Adam. The law of the flesh and the law of the spirit, the
earthward-tending life of mere natural impulse and the quickening life
of re-directed desire, the natural and the spiritual man, are
conceptions which the new psychologist can hardly reject or despise.
True, religion and psychology may offer different rationalizations of
the facts. That which one calls original sin, the other calls the
instinctive mind: but the situation each puts before us is the same. "I
find a law," says St. Paul, "that when I would do good evil is present
with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man _but_ I
see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind....
With the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law
of sin." Without going so far as a distinguished psychoanalyst who said
in my hearing, "If St. Paul had come to me, I feel I could have helped
him," I think it is clear that we are learning to give a new content to
this, and many other sayings of the New Testament. More and more
psychology tends to emphasize the Pauline distinction; demonstrating
that the profound disharmony existing in most civilized men between the
impulsive and the rational life, the many conflicts which sap his
energy, arise from the persistence within us of the archaic and
primitive alongside the modern mind. It demonstrates that the many
stages and constituents of our psychic past are still active in each one
of us; though often below the threshold of consciousness. The blindly
instinctive life, with its almost exclusive interests in food, safety
and reproduction; the law of the flesh in its simplest form, carried
over from our pre-human ancestry and still capable of taking charge when
we are off our guard. The more complex life of the human primitive; with
its outlook of wonder, self-interest and fear, developed under
conditions of ignorance, peril and perpetual struggle for life. The
history of primitive man covers millions of years: the history of
civilized man, a few thousand at the most. Therefore it is not