Four Archetypes (14 page)

387

As linguistic usage shows, spirit in the sense of an attitude has unmistakable leanings towards personification: the spirit of Pestalozzi can also be taken concretistically as his ghost or imago, just as the spirits of Weimar are the personal spectres of Goethe and Schiller; for spirit still has the spookish meaning of the soul of one departed. The “cold breath of the spirits” points on the one hand to the ancient affinity of
with
and
which both mean ‘cold,’ and on the other hand to the original meaning of
which simply denoted ‘air in motion’; and in the same way animus and anima were connected with
‘wind.’ The German word
Geist
probably has more to do with something frothing, effervescing, or fermenting; hence affinities with
Gischt
(foam),
Gäscht
(yeast),
ghost
, and also with the emotional
ghastly
and
aghast
, are not to be rejected. From time immemorial emotion has been regarded as possession, which is why we still say today, of a hot-tempered person, that he is possessed of a devil or that an evil spirit has entered into him.
³
Just as, according to the old view, the spirits or souls of the dead are of a subtle disposition like a vapour or a smoke, so to the alchemist
spiritus
was a subtle, volatile, active, and vivifying essence, such as alcohol was understood to be, and all the arcane substances. On this level, spirit includes spirits of salts, spirits of ammonia, formic spirit, etc.

388

This score or so of meanings and shades of meaning attributable to the word “spirit” make it difficult for the psychologist to delimit his subject conceptually, but on the other hand they lighten the task of describing it, since the many different aspects
go to form a vivid and concrete picture of the phenomenon in question. We are concerned with a functional complex which originally, on the primitive level, was felt as an invisible, breathlike “presence.” William James has given us a lively account of this primordial phenomenon in his
Varieties of Religious Experience
. Another well-known example is the wind of the Pentecostal miracle. The primitive mentality finds it quite natural to personify the invisible presence as a ghost or demon. The souls or spirits of the dead are identical with the psychic activity of the living; they merely continue it. The view that the psyche is a spirit is implicit in this. When therefore something psychic happens in the individual which he feels as belonging to himself, that something is his own spirit. But if anything psychic happens which seems to him strange, then it is somebody else’s spirit, and it may be causing a possession. The spirit in the first case corresponds to the subjective attitude, in the latter case to public opinion, to the time-spirit, or to the original, not yet human, anthropoid disposition which we also call the
unconscious
.

389

In keeping with its original wind-nature, spirit is always an active, winged, swift-moving being as well as that which vivifies, stimulates, incites, fires, and inspires. To put it in modern language, spirit is the dynamic principle, forming for that very reason the classical antithesis of matter—the antithesis, that is, of its stasis and inertia. Basically it is the contrast between life and death. The subsequent differentiation of this contrast leads to the actually very remarkable opposition of spirit and nature. Even though spirit is regarded as essentially alive and enlivening, one cannot really feel nature as unspiritual and dead. We must therefore be dealing here with the (Christian) postulate of a spirit whose life is so vastly superior to the life of nature that in comparison with it the latter is no better than death.

390

This special development in man’s idea of spirit rests on the recognition that its invisible presence is a psychic phenomenon, i.e., one’s own spirit, and that this consists not only of uprushes of life but of formal products too. Among the first, the most prominent are the images and shadowy presentations that occupy our inner field of vision; among the second, thinking and reason, which organize the world of images. In this way a transcendent
spirit superimposed itself upon the original, natural life-spirit and even swung over to the opposite position, as though the latter were merely naturalistic. The transcendent spirit became the supranatural and transmundane cosmic principle of order and as such was given the name of “God,” or at least it became an attribute of the One Substance (as in Spinoza) or one Person of the Godhead (as in Christianity).

