The Soul, or Rational Psychology

This was published in London, 1847, by Dr. J. J. G. Wilkinson under the title Posthumous Tracts. Besides the treatise on Action and another on Sensation, or the Passive State of the Body original: "Passion of the Body"; here "passion" refers to the body's capacity to be acted upon by external stimuli, this volume contains three brief essays original: "transactions", all directly related to the subject before us. These were evidently written at different times and before the date of the present work. These three include: a brief essay titled The Way to a Knowledge of the Soul; a paper in four chapters on The Origin and Propagation of the Soul; and a significantly long treatise called a Fragment on the Soul.

Even as early as 1734, in the work titled Outlines on the Infinite—which immediately followed his major work, the Principia—the author devotes the second part of the treatise to a Philosophical Argument on the Mechanism of the Interaction original: "Intercourse" between the Soul and the Body.*

Finally, among these preliminary looks at the great subject he aimed to address, we should mention two chapters on The Soul and The Chain and Bond of Uses. The latter treats the cerebrum the main part of the brain as the medium of interaction between the soul and the body. These are found in Codex 58 of the Manuscripts (Photolithographed MSS., vol. vi., pp. 81-92) and were inserted by Dr. Rudolph L. Tafel in volume I of the work on The Brain mentioned above (see page 13).

An explanation for these frequent, scattered, and unfinished essays on the soul is found in the author's address to the reader, which introduces the Fragment on the Soul mentioned above. He says:

"I was for some time in doubt whether to include all my long meditations on the soul and the body—and their mutual action and reaction original: "passion"—in a single volume, or whether it would be better to divide the work into sections and publish it sequentially original: "seriatim", in the manner of scholarly reports original: "transactions". My goal is to declare the nature of the soul, to show its state, to demonstrate the mutual interaction and actions existing between it and the body, and the connection of each with each in the bonds of harmony. In other words, I intend to display—philosophically, analytically, geometrically, and anatomically—the entire kingdom of the soul original: "animal kingdom"; from the Latin anima, meaning soul and its parts, along with the functions and duties of each. This is a labor of several years and must extend over several volumes... I have thought it most prudent to divide the labor and to take up my pen at short intervals, allowing myself an occasional rest to catch my breath and attend to my other duties. For the mind is just like a pen: too much use blunts its point and wears away its precision. This, gentle reader, is the reason I will return to my self-prescribed task at frequent intervals and appear before you often—probably no less than five or six times a year—with my publications, which may properly be called Psychological Transactions. By this means I hope, after a few years, to reach my goal and be in a position to explain the state of the soul when its connection with the body is ended by death and it is left to its own disposal."

That the work now before us, On the Soul original: "De Anima", is the author's long-delayed Rational Psychology and the final summary of all his studies—

* Outlines of a Philosophical Argument on the Infinite, etc., by Emanuel Swedenborg. Translated from the Latin by James John Garth Wilkinson; London, 1847.