I. Man as a Psychic Unit and Totality

6. Medicine has learned to consider the human body as a mechanism of great precision, whose parts fit into each other and are connected to each other. The place and the characteristics of these parts are dependent on the whole. They serve its existence and its functions. But this conception is more applicable still to the soul, whose delicate wheels have been assembled with much more care. The various psychic faculties and functions form part of the whole spiritual being and subordinate themselves to its final end.

7. It is useless to develop this point further. But you, psychologists and psychic healers, must bear this fact in mind: the existence of each psychic faculty and function is explained by the end of the whole man. What constitutes man is principally the soul, the substantial form of his nature. From it, ultimately, flows all the vital activity of man. In it are rooted all the psychic dynamisms with their own proper structure and their organic law. It is the soul which nature charges with the government of all man's energies, in so far as these have not yet acquired their final determination.

8. Given this ontological and psychological fact, it follows that it would be a departure from reality to attempt, in theory or in practice, to entrust the determining role of the whole to one particular factor, for example, to one of the elementary psychic dynamisms and thus install a secondary power at the helm. Those psychic dynamisms may be in the soul, in man. They are not, however, the soul nor the man. They are energies of considerable intensity perhaps, but nature has entrusted their direction to the centerpost, to the spiritual soul endowed with intellect and will, which is normally capable of governing these energies. That these energies may exercise pressure upon one activity does not necessarily signify that they compel it. To deprive the soul of its central place would be to deny an ontological and psychic reality.

9. It is not possible, therefore, when studying the relationship of the ego to the dynamisms that compose it to concede unreservedly in theory the autonomy of man- that is, of his soul-but to go on immediately to state that in the reality of life this theoretical principle appears to be very frequently set aside or minimized to the extreme.

10. In the reality of life, it is argued, man always retains his freedom to give his internal consent to what he does, but in no way the freedom to do it. The autonomy of free will is replaced by the heteronomy of instinctive dynamism. That is not the way in which God fashioned man.

11. Original sin did not take away from man the possibility or the obligation of directing his own actions himself through his soul. It cannot be alleged that the psychic troubles and disorders which disturb the normal functioning of the psychic being represent what usually happens. The moral struggle to remain on the right path does not prove that it is impossible to follow that path, nor does it authorize any drawing back.