Page 19. _Mind and body interacted._

The self which acts in a man is itself moved by forces which have long
been familiar to common sense, without being understood except
dramatically. These forces are called the passions; or when the dramatic
units distinguished are longish strands rather than striking episodes,
they are called temperament, character, or will; or perhaps, weaving all
these strands and episodes together again into one moral fabric, we call
them simply human nature. But in what does this vague human nature reside,
and how does it operate on the non-human world? Certainly not within the
conscious sphere, or in the superficial miscellany of experience.
Immediate experience is the intermittent chaos which human nature, in
combination with external circumstances, is invoked to support and to
rationalise. Is human nature, then, resident in each individual soul?
Certainly: but the soul is merely another name for that active principle
which we are looking for, to be the seat of our sensibility and the source
of our actions. Is this psychic power, then, resident in the body?
Undoubtedly; since it is hereditary and transmitted by a seed, and
continually aroused and modified by material agencies.

Since this soul or self in the body is so obscure, the temptation is great
to dramatise its energies and to describe them in myths. Myth is the
normal means of describing those forces of nature which we cannot measure
or understand; if we could understand or measure them we should describe
them prosaically and analytically, in what is called science. But nothing
is less measurable, or less intelligible to us, in spite of being so near
us and familiar, as the life of this carnal instrument, so soft and so
violent, which breeds our sensations and precipitates our actions. We see
today how the Freudian psychology, just because it is not satisfied with