391

The corresponding development of spirit in the reverse, hylozoistic direction—a
maiori ad minus
—took place under anti-Christian auspices in materialism. The premise underlying this reaction is the exclusive certainty of the spirit’s identity with psychic functions, whose dependence upon brain and metabolism became increasingly clear. One had only to give the One Substance another name and call it “matter” to produce the idea of a spirit which was entirely dependent on nutrition and environment, and whose highest form was the intellect or reason. This meant that the original pneumatic presence had taken up its abode in man’s physiology, and a writer like Klages could arraign the spirit as the “adversary of the soul.”
⁴
For it was into this latter concept that the original spontaneity of the spirit withdrew after it had been degraded to a servile attribute of matter. Somewhere or other the
deus ex machina
quality of spirit had to be preserved—if not in the spirit itself, then in its synonym the soul, that glancing, Aeolian
⁵
thing, elusive as a butterfly (anima,
).

392

Even though the materialistic conception of the spirit did not prevail everywhere, it still persisted, outside the sphere of religion, in the realm of conscious phenomena. Spirit as “subjective spirit” came to mean a purely endopsychic phenomenon, while “objective spirit” did not mean the universal spirit, or God, but merely the sum total of intellectual and cultural possessions which make up our human institutions and the content of our libraries. Spirit had forfeited its original nature, its autonomy and spontaneity over a very wide area, with the solitary exception of the religious field, where, at least in principle, its pristine character remained unimpaired.

In this résumé we have described an entity which presents itself to us as an immediate psychic phenomenon distinguished from other psychisms whose existence is naïvely believed to be causally dependent upon physical influences. A connection between spirit and physical conditions is not immediately apparent, and for this reason it was credited with immateriality to a much higher degree than was the case with psychic phenomena in the narrower sense. Not only is a certain physical dependence attributed to the latter, but they are themselves thought of as possessing a kind of materiality, as the idea of the subtle body and the Chinese
kuei
-soul clearly show. In view of the intimate connection that exists between certain psychic processes and their physical parallels we cannot very well accept the total immateriality of the psyche. As against this, the
consensus omnium
insists on the immateriality of spirit, though not everyone would agree that it also has a reality of its own. It is, however, not easy to see why our hypothetical “matter,” which looks quite different from what it did even thirty years ago, alone should be real, and spirit not. Although the idea of immateriality does not in itself exclude that of reality, popular opinion invariably associates reality with materiality. Spirit and matter may well be forms of one and the same transcendental being. For instance the Tantrists, with as much right, say that matter is nothing other than the concreteness of God’s thoughts. The sole immediate reality is the psychic reality of conscious contents, which are as it were labelled with a spiritual or material origin as the case may be.

393

The hallmarks of spirit are, firstly, the principle of spontaneous movement and activity; secondly, the spontaneous capacity to produce images independently of sense perception; and thirdly, the autonomous and sovereign manipulation of these images. This spiritual entity approaches primitive man from outside; but with increasing development it gets lodged in man’s consciousness and becomes a subordinate function, thus apparently forfeiting its original character of autonomy. That character is now retained only in the most conservative views, namely in the religions. The descent of spirit into the sphere of human consciousness is expressed in the myth of the divine
caught in the embrace of
This process, continuing
over the ages, is probably an unavoidable necessity, and the religions would find themselves in a very forlorn situation if they believed in the attempt to hold up evolution. Their task, if they are well advised, is not to impede the ineluctable march of events, but to guide it in such a way that it can proceed without fatal injury to the soul. The religions should therefore constantly recall to us the origin and original character of the spirit, lest man should forget what he is drawing into himself and with what he is filling his consciousness. He himself did not create the spirit, rather the spirit makes
him
creative, always spurring him on, giving him lucky ideas, staying power, “enthusiasm” and “inspiration.” So much, indeed, does it permeate his whole being that he is in gravest danger of thinking that he actually created the spirit and that he “has” it. In reality, however, the primordial phenomenon of the spirit takes possession of
him
, and, while appearing to be the willing object of human intentions, it binds his freedom, just as the physical world does, with a thousand chains and becomes an obsessive
idée-force
. Spirit threatens the naïve-minded man with inflation, of which our own times have given us the most horribly instructive examples. The danger becomes all the greater the more our interest fastens upon external objects and the more we forget that the differentiation of our relation to nature should go hand in hand with a correspondingly differentiated relation to the spirit, so as to establish the necessary balance. If the outer object is not offset by an inner, unbridled materialism results, coupled with maniacal arrogance or else the extinction of the autonomous personality, which is in any case the ideal of the totalitarian mass state.