Philosophical Psychology — Conclusions

Tract: Psychology · Paul J. Glenn · 1936 · 25 articles in two Parts, plus an appendix on sleep and dreams School: Thomist Depends on: Metaphysics — act and potency, prime matter and substantial form, the four causes. Cosmology — the constitution of bodies. Supports: Epistemology — the intellect whose validity Criteriology defends is established here. Ethics — the will and its freedom. Natural Theology — the soul’s spirituality and immortality.

What this tract is for

Psychology in the scholastic sense is the philosophical science of life — not of behaviour or mental states, but of the life-principle and the living body. It asks what life is, what grades of it exist, and what principle accounts for the unity and activity of a living thing.

It is the tract where the series’ most consequential single conclusion is proved: that the human soul is spiritual and therefore immortal. Criteriology asserts the intellect’s immateriality, Ethics assumes the will’s freedom, Theodicy assumes man’s ordination to an end beyond this life — all three are cashed out here.

The architecture

The tract is a single ascending argument, and reading it out of order defeats it.

Part I — Life below man. What life is (immanent activity); that living differs from non-living essentially, not by degree; that there are three grades; that each grade needs a life-principle — the soul — which is the substantial form of the body. Then vegetal life and sentient life worked through in the same order: operations, then principle.
Part II — Human life. The same method applied to man — and it breaks the pattern, because the human soul turns out to be spiritual, and so complete in substantiality where the others were not. Then the faculties: sentient (sensation, appetition, locomotion), then intellect, then will and its freedom.

Each grade is treated by the same three-step move: identify the operations, show they cannot be explained by what is below, infer the principle. Glenn runs it three times, and only the third time does the inference land on something that survives the body.

Part I — Life

What life is

1. The basic property of a living thing is its capacity for self-movement. Life is a reality evidenced by the attributes or properties of living things, and self-movement is the root property. → P1 C1 A1 — What We Mean by Life

2. Life-activity is always immanent activity. Activity divides as transient (terminating outside the agent) and immanent (initiated, directed and terminated within it). Vital activity is immanent — even though it regularly has outer effects as “side issues” — and all non-vital activity is necessarily transient. Immanent activity and vital activity are synonymous, and this equation is the tract’s foundational move. → P1 C1 A1

3. The existence of activity, immanent or transient, points back to an Infinite Immanence of Activity as its necessary First Cause. → P1 C1 A1

4. Life is described in first actuality and in second actuality — the capacity for vital operation, and the exercise of it. → P1 C1 A1

5. Between living and lifeless bodies the difference is truly essential, not accidental. The argument runs from the essential difference of the properties to the essential difference of the bodies, supported by proofs drawn from natural origin, growth and decline, and structure and function. → P1 C1 A2 — The Difference Between Life and Non-Life

6. All living bodies fall under three heads — plants, animals, men — and these differ essentially, not accidentally. Since function follows from and indicates essence, essentially different operations prove essentially different kinds of living body. These forms of life are also grades: each includes what is below it and adds to it. → P1 C1 A3 — The Scale of Life and of Living Bodies

7. Life cannot be explained by the living body as material substance, as organic structure, or as a field for the interplay of material forces. Glenn eliminates all three in turn: mass is common to living and lifeless bodies alike; organic structure is the effect of life, not its cause; and physico-chemical forces are invariably transient in action, where vital activity is immanent and harmonised toward a single end. → P1 C1 A4 — The Principle of Life

8. There must therefore be a life-principle: a substantial constituent element of the living body which makes it what it is and endows it with its capacities and functions. This principle is the soul — Glenn keeps the ancient term and rejects the bizarre names invented for it by certain scientists and philosophers. Defined with Aristotle as the first act of a physical organic body. → P1 C1 A4

Vegetal life

9. The plant applies, directs and controls physico-chemical and mechanical energies as instruments to its own development, maintenance and propagation. It is self-directive and self-perfective, and so gives unmistakable evidence of perfective self-movement — that is, of life. But it has only the lowest grade of life and does not possess sentiency. → P1 C2 A1 — The Life of Plants

10. There are three vegetal operations — nutrition, growth and generation — and because every living body shares the vegetal grade, these belong to organisms generally. Growth has the development and multiplication of the cell as its root-source. → P1 C2 A2 — The Vegetal Operations

11. The proximate principles of the vegetal operations are three distinct powers or faculties — the nutritive, the growing and the generative — distinct from one another and also from the substance of the living thing. → P1 C2 A2

