Modern Man in Search of a Soul

by C.G. Jung

Chance occurrences have two aspects; on the one hand it is a fact that they tend to take place in series, and on the other that they are endowed with an apparent purposefulness through the projection of unconscious psychic contents—in other words by "participation mystique." Archaic man, to be sure, does not draw this distinction, for he projects psychic happenings so completely that they coalesce with physical events. An accident seems to him to be an arbitrary and intentional act—an interference by an animated being—because he does not realize that unusual events move him only in so far as he invests them with the force of his own astonishment or fear. Here, it is true, we move on treacherous ground. Is a thing beautiful because I attribute beauty to it? It is well known that great minds have wrestled with the question whether it is the glorious sun that illumines the worlds, or whether it is the human eye by virtue of its relation to the sun. Archaic man believes it to be the sun, and civilized man believes it is the eye—so far, at any rate, as he reflects at all and does not suffer from the disease of poets. He must strip nature of psychic attributes in order to dominate it; to see his world objectively he must take back all his archaic projections.