The pretended rational doctrine of the substantiality and spirituality of the soul, with all the apparatus that accompanies it, is born simply of the necessity which men feel of grounding upon reason their inexpugnable longing for immortality and the subsequent belief in it.  All the sophistries which aim at proving that the soul is substance, simple and incorruptible, proceed from this source.  And further, the very concept of substance, as it was fixed and defined by scholasticism, a concept which does not bear criticism, is a theological concept, designed expressly to sustain faith in the immortality of the soul.

William James, in the third of the lectures which he devoted to pragmatism in the Lowell Institute in Boston, in December, 1906, and January, 1907[26]—­the weakest thing in all the work of the famous American thinker, an extremely weak thing indeed—­speaks as follows:  “Scholasticism has taken the notion of substance from common sense and made it very technical and articulate.  Few things would seem to have fewer pragmatic consequences for us than substances, cut off as we are from every contact with them.  Yet in one case scholasticism has proved the importance of the substance-idea by treating it pragmatically.  I refer to certain disputes about the mystery of the Eucharist.  Substance here would appear to have momentous pragmatic value.  Since the accidents of the wafer do not change in the Lord’s Supper, and yet it has become the very body of Christ, it must be that the change is in the substance solely.  The bread-substance must have been withdrawn and the Divine substance substituted miraculously without altering the immediate sensible properties.  But though these do not alter, a tremendous difference has been made—­no less a one than this, that we who take the sacrament now feed upon the very substance of Divinity.  The substance-notion breaks into life, with tremendous effect, if once you allow that substances can separate from their accidents and exchange these latter.  This is the only pragmatic application of the substance-idea with which I am acquainted; and it is obvious that it will only be treated seriously by those who already believe in the ’real presence’ on independent grounds.”

Now, leaving on one side the question as to whether it is good theology—­and I do not say good reasoning because all this lies outside the sphere of reason—­to confound the substance of the body—­the body, not the soul—­of Christ with the very substance of Divinity—­that is to say, with God Himself—­it would appear impossible that one so ardently desirous of the immortality of the soul as William James, a man whose whole philosophy aims simply at establishing this belief on rational grounds, should not have perceived that the pragmatic application of the concept of substance to the doctrine of the Eucharistic transubstantiation is merely a consequence of its anterior application to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul.  As I explained