12. The vegetal life-principle is the substantial form of the living plant — substantial, and a substance, but not a complete substance: incomplete both in the order of substantiality and in the order of species. → P1 C2 A3 — The Vegetal Life-Principle

13. It is a material substantial form — not in the sense that it is made of matter, but that it depends on matter. It is simple; actually one but potentially multiple in each plant; and it comes into being and perishes per accidens, not per se. Hold on to that last point: it is the hinge on which Th. 26 turns. → P1 C2 A3

Sentient life

14. Brute animals are truly living bodies and not automata — against Descartes. → P1 C3 A1 — The Life of Sentient Bodies

15. Animals, though sentient, are not endowed with intellect. Three marks characterise intellectual organic beings and are absent from every merely sentient one: the power of knowing things in universal and in the abstract; the power of using intelligently significant speech; and the power of improving the mode of action. These same three marks return as the proof of man’s intellect (Th. 27) — the argument is one argument, run in both directions. → P1 C3 A1

16. Instinct, however astonishingly adequate its product, is in no sense evidence of intellect. Glenn contrasts the two directly. → P1 C3 A1

17. The three sentient operations are sensation, appetition and locomotion, distinct from one another and proceeding from distinct powers of the sentient organism — over and above the vegetal operations, which animals also possess. → P1 C3 A2 — The Operations of Sentient Bodies

18. The sentient life-principle is the substantial form of the animal’s organic body, and is the one and only vital principle whereby the animal lives, takes nourishment, grows, propagates, senses, appetizes and moves by local movement. Though both vegetal and sentient, it is essentially different from and superior to the merely vegetal principle. Like the plant soul it is material and incomplete both as a substance and as an animal. → P1 C3 A3 — The Sentient Life-Principle

The origin of species

19. Species are distinguished by two marks: structure and filiation. Glenn defines hybrid, mongrel, reversion and atavism, and gives the biological classification from species back to phyla. → P1 C4 A1 — The Existence of Species

20. Spontaneous generation is inadequate to explain the origin of life, and indeed is impossible. Life, being essentially different from non-life (Th. 5), cannot arise from what is not alive by any natural process however complex. → P1 C4 A2 — The Problem of Species

21. Haeckelian (monistic) evolution and Darwinian (natural-selection) evolution fail to square with reason, with facts and with experience, and are to be rejected as false doctrine. Glenn’s specific objection to Darwin: natural selection is a theory of elimination — it explains why types die out, not how new types arise — and the appearance of an essentially new specific nature cannot be accounted for by accumulated accidental variation on a pre-existing nature. → P1 C4 A2

22. Christian evolution is philosophically possible. On this view God created the primary organisms and endowed matter with directed potencies to develop into the species now observed, under the general governance of divine Providence. Glenn’s verdict is carefully graded: it contradicts no defined doctrine of faith provided the special creation and infusion of the human soul is maintained; it is compatible with the geological and fossil evidence; but it is as yet an unproved hypothesis, the evidence suggestive and not conclusive. Asked whether evolution excluding man is really a fact, he answers that it has not been proved so even for the lowest organisms, that it seems probable enough, and that it may well be a fact.

He is explicit that rejecting Haeckel and Darwin is not rejecting evolution as such: two special theories about the manner in which evolution is supposed to work have been rejected; evolution as a possible fact has not been denied. → P1 C4 A2

Part II — Human Life

23. The human soul is a substance — not a quality or accident of the body, and not a harmony of bodily parts, as the ancients sometimes described it and many moderns still treat it. → P2 C1 A1 — The Principle of Human Life

24. The human soul is simple: no quantitative parts, not extended, incapable of being divided or broken up. The proof lies in the operation of complete self-reflection — the mind can make its own act of knowing the very object of its knowing. A thing made of parts could not bend entirely back upon itself; part might bend back on part, but the whole could not wholly bend back upon itself. (This is the article Criteriology’s argument for the intellect’s immateriality points forward to.) → P2 C1 A1

25. The human soul is spiritual — it has no matter in its make-up, being form alone and not matter-and-form. The proof is from the intellect’s grasp of objects in universal and in the abstract. Glenn’s example: you can see two bricks, hear two sounds, smell two odours, touch two objects, imagine two — but by no sense or sense-organ can you lay hold of two by itself. The mind can. What grasps truth in universal must transcend the limitations of matter; so the intellect is a spiritual faculty, and a spiritual faculty can reside only in a spiritual substance. → P2 C1 A1

