Page 96 - Eclipse of God

Religion and Modern Thinking 69

and consequently they are psychological.” However, all state-
ments, if they are considered not according to the meaning
and intention of their contents but according to the process of
their psychic origin, could be described as “expressions of the
soul.” If, consequently, that sentence is to be taken seriously,
the boundaries of psychology are forthwith abolished. These
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are the same boundaries that Jung says in still another place
that psychology must guard against “overstepping through
metaphysical statements or other professions of faith.” In the
greatest possible contradiction to this, psychology becomes
here the only admissable metaphysic. It is supposed to remain
at the same time an empirical science. But it cannot be both
at once.
Jung also supplies the idea of the soul which belongs to this
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conception. “It is the soul,” he says, “that produces the meta-
physical expression out of inborn divine creative power; it ‘sets’
the distinctions between metaphysical essences. It is not only
the condition for metaphysical reality, it is that reality itself.”
The term “sets” is not chosen without reason; what is here set
forth is in fact a translation of post- Kantian idealism into psy-
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chology. But that which has its place within metaphysical
thinking when it is a product of philosophical reflection such
as Fichte’s I, can demand no such place when it is applied to
the concrete individual soul or, more precisely, to the psychic
in an existing human person. Nor can Jung indeed mean any-
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thing other than this. According to his explanation, even the
collective unconscious, the sphere of the archetypes, can enter
ever again into experience only through the individual psyche,
which has inherited these “typical attitudinal figures.”
The real soul has without question producing powers in
which primal energies of the human race have individually
concentrated. “Inborn divine creative powers” seems to me, to
be sure, an all too lofty and all too imprecise designation for