The Soul and the Unity of Attention

Abstract Should one develop a psychology without the soul or not? Lotze and his opponents agree that belief in the soul is a pre-scientific prejudice. They want to overcome it; Lotze wants to justify it. This chapter will consider and reject arguments for the soul that are based on the idea that feelings and thoughts are necessarily feelings and thoughts of something. Lotze changed tack in this debate: his ‘master-argument’ is supposed to argue for the soul on the basis of observations about the unity of consciousness. According to Lotze, a ‘medium of combination’ is required for some sensations to jointly cause the activity of comparing that leads to distinct awareness of relations. The activity of comparing cannot be carried out by an aggregate. Hence, there must be a simple medium of combination. This medium turns out to be what common sense took the soul to be. Now, we have a follow-up problem. If there is a soul, where is it and how does it cause changes in the physical world? The chapter concludes by expounding Lotze’s answers to these questions.