A history of psychology / by Otto Klemm ; authorized translation with annotations by Emil Carl Wilm ; and Rudolf Pintner.

  • Otto Klemm
Date:
[1914], [©1914]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A history of psychology / by Otto Klemm ; authorized translation with annotations by Emil Carl Wilm ; and Rudolf Pintner. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

    35/404 (page 15)
    rhythmic movement of existence: It is death to souls to become water, and death to water to become earth. But water comes from earth; and from water, soul. The ex- perienced difference between body and soul Heraclitus ex- plains by the hypothesis that they represent two stages in the development of fire. The knowledge of the soul accord- ingly presupposes a knowledge of reality as a whole. Like the universe, it is unfathomable, as the well-known saying testifies: You will not find the boundaries of soul by trav- elling in any direction. ^ It is not until we come to Empedocles of Agrigentum that Ionic hylozoism becomes consistently dualistic. It is true that Empedocles reduces all becoming to relationships of matter and force. Matter is composed of four elements, while force manifests itself in the interplay of attraction and repulsion, figuratively called love and hate. The soul, how- ever, is not affected by these physical theories. The hypoth- eses of the philosophy of nature that the soul, like everything else, consists of the various elements combined in the proper proportions become mingled with religious ideas according to which the individual soul is merely a part of the world soul. The elements themselves are now transformed into divinities; the soul is capable of an existence separate from matter, and the doctrine of metempsychosis clearly indicates contact with Pythagorean ideas. Pythagorean psychology, from all we are able to ascertain concerning the matter, was also dualistic in character. The saying that the soul is a harmony, or possesses harmony, was already within the Pythagorean school a statement of equivocal significance. It is beyond question, however, that the dualism of body and soul was for the Pythagoreans merely a repetition of the familiar antithesis between the unlimited and the limited, between matter and force. 1 [Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, p. 138. Trs.]