After debating the idea of the soul for centuries, we invented the "mind."
It may seem unimaginable now, but we didn’t always think we had minds. We thought we had souls, which were immortal and rational.
Mind—neither the Christian soul nor the brain—was a radical idea when it arrived in the mid-1600s in Europe and Great Britain, reports psychiatrist and historian George Makari, in Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind. He gives the most credit for our modern concept to John Locke, the political philosopher who inspired the U.S. Constitution.
Locke was also a Christian, who like many of us today believed that the soul is the seat of human consciousness, a spark of God that resides within our bodies, but isn’t flesh and so can survive into the afterlife.
Our souls were our source of reason and dignity and our consolation when dying. In medieval times in Christian Europe, when people slipped into what we now see as mental illness, they were judged souls in danger of damnation, possessed by demons or the Devil. ... - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/b...ally-have-soul
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