26. The human soul is immortal. Cessation of being comes about per se, by dissolution of one’s own constituent parts, or per accidens, through dissolution of something one depends on. The soul cannot die per se, being simple and having no parts to fall apart (Th. 24). It cannot die per accidens, since being spiritual it does not depend on the body for its being and in fact exists without it after death (Th. 25). Plant and animal souls die per accidens precisely because they are material (Th. 13, 18) — which is why the whole ascent through the lower grades was necessary. God could annihilate the soul by His absolute power; by His ordered power He does not. → P2 C1 A1

27. The human soul comes into existence only by creation, direct and immediate in each instance. It does not pre-exist its body but is created and infused by a single divine act at a single instant — which, following the more probable opinion, is the moment of conception. → P2 C1 A1

28. The union of soul and body in man is substantial, not accidental. Three results follow: man is one essence and nature embracing three grades of vital operation; each human soul is individual; and man is metaphysically defined as a rational animal. → P2 C1 A2 — The Union of Soul and Body in Man

29. Five theories of the body-soul relation are rejected: Platonic-Cartesian dualism, occasionalism, pre-established harmony, pan-psychism, and behaviourism. The soul is in the body informatively or operatively. → P2 C1 A2

The faculties

30. A faculty is really distinct from the soul and from the other faculties. The rational faculties belong to the soul alone; the vegetal and sentient faculties belong to the compound substance of soul-and-body. (This distribution is what makes Th. 26 work: the operations that survive the body are seated in what survives it.) → P2 C2 A1 — Nature and Kinds of Faculties

31. The object of sense must be trans-subjective. Glenn studies the sensing-system (cerebro-spinal axis, cerebro-spinal nerves, external sense-organs), the senses severally with their organs and proper objects, and the sensing-process, describing the impressed and expressed species involved in external and internal sensation. → P2 C2 A2 — Sensation

32. Sentient appetition is distinct from the natural appetency of all creatures. The appetencies or passions divide as concupiscible — love and hatred, desire and abhorrence, joy and sadness — and irascible — hope and despair, courage and fear, and anger. → P2 C2 A3 — Appetition

33. The passions are good in themselves, and lead to evil only when inordinately used or engaged on wrong objects under the influence of a perverse will. All the passions are rooted in love. The organ which exercises appetition is the brain; the organ which first manifests it is the heart. → P2 C2 A3

34. Locomotion is the carrying-out in bodily movement of the tendency appetition has aroused in response to sensation, and is really distinct from appetition. Its organ is the motor nervous and muscular system; in man voluntary locomotion is guided by intellect and will. → P2 C2 A4 — Locomotion

Intellect

35. Man actually possesses an intellect — the knowing-power that pierces beneath the accidentals presented by sense to grasp essences. It goes under different names in its different services: mind, intelligence, reason, understanding, consciousness, conscience, memory. The intellect is a spiritual faculty of the soul. → P2 C3 A1 — Nature and Actuality of the Intellect

36. The intellect has three operations: simple apprehension (forming concepts), judgment (affirming or denying the agreement of concepts), and reasoning (moving from known truths to a new truth). → P2 C3 A2 — The Operation and Object of the Intellect

37. The proper object of the intellect in this life is the essences of material things conceived in universal. The qualification in this life is doing real work — it is what leaves room for the separated soul’s operation in Th. 25–26. → P2 C3 A2

38. Ideas originate by abstraction from the phantasm. Three theories are examined and rejected — innate ideas, occasionalism, and empiricism. The agent intellect abstracts the intelligible content from the sense-image; the possible intellect receives the intelligible species and forms the concept. → P2 C3 A3 — The Origin and Expression of Ideas

39. Ideas are expressed in the inner word — the concept as the mind’s interior expression — and the outer word, spoken or written language as a conventional sign of the inner word. → P2 C3 A3

Will

40. The will is rational appetency, and its object is the good — good in general, that which is appetizable — and in last analysis the Summum Bonum, the supreme and infinite Good. → P2 C4 A1 — Nature and Operation of the Will

41. Moral evil is chosen under the aspect of good, by a perverse and blameworthy will. Nothing is willed as evil precisely as evil. (This is the psychological ground of Ethics’ account of the determinants of morality.) → P2 C4 A1

42. Acts of the will divide as elicited and commanded. → P2 C4 A1

43. The will always requires anterior action on the part of the intellect; the intellect does not always require the activity of the will for its function. The asymmetry is deliberate. → P2 C4 A2 — The Interaction of Intellect and Will

44. The intellect moves the will as a final cause; the will moves the intellect as an efficient cause. Glenn adds a word on the relative perfection or nobility of the two. → P2 C4 A2

45. Human freedom is freedom of exercise and freedom of specification — the power to will or not will, and to will this or that. Freedom in general is undeterminedness, immunity from necessitation; the kinds distinguished include freedom of contradiction and of contrariety. → P2 C4 A3 — The Freedom of the Will

46. Human freedom is proved by four arguments: from consciousness, from deliberation, from the nature of the will’s object, and from the absurdity of determinism. The main forms of determinism are examined and found inadequate. An appendix reconciles human freedom with divine foreknowledge. → P2 C4 A3

47. Sleep is a more or less perfect suspension of the activities of sentient life — Aristotle’s “binding up of the common sense.” Since in man’s earthly life the intellect is extrinsically dependent upon sentiency, suspending sentient consciousness suspends normal rational consciousness. (A small article, but it corroborates Th. 37: the dependence is extrinsic, which is exactly what the separated soul’s operation requires.) → Appendix — On Sleep and Dreams

Frontmatter changes noted

None required. This is the first tract where I have found nothing to correct.

I checked every article’s summary against Glenn’s own end-of-article summary — 24 of 26 have one — and ran the named-entity test over the whole branch. Two articles flagged, both false positives: sentence-initial “First” and “Third” in the union article, and “Theodicy” in the introduction, where the summary uses the term in explaining major versus minor psychology. Spot checks on the specific technical claims all confirmed: intus legere for the etymology of intellect, Aquinas named for rational appetency, freedom of contradiction and contrariety, and “the more probable opinion” for the moment of ensoulment.

Two structural notes that are not errors but are worth fixing while you are in these files:

book is 0 and bookTitle is empty on all 26 articles, so the two Parts are not represented in the frontmatter at all. The p1-/p2- filename prefixes carry the division; the metadata does not. Every other branch encodes its Books.
The appendix (appendix-on-sleep-and-dreams.md) carries chapter: 0, article: 0, so it collides with introduction.md on sort order.

A cross-tract discrepancy worth knowing

Glenn’s position on evolution here (1936) is considerably more careful than in Sociology (1935). There he calls Evolutionism “merely a hypothesis and not at all a scientific fact” and, as touching man, “demonstrably false.” Here he rejects two specific theories — Haeckel’s and Darwin’s — while holding that Christian evolution is philosophically possible, contradicts no defined doctrine provided the soul’s special creation is maintained, “seems probable enough,” and “may well be a fact.”

The two are reconcilable, and the reconciliation is Glenn’s own: what he denies absolutely is evolution touching man, and what he leaves open is evolution excluding man. But a reader who met only the Sociology page would come away with a different impression of his position than a reader who met only this one. Whichever cheatsheet they land on first, they should be able to see the other — I would cross-link Sociology Th. 11–13 and Psychology Th. 21–22 explicitly.

Key terms

— immanent / transient activity · terminating within the agent / outside it
— first / second actuality · the capacity for vital operation / its exercise
— life-principle, soul · the substantial form of a living body
— first act of a physical organic body · Aristotle’s definition of the soul
— per se / per accidens corruption · by dissolution of one’s own parts / of what one depends on
— incomplete in substantiality / in species · unable to exist alone / unable to be the whole nature
— phantasm · the sense-image from which the intelligible species is abstracted
— agent / possible intellect · the abstracting power / the receiving power
— concupiscible / irascible appetite · toward good and from evil simply / against difficulty
— freedom of exercise / of specification · to act or not / to act this way or

Reading it properly

P2 C1 A1 is the article the whole tract exists to reach, and the four proofs — substantiality, simplicity, spirituality, immortality — are short enough to read in full and are the single most quoted passage in the series. Read them in order; each depends on the one before, and the immortality proof is worthless without the simplicity proof two paragraphs above it.

Before that, read P1 C1 A1 for the immanent/transient distinction, because every later argument uses it as a lever. And if you want to see the method rather than the conclusions, compare the three life-principle articles — P1 C2 A3, P1 C3 A3, P2 C1 A1 — which run the same three-step argument at three grades and diverge only at the last step.