The Philosophy of Mysticism Volume 1 of 2

The absence from Christian teaching of anything which can be called a psychology (such as occupies so prominent a place in some Eastern systems of religious philosophy) has left Western belief in immortality without any more definite conception of what survives in man, than that of a Spiritual substance or principle, with which is identified the self supposed to be already known in consciousness. The Neo-platonic idea that the soul is only partially known in the physically conditioned consciousness thus asserting a transcendental individuality though not without some Patristic patronage, was not easily intelligible, and has long dropped out of view, as it is not to be confused with the doc trine of the trichotomy of man, which distinguishes soul from spirit. In the Christian belief, the soul is wholly introduced into a heterogeneous form, the body. That was a dualism which could not long survive scientific tendencies of thought and as it is, in the West, the only traditional form of belief in individual immortality, that belief has long been decay ing with the increase of intellectual activity among the people.