten Gebieten des Lebens bestatigt gefunden, was der Sinn unserer Zusammenstellung der beiden Worter Person und Personlichkeit sein soUte. Zwei Stufen von Werten stellen sie dar: die Person mit Eigenart und Eigenrecht ist die eine, die Personlichkeit als eigenartiger Besitz der hochsten geistigen Werte ist die andere. Zwei verschiedene — wie soil man sagen? — Welten oder Gebiete der Welt stehen hinter den beiden Werten: die Welt der Natur oder der ersten Schopfung, und die Welt des Geistes oder die hochste und eigentliche Welt Gottes. Wie diese beiden Welten aus einer Hand stammen, der Hand des Schopfers, der zugleich der Hort der Werte ist, so sind Person und Personlichkeit bestimmt, in die engste Beziehung zu einander zu treten: Die Person liefert das Eigene, ohne das eine Personlichkeit nicht sein kann, was sie ist; aber die Personlichkeit nimmt dies Eigene als gewollt in sich auf und setzt sich in Verbindung mit den hochsten Werten und Idealen des geistigen Lebens. So ist die Person die Grundlage der Personlichkeit, die Personlichkeit aber die Verklarung der Person.”

process is our true history, and its progress our true welfare.

It has been objected, indeed, to the philosophy of culture, as expounded by Fichte or Matthew Arnold, that it tends to arrogance and self-absorption. It is a dangerous thing to be too much bound up in self, even if moral attainment be the goal. This, however, is corrected by the consideration, that it is in conflict with the world and in performing the common work of mankind that the personality grows. As Goethe has said,

A talent ripens best when hid

Away from stir and strife;
A character must grow amid

The rush and roar of life.

But the best guarantee against too much absorption in self is to pursue culture under the inspiration of Jesus; for He will inevitably lead the aspiring soul forth into the service of both God and man, since His will is the coming of the Kingdom of God.

The word psyche, from which psychology is formed, is the very Greek word used by Jesus in speaking about the soul. That is to say, the object to which He sought to draw the attention of mankind is the same to which psychology directs all its attention. No doubt His aim was different from that of this science. Yet what He said about the soul has, in all the Christian centuries, been lending assistance to Psychology, as, on the other hand, Psychology is capable of lending significance to His words. Those who have taken in the truth, that their glory and destiny lie in the soul and its salvation, cannot but be interested in knowing what the soul is; and the science which reveals what are the different parts and functions of the soul, and especially the

1 At this point the writer on Christian Psychology can appeal directly to the example of Christ Himself, of whom it is written, “He knew what was in man” (John ii. 25). The science of “what is in man” would be an excellent definition of Psychology; and it would be easy, by going through the Gospels, to prove how often this statement might have been repeated about the Son of Man. In this passage the remark is a severe reflection on human nature; but in others the implication is of an opposite character. How well, for example, did He know St. Peter, when He first gave him this name, forecasting all his future, overlooking his weaknesses, and predicting that he who was unstable as water would yet become a man of rock. On my shelves there is a small book, recently published in Germany, with the title, “Jesus as Philosopher “; and my esteemed and beloved friend of Kirkcaldy days, the Rev. Dr. McHardy, in a choice book entitled “The Higher Powers of the Soul,” when interpreting the verse just quoted from the second chapter of St. John, speaks of Jesus as seeing all men with the eye not only of the Philosopher, but of the Poet, of the Prophet, and of the lover.

development of which each of these is capable, may, it is evident, be a handmaid to Christianity. I believe myself, that it is possible to interest people of a very humble degree of education in knowledge about the inner man, when once the intellect has experienced a religious awakening; and those whose vocation it is to kindle aspiration in the multitude may find the motives of which they are in search very close at hand. It was a saying of Vinet, that the soul of man and the Gospel of Christ answer to each other like lock and key; and this maxim might almost be taken as the keynote of all that follows in this book.

The Scottish School of philosophy has been honourably connected with the science of psychology, the conclusions of which have penetrated far into the knowledge of the common people of Scotland, begetting in them a taste and facility for such ideas. It is highly characteristic that the lectures on Metaphysics of Sir William Hamilton are nothing but a treatise on Psychology. He is the greatest member of the Scottish School; his writings combining in a singular

See Seth: “English Philosophers and Schools of Philosophy “; also McCosH: “The Scottish Philosophy, Biographical, Expository, Critical “. President McCosh carried the degree knowledge brought from ancient times and foreign parts with a shrewdness and common sense native to his own country. His mantle may perhaps be said to have passed from Scotland to America, where it has been worn by President McCosh and Professor James, as well as by psychologists of eminence still alive. These have, however, extended Hamilton’s methods of inquiry by experimental and physiological research, carried on with extraordinary expenditure of acumen and patience; and these new methods have been successfully cultivated also in England, France and Germany. By some, indeed, they have been employed in such a way as to destroy the very foundations of preceding attainment, for these writers would deprive the human subject of all the attributes which give him dignity, and they pretend to construct the science of the soul without a soul. Nietzsche and his disciples, in their passion for the revaluation of all values, would like to banish from the

Scottish methods to the United States, and exercised a wide influence for many years. I happened to be staying under his hospitable roof at Princeton on his eighty-first birthday, when he received a gift of silver-plate from a large number of professors, who had not only profited from his instructions, but had, largely through his influence, been placed in professorial chairs all over the American Continent.

mind of man the soul and its salvation and to put in their place the body and its health.

