a concept, whose expression historically altered views of man’s inner world. In religion, idealist philosophy, and psychology, “soul” is the concept of a special nonmaterial substance that is independent of the body. The concept of the soul can be traced to animistic ideas concerning a special force dwelling in the bodies of man and animals (sometimes, in plants) and departing from the body during sleep or at death. The concept reflects the development of mythological, religious, philosophical, and scientific thinking about the nature of man and marks the formation of the subject of psychology. In the history of philosophy the soul was comprehended by contrasting it with the body as an object (the soul as the dynamic force); with the organic body (the soul as the active life source); with the spirit (the soul as the individual manifestation of the universal spiritual substance or as the unique personal principle created by god); and with the external social forms of human behavior (the soul as the inner world of man—his self-consciousness).
In its early stages, ancient Greek natural philosophy was imbued with ideas about the universal animation of the cosmos (hylozoism). According to Democritus and Epicurus, the soul is corporeal and made of spherical, moving atoms. The idea of the soul as a special non-corporeal and immortal essence was voiced by the Pythagoreans, who also viewed it as the basis of harmony for the parts of the body. This idea was further developed by Plato and the Neoplatonists (Plotinus and Proclus). Plato considered the “universal soul” one of the universal principles of being—an eternal dynamic source, the source of self-movement, which unites the world of immutable ideas and the world of mutable corporeal objects. The individual human soul was the image and outflow of the universal soul.
Aristotle was the father of the scientific approach to the study of the soul as the “form” (eidos) of the living body (from the point of view of the Aristotelian division of form and matter). He examined the soul in the context of his teachings about purposefulness in the development of organic nature, and he understood the soul to be the entelechy (realization) of the body—the principle of its purposeful activity. Three types of souls were distinguished by him: the nutritive soul (vegetative), sensitive soul (animal soul, capable of sensory perception, desire, and movement), and rational soul (specifically human). Aristotle outlined the main problem of psychology as a study of relationships between the mental capacities and organic processes. Elements of Platonic and Aristotelian teachings about the soul were absorbed by Scholasticism and reworked in conformity with Christian ideas of the immortality, individual uniqueness, and personal character of the soul.
In modern European philosophy the term “soul” began to be used to signify man’s inner world. The dualistic metaphysics of Descartes distinguishes the soul and the body as two independent substances. The soul is spirit and is manifested in various states and acts of consciousness; the body is material and extensional. Animals were viewed by Descartes as live automatons, devoid of souls. From Descartes to the German psychologists E. H. Weber and G. Fechner, the question of the interaction of the soul and the body has been discussed primarily as a psychophysical problem. Descartes’ dualistic ideas formed the basis of both the empirical sensory (J. Locke) and rationalistic (G. Leibniz) traditions in interpreting the soul. Thus, Leibniz sees the soul as a closed substance (monad) with two basic capacities—feelings (senses) and desires. Locke, refusing to discuss the nature of the soul as a metaphysical issue, called for limitation of the study to mental phenomena—the sensations and ideas as their combinations. Thus, he provided a basis for associationism in psychology. In describing the human ego as a simple bundle of representations, D. Hume subjected to doubt the idea of the soul’s substantive nature, the demonstration that this idea cannot be derived from empirical description of mental life. Kant’s criticism of rationalistic psychology extended the concept of the soul beyond human experience into the realm of transcendental ideas that make human cognition possible. He adopted a schema proposed by the German psychologist I. Tetens that divided mental capacities into mind, will, and feeling. Post-Kantian German classical idealism has endeavored to overcome the Cartesian dichotomy of the soul and the body through an understanding of their common origin in the spirit (Schelling and Hegel).
In experimental psychology, which has developed since the mid-19th century, the concept of the soul has been displaced to a considerable degree by the concept of psychics. At the end of the 19th century the need for an integral approach to man and his psychic life reanimated the interest in the problem of the soul as the inner life of man, which gives motivation and purposefulness to his behavior and activity. In their analysis of the psyche, a number of schools of thought distinguish its components (sensations, feelings, acts, and conditions) and try to reveal the mechanisms of their interrelationship (for example, association, intuition, capacity, and gestalt). Other schools have also emerged that consider primarily the content of consciousness of the acting and reflective ego (philosophy of life, “understanding psychology,” and phenomenology). In this sense, the soul may be understood as the inner (as opposed to outer behavior), the integral (as opposed to separate elementary psychic features and functions), the spiritual (ideal substance as opposed to the material physiological substratum), and the active (active realization of the personality as opposed to reactive accommodation or adaptation of the organism).
In Soviet psychology the term “soul” is sometimes used as a synonym of “psychics,” which is regarded by Marxist philosophy as a subjective image of the objective world, this world being a product of sociohistorical development.
I. N. SEMENOV