This work has decided in favour of the soul against the absurd and pitiable psychology without a soul. In fact, it may be doubted if, on the assumption that the soul exists and has free thought and free-will, there can be a science of causal laws and self-imposed rules of willing and thinking. I have no intention of trying to inaugurate a new era of rational psychology. I wish to follow Kant in positing the existence of a soul as the unifying and central conception, without which any explanation or description of psychic life, however faithful in its details, however sympathetically undertaken, must be wholly unsatisfying. It is extraordinary how inquirers who have made no attempt to analyse such phenomena as shame and the sense of guilt, faith and hope, fear and repentance, love and hate, yearning and solitude, vanity and sensitiveness, ambition and the desire for immor- tality, have yet the courage simply to deny the ego because it does not flaunt itself like the colour of an orange or the taste of a peach. How can Mach and Hume account for such a thing as style, if individuality does not exist? Or again, consider this: no animal is made afraid by seeing its reflection in a glass, whilst there is no man who could spend his life in a room surrounded with mirrors. Can this fear, the fear of the doppelganger,[1] be explained on Darwinian principles. The word doppelganger has only to be mentioned to raise a deep dread in the mind of any man. Empirical psychology cannot explain this; it reaches the depths. It cannot be explained, as Mach would explain the fear of little children, as an inheritance from some primitive, less secure stage of society. I have taken this example only to remind the empirical psychologists that there are many things inexplicable on their hypotheses.
Why is any man annoyed when he is described as a Wagnerite, a Nietzchite, a Herbartian, or so forth? He objects to be thought a mere echo. Even Ernst Mach is angry in anticipation at the thought that some friend will
- ↑ It is notable that women are devoid of this fear; female doppelgangers are not heard of.