This may be a reaction against certain mistakes of the past; for it cannot be denied that the soul has often been treated as if it were a ghost, not connected in any way with the conditions or the fortunes of its companion, the body. Nothing of the kind can, however, be alleged against Jesus, who, though He spake about the soul as never man spake, yet treated the body with consideration and sympathy, throughout His entire ministry combining the vocation of healer with that of preacher. This example will always recall His followers from the excesses of an overweening spirituality, however these may be indulged for a time; and it will justify Christian thinkers in taking the whole man into account when they speak of Christian Psychology.

The above may suffice to prove that there is a close connexion between religion and psychology, and that it may be to the advantage of both to cultivate this connexion. If, on his bodily side, man be nothing but an infinitesimal portion of the physical universe, yet is this speck or atom more interesting than all the rest put together; and it is, in itself, fearfully and wonderfully made. Therefore, anatomy, the science of the parts of which the body is composed, and physiology, the science of the functions performed by these several parts, must always hold a place of honour among the physical sciences. But, if there be a part of man which links him up with God, and makes him the child and heir of eternity, then to know this must be of all studies the one most worthy of attention. It is not, however, only a speculative but also a practical study. The more the soul is studied, the more, it may be presumed, will its value be realised, and the more exact will the knowledge become of the means appropriate for its cultivation and development.^

In a sprightly little work on Psychology, intended for teachers and entitled “Know your Own Mind,” Mr. William Glover compares a person who has no acquaintance with the mechanism of his own mind to the driver of a motor-car totally ignorant of the structure of the machine he has to handle. “Each of us is in possession of a bit of mechanism very much more complex than a motor; and we have to drive it whether we understand it or not. Happily it is largely self-acting, and gets along somehow, with very little conscious attention from its owner-and-driver, but, left so much to its own devices, it acts capriciously. Sometimes it runs away with us. Sometimes it jibs, as it were, in a crowded thoroughfare. And, perhaps, it would be no exaggeration to say, that it carries us in a vong direction oftener than in the right.

“Knowing nothing then, or next to nothing, of their own

Nothing has been commoner, in the books on psychology written in recent times, than the warning not to break up the unity of the soul in studying it or to speak of it as if it were merely a compound of many different faculties. The soul is a unit, the different functions of which are going on together all the time; it is a stream of consciousness, which is moving forward, every moment, over the entire surface between bank and bank. This may have been forgotten; although, I fancy, warnings to the same effect can be found in philosophical literature ever since the human race began to meditate on this subject. And, indeed, the warning may be repeated too often; because it may be allowed to play into the hands of those who ignore the personal element in mind and convert the whole inner life into a mere succession of sensations and associations. Even the student of the body may require to be warned that the body is a unit, every part

inner nature, the coming generation grow up; and failing to make good this deficiency in after-life, they fall into many consequent blunders. They blunder about choosing a profession or trade, a hobby, companions, a husband or wife; about the regulation and control of the intellect, the emotions, the will; about dealings with themselves and dealings with their fellows. Every day they make mistakes which even a little knowledge of psychology might have prevented.”

of which is affected by every other part; yet this does not prevent him from availing himself of the utility to be derived from the separate study of the various members and functions. So, in psychology, while the unity of the whole is never to be forgotten, we must not deny ourselves the advantage of the separate study of the parts. It would be to blow out the candle of knowledge for the sake of a whim to cease to recognise the broad distinction between thinking, feeling and willing; and it would be equally pusillanimous to refrain from speaking, for example, about memory and imagination as separate faculties.

For the purpose which we have at present in view, it must be made easy for the hearer in the pew to identify the part of his own experience about which the voice in the pulpit is speaking; and the preacher must wield a language distinct and concrete, as far removed as possible from the vagueness and featurelessness into which the jargon of philosophy has of late been falling. We have to show not only that the soul is one, but also that it is manifold, and that its progress must be carried forward along various lines of development. The spirit which ought to characterize our attempt is that of the Eighth Psalm —

What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that Thou visitest him? For Thou hast made him but little lower than God, And crownest him with glory and honour —

or of the words, almost biblical in their grandeur: ‘’ What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension like a